Last Gasps of the Wild West of the Internet

Back in the halcyon days of the World Wide Web, when signing onto the Internet meant suffering through a series of high-pitched buzzing and clicking sounds on a dial-up modem, and it took fifteen minutes to download a three-minute song, a little thing called Napster* made an appearance—a peer-to-peer system to download music for free.

It was illegal, inconvenient, and glitchy, but free tends to win the day. Since the music industry had not adopted a system for digital downloads, Gen X’er’s like me fully embraced it.

As someone who used to record audio from TV on a cassette deck in his grammar school days, I was all aboard the Napster bandwagon. I justified it as I wasn't selling the music but just using it as my own version of a radio station—albeit a radio station with truly awful audio fidelity.

In the same way, the poor quality of the cassette audio recordings off the TV were only for my personal amusement. Raiders of the Lost Ark, the highly inappropriate for my age, The Stunt Man (recorded at my friend Nick’s house as he was the fortunate soul who had cable) and Superman: The Movie being my favorite bedtime stories. (If I close my eyes, I can still hear the voice of the young boy—who I imagined was my own age—narrating the opening of Superman: “In the decade of the 1930s, even the great city of Metropolis was not spared the ravages of the world wide depression. In the times of fear and confusion, the job of informing the public was the responsibility of the Daily Planet…” This was quite optimistic in the post-Watergate 70s; now it sounds like a fairy tale.)

I thought the days of lo-fi video and audio were long behind me, as Apple Music provides 90% of my music listening in glorious Lossless quality and Netflix, Max, Kanopy** and a few AVOD apps provide the same percentage of my movie watching pleasure in HD and 4K. But over the past few years, I’ve stumbled across two magnificent gems that fill the gaps in both my celluloid obsessions. Both sites seem to work in a legal gray zone, but since they provide material that is either public domain or unavailable elsewhere, I feel comfortable in singing their praises to my fellow creative souls at Pipeline Artists.

First up is Listen to a Movie. When I found the site, I was a bit confused. I truly thought I was the only human who recorded audio of their favorite movies off their television. I grew up in an environment where TV was both a luxury and a rarity (with parents who truly only watched PBS, so we didn't have cable or a DVD player until pretty late in the game). How is possible that there is an entire website devoted to the audio recordings of movies? It seemed like I was their entire market and therefore a poor business model.

Bringing up the subject to a few friends, I realized we all had kept the same deep, dark secrets to ourselves. Clearly, the people who established the website felt the same way. Of course, they have the benefit of ripping the audio from DVDs and even having a separate category for director’s commentary. Once I got over the disappointment of the files lacking the audible hiss I was used to from cassettes, I was hooked.

Since I first discovered it, they have added TV, stand-up comedy, and radio categories. The radio category was somewhat disappointing as it only includes Ricky Gervais’s UK XFM radio show from the early aughts (although it’s great to listen to the pre-"The Office" Gervais fine tune his voice over the course of dozens of episodes).

My disappointment with the radio category was quickly forgotten when I discovered the other Wild West website: Internet Archive.

Of course, I had heard of the site. I was under the impression it was merely a depository for every website that has ever existed to be accessed through its Wayback Machine—a feature that's quite nice while we're in the throes of the government deleting millions of files a day from their database. But I digress.

Internet Archive is extraordinary. Although it does contain access to hundreds of millions, if not billions, of websites, it also contains the Holy Grail of obscure movies, old-time radio, public domain books, music, etc.

While the vast majority of movies and television are public domain, there are definitely some questionable items that I'm almost reluctant to publish information about, including obscure early Hitchcock and Lubitch films, brilliant Playhouse 90 movies written by the likes of Rod Serling and Paddy Chayefsky, unaired TV pilots—and the Holy Grail(s); for me at least; the four-and-a-half hour cut of This Is Spinal Tap, as well the five-hour workprint of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.

I recommend readers head to Internet Archive immediately as I suspect these things will not be long for the world wide web. In the past few months, I have found that certain titles that I bookmarked to revisit were gone. So far, the 300-minute rough cut of David St. Hubbins, Nigel Tufnel, and Derek Smalls opening for a puppet show still exists in digital format. As a massive fan of the original film, one who is rooting for the soon-to-be released sequel to be “an 11," it was an amazing discovery.

To the uninitiated, the rough cut was never meant to be released, and the film was likely always meant to be a 90-minute feature, but there are some truly inspired comic moments that didn't make it into the film. I recommend watching it over the course of several nights, probably the way most people watched the four-hour cut of Justice League when it premiered during the pandemic. Only it’s slightly funnier than Zach Snyder’s dark, dystopian, joyless slow-motion affair.

As for the workprint of one of Coppola’s fourth masterpieces of the 1970s, much of the footage has been incorporated into Redux and Final Cut, but it's still amazing to see it in his pure form. Messy, ambitious, wild—similar terms that can be described to Megalopolis, but that's another story and a fierce debate among cineastes.

In addition to the treasure trove of film and television materials, there are tens of thousands of radio shows, from my personal favorites—BBC "Plays of Today," CBS "Radio Mystery Theater," The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Orson Welles Collection—and pretty much every show from the 1930s to the present day. There are also audiobooks and digital books (in ePub and PDF; similar to what’s on the Gutenberg site).

The irony of me singing the praises of these websites is I still purchase physical media for independent movies and indie bands—as the royalty rate is far, far higher than streaming—and I encourage readers to do the same. We must not forget that artists depend on royalties for their very existence. There’s also the added benefit of not worrying if a title has disappeared from a streaming site or the odd, little discussed aspect of when you buy digital media, you are merely purchasing a license; one that has the potential to be revoked.

For me, the Internet Archive is a last ditch effort to find a title. In addition to owning over 500 DVD/BDs and even more CDs, I subscribe to three streaming services and am a regular user of Kanopy. My ironclad rule is I only check the site if I cannot find it streaming, available to rent, purchase, or borrow.

The gems, for me, are the previously stated rough cuts, public domain television movies such as Forbidden Area (with Charlton Heston in an eyepatch; Vincent Price as a military bureaucrat—all directed by the sure hand of a young John Frankenheimer) as well as unaired pilots—that are unavailable anywhere else in any format.

Whatever your interests—cult, foreign language, documentaries—I highly recommend you visit the site. It’s a treasure trove that will not last forever. For film lovers, it’s an endless inspiration. Do yourself a favor and dive in today. The water may look murky, but it’s worth the eye strain.

*Eventually, Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora and others made streaming music legal, but not before the music industry was effectively decimated—turning royalties for artists into a pittance. One million streams of a song equals approximately $4000—which needs to be split with the publisher. In other words, a hit song that might have earned the artist $100,000 once upon a time now hands them $2000. (The numbers are a bit hazy thanks to Spotify’s wonderful accountants’ fine print. Apple Music pays more, with Tidal—an artist owned streaming service—paying the highest royalty rate.)

**Kanopy, the free library streaming service deserves its own article, as its vast library is full of amazing and eclectic titles—from mainstream to international to the Criterion Collection. I’m a true convert, and it tends to be my go-to source for my traditional Friday Movie Night.

*Feature image by vali_111 (Adobe)