Hello, my name's Justin Aclure and I'm here today with Will Sloan.

And you're listening to The Important Cinema Club.

And today we're doing a subject episode because we're talking about films that were shot on video.

It's not too much of an overstatement, I don't think, to suggest that the advent of home video in

the 1980s for a brief, glorious moment, democratized movie making. Absolutely. Because with the

arrival of video and camcorder technology, you could make a movie and it would share the same

shelf space as any other Hollywood blockbuster.

In fact, it probably costs the same to buy on VHS.

That's right.

In the early days of video stores, store owners had more shelf space than they had movies.

And the early economic model of video stores was, let's say you buy a VHS copy of Star Wars. You can rent that tape to whoever you want because you own it. You're the store. You bought it. You can do whatever you want. And you paid probably $100 U.S. for it as well? That's the thing. The big studios hated this model. So even though they couldn't stop it, they would price the movies for the rental market.

So, yeah, the VHS copy of Star Wars might cost $100, and the video store owner, like, it'd be an investment for them.

But then, if you had a video camera and you didn't now need the money and technical skills or the infrastructure required to make a 35-millimeter professional feature film.

And for a brief, glorious period, a lot of these movies that these, let's say, amateur filmmakers

were making, were getting pretty widespread video store distribution.

People need to understand that, like, if you're maybe even a little bit younger than me and

will, you don't understand the way that, like, shooting on film works, which is you need the gigantic cameras

to do so.

You could be shooting on Super 8 or 16 millimeter, but the one big expensive thing is that you need

to get that film developed.

And once you have that film developed, you then need to be able to cut it on a particular

machine, then make another copy that you then need to be able to cut it on a particular machine,

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