The age of classic movies being broadcast on every channel is over and there is no use in whining about it, although whining about it is one of the things I am very good at. I have been wracking my brain to come up with ways to bring these movies back into the mainstream, and my solutions are really inept.
I have pondered classifying classic movies as part of our history and therefore making them a standard part of our children's education. This approach is rife with problems, and basically leave it in the hands of the Federal Government, which, as a dues-lapsed Libertarian, I find disturbing. Our public education system and all the various government entities in charge of it have fallen to such despairing depths in the past thirty years that I would not trust the powers that be to choose the films and present them properly. Though many may disagree, I believe public education is no longer a tool to teach kids how to read, write and learn math, but rather be indoctrinated into whatever political agendas have caught the fancy of those in charge. I honestly doubt that 90 percent of our classic movies would get by any government board without some serious editing, and I would rather the classic movies were not shown at all then to have them used as propaganda.
I have already discussed how local broadcast stations will no longer show classic movies since Turner Classics and American Movie Classics hold a monopoly on them. Which leaves the revival of these films in the hands of Hollywood itself, as depressing a notion as I have ever heard.
Modern Day Hollywood has its own agendas, political and economical, and promoting great films from the past interferes with Hollywood's need to hawk its own current movies. Why rerelease an intelligent film like REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE when it might take some of the spotlight away from chillingly mindnumbing stuff like AMERICAN PIE 2? Why revive Laurel and Hardy or Buster Keaton when it might make people realize that Adam Sandler and Jim Carrey are not that funny? The only time Hollywood goes out of its way to promote older films are in those increasingly unimaginative American Film Institute specials, who seem to base their list of the 100 Greatest Whatever Movies not on merit but on commercial viability, - what videos and DVDs can they promote through Blockbuster? It is a small pleasure to see older films promoted this way, but that pleasure is usually tempered by the seemingly random choices the AFI makes. For example, THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY earned a high spot on their list of 100 Greatest Comedies, while W.C. Fields and Buster Keaton were nowhere to be found. In addition, though the top ten comedies on that list were all fine films, I could go through them one by one and tell you the political and cultural reasons why the denizens of Hollywood chose those ten films to go straight to the top of the class.
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