Martin Scorsese has said this many times before, and so have others who care about preserving our cinematic history as best we can. But it was great to be sitting in a cavernous ballroom (two or three football fields wide) inside Caesar’s Place an hour ago and hear Scorsese say it once more: “We have an obligation to our culture to preserve it.” By “it” he meant all those films that have found a certain exalted or venerated status which need to be preserved and restored.
The corporate guys running Hollywood talk a nice slick game, but many of them don’t care too much about preserving anything. Most care about their earnings and assets. Most of them are wolves in the forest, and not much more than that. Okay, some corporates care and are standing up and doing the right thing as best they can. But would Brad Grey have committed the Paramount funds to restore and preserve the Godfather films if Steven Spielberg hadn’t urged (i.e., pressured) him to do so? Why di dit take Paramnount so long to commit to a Shane restoration for a Bluray? Why is Sony Home Video still stalling on releasing that From Here to Eternity Bliuray that they prepared in 2009?
