4.6 • 639 Ratings
🗓️ 14 March 2018
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Peter Becker, president of the home video distribution company The Criterion Collection, has made a business on a mission not a product. Focusing on licensing "important classic and contemporary films" and selling them to film aficionados, Becker discusses what sets Criterion apart from any other dvd/blu-ray distribution service as well as utilizing their film stock in classic theatre and museum use. He also explains his theory in most people wanting to attend film school 10 minutes a month and producing upcoming projects around this idea.
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0:00.0 | From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment. |
0:14.6 | Welcome to the treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. We're in New York, and as always, it's good to have friends to the show. |
0:19.0 | And no better friend to the show than our |
0:20.8 | old friend Peter Becker or Criterion Collection. Good to have you back here. Nice to be here. |
0:24.8 | So much to catch up on. It's been a while since you've been here. First and foremost, why don't we start |
0:28.4 | with Film Strzrod? Oh, wow. I mean, that's been the biggest new thing we've done. We launched this |
0:34.3 | streaming service with Turner Classic Movies, and the idea was really to |
0:38.0 | create a home base for people who care about movies primarily. There really wasn't a service out there |
0:42.8 | focused on movies, and all of the things that are being selected for us are being selected for us |
0:47.4 | sort of algorithmically based on what we've watched in the past. So there really wasn't a very good |
0:53.4 | engine of discovery, kind of, or archive of just great movies that you could rove through. And that was the goal was to make a place that was really, as Filmstruck likes to say, by film lovers, four film lovers. And, you know, it's been a really exciting year. We've treated it kind of as an experimental year. We've tried a whole bunch of different |
1:12.4 | things, and we've settled down on what we think is really the core of the programming, and it's |
1:16.2 | really starting to look like the service we want now. |
1:18.7 | Because one of the things when I heard about this, I thought, you know, now that basically |
1:21.7 | video stores are gone, so the idea of going and rifling through and just looking, seeing something on a shelf, you, oh, I'll try this out because it looks interesting. |
1:29.7 | And the copy on the box makes it look like something I want to see. |
1:32.9 | That idea of just discovering something that you didn't anticipate has almost disappeared |
1:38.7 | from the way we consume film nowadays. |
1:41.2 | Yeah. |
1:41.5 | I mean, I think that was a great pleasure for those of us who would go to |
1:44.6 | the old Kim's video or whatever and just scan the shelves. And often the best part was seeing |
1:51.1 | something where you didn't expect it or seeing something, you know, in a new way or discovering |
... |
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