In an email exchange this week with John Damer-a regular FilmCouch listener–he mentioned a movie called Gabriel Over the White House. Just go to this movie’s Wikipedia page, and a movie-dork acid will start to fill your stomach. William Randolph Hearst made a movie where there’s a gangster driveby of the White House and the President predicts last week’s bailout plan?!?!?! You must see it.
You start searching for the DVD and, probably, wind up at Amazon.com. There you’ll find a few secondary vendors selling VHS copies of the movie for over $100. Your heart sinks. A little more digging reveals there’s no copy at the local library. For the more Internet immersed, you may try Archive.org hoping the copyright expired and it’s now in the public domain. No luck. MGM still holds the rights. But there’s a guerrilla spirit of VHS movie collectors out there who won’t let baby be put in the corner.
YouTube is the current battleground in getting hard-to-find movies released, and John Damer has decided to start blogging about film essentials that are likely only available to you there. It was a short debate he and I had: Keep them a secret so they don’t get taken down? Or start letting people know as a bottom-up protest to release these movies in some legal way?
My vote fell on the latter side because doing nothing usually results in nothing. Watch them while you can! Gabriel Over the White House (1933), The Decline of Western Civilization (1981), Quatermass and the Pit (1967)
Postscript: Kevin Buist and I have an in depth discussion this week about Gabriel Over the White House on FilmCouch. That podcast will be up Friday morning.
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