Quote:
Originally Posted by baddog
Anything with WC Fields
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Fields is the absolute best, but he was never on TV. Just the Marx Brothers and Hope/Crosby. Never much Hitchcock. A lot had to do with who owned the movie rights.
Oddly enough the company that owned Playtex also owned a large chain of TV stations and rights to a huge movie library. That's why I got to see Hope/Crosby and the Marx Brothers.
Fields got second wind when I was in college and suddenly the movies theatres would run his movies.
There were 5 classic Hitchcock movies, Rope being one of them that were tied up in legal issues until Hitchcock died.
On the other hand, some movies are out of copyright. There's a couple of brothers here in town that own a couple of art theatres. They teamed up with a guy who had a collection of films out of copyright and converted them to VHS. Mostly film noir or 60's sci-fi. They sold well. One of the brothers told me it was all in the artwork on the box cover. They paid an artist to do really colorful art and people snapped them up. I guess they had tried simple B&W shots from the movies and no one would buy them.