Slashdot Mirror
Bing Crosby, Television Sports Preservationist
Hugh Pickens submits news first gleaned from a now-paywalled article at the New York Times (and, happily, widely reported) that "The hunt for a copy of the seventh and deciding game of the 1960 World Series, considered one of the greatest games ever played and long believed to be lost forever, has come to an end in the home of Bing Crosby, a canny preservationist of his own legacy, who kept a half-century's worth of records, tapes and films in the wine cellar turned vault in his Hillsborough, California home. Crosby loved baseball, but as a part owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates he was too nervous to watch the Series against the Yankees, so he and his wife went to Paris, where they listened by radio. Crosby knew he would want to watch the game later — if his Pirates won — so he hired a company to record Game 7 by kinescope, an early relative of the DVR, filming off a television monitor. The five-reel set, found in December in Crosby's home, is the only known complete copy of the game, in which Pirates second baseman Bill Mazeroski hit a game-ending home run to beat the Yankees, 10-9."
Get him for piracy...
As soon as they figure out that this recording was made without the express written consent of Major League Baseball, Crosby's estate is going to be totally hosed.
is one of the all time great World Series.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
1960 was a classic Series. It's right up there with 1955-6, 1986, 1996, and 2001 on my list for the all-time best.
It's amazing to realize how different program preservation policy was in the prime of 2" Ampex quad videotape. So much of historic significance has been lost -- and not just Doctor Who and the moon landings, either. British TV before 1978 is a Swiss cheese. American programming suffered as well -- there are huge chunks of The Tonight Show that just plain don't exist anymore. For a long time, possibly the greatest baseball game of all time (1956 WS game 5) was thought to be gone forever.
What with Google pushing something like 20 PB of data every day it kind of makes you wonder what's being done to ensure the long-term survival of the digital patrimony. I mean, I don't particularly give a damn whether the wingnuts' blogs and every video of a dog pooping on a baby makes it to the 22nd century, but isn't there some stuff worth saving? Who's taking that responsibility?
Just think about all the culture that would still be available to us today, if the technology to copy was wider spread and available when TV first appeared. We would have a complete collection of all the old Dr. Who episodes.
Spelling and grammar mistakes specifically left in to give the grammar and spelling nazis a meaning to their life.
Man, I love those old Crosby recordings, like "I Remember Dear" and "Moonlight Becomes You". And the "Road to..." pictures he did with Hope were some of the funniest, hippest movies of the era (especially "Road to Bali"). But as as person, he was a piece of shit. Worse as he got older.
That he saved some old recordings doesn't make him a pioneer of media preservationism as much as someone who wanted to have what other people couldn't have.
A "preservationist" is someone like Martin Scorsese who has worked tirelessly to make sure old celluloid films aren't lost. He's doing it to make sure others can get the kind of exposure to the history of our culture as shown in cinema.
When I was growing up, the local TV station, WGN-TV, had an amazing library of films and played at least two of them every day. There would be one a 9am and another after the evening news. Sometimes another after midnight. Everything from film noir to Busby Berkeley to Fellini (both dubbed and subbed). Howard Hawks, King Vidor, Walter Huston, Welles, Michael Powell, Billy Wilder, the Marx Bros, Kurosawa, Vittorio Di Sica. Even modern masterpieces like "Joe" or "Little Murders". Everything. Sometime in the early '80s, there must have been some change in the way they were licensed or something because those movies were replaced by back-to-back episodes of some lame TV show like Dallas or even worse. I got a remarkable education in cinema just from my local TV station. Now that's all gone. The cable stations that are dedicated to "classic" films aren't nearly so eclectic or comprehensive. When they went to commercial, the bumper music they used was "Take Five" by Dave Brubeck. Whenever I hear that song today all those images flood into my mind's eye. I'll always associate that 5/4 melody with the excitement of being exposed to another nugget of cinema greatness, curled up in a comfy chair in my parents' basement, watching an old Sylvania console TV.
When I was in college, I had campus job in the film school's archive. It was always slow, so I could project 16mm versions of foreign and avant-garde films, such as the work of Kenneth Anger, Michael Snow, Maya Deren, Bunuel, and my favorite Joseph Cornell (if you ever get a chance, see the film "Rose Hobard" actually projected on a screen. It's a mind-bender.
Sometimes I wonder about some young kid out there using the Internet to search out these films and to be exposed to cinema in the way I did, without effort, almost accidentally. With luck, Scorsese's foundation got to these works before the masters disintegrated beyond saving.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Couldn't we have had a spoiler alert?
rewriting history since 2109
It's amazing?
So if long-lost footage of Mike Smith of Omaha, Nebraska jerking off and drinking Schlitz in his basement suddenly resurfaces, by your logic, that would also be slashdot worthy?
Your interest in such an event doesn't constitute a lot of people caring about it, so no.
Slashdot is the proper forum for random people finding shit they thought was lost?
Really?
Bing Crosby is hardly a random person. And a sports event that a lot of people cared about is hardly 'shit'. They way he recorded it is also rather novel.
He was too nervous to watch the game - so he took a trip to Paris? Must be nice to have that kind of disposable income...
As a side note - although Fitzgerald originally wrote the line I used as the subject of this post, I always remember Hemingway's adaptation instead: "The rich are very different from you and I." "Yes - they have more money."
#DeleteChrome
The article is not paywalled, you just have to register to read it.
I think it is relevant because it is an example of the usefulness of recording by the public as part of the deal between a creator and society. A copyright holder has the right to stop anyone from using the material for a (ridiculous long) period of time. The reward for society of giving a copyright holder this power, is that in the end the work enters the public domain. What you see here, is that the copyright holder got his end of the bargain from society (it is not relevant whether he actually ever sued over it; he had the right to), society doesn't get anything once the copyright holder loses interest (or trashes the recording).
People should make a mental note of this when it comes to arguing the duration of copyright, and also when it comes to DRM. I don't think that copyright should apply to DRM material because there obviously is no guarantee that the work could end up in the public domain. More likely the DRM technique used is likely to be abandoned before the copyright expires.
Bert
Who refuses to buy anything Blue-ray because of this.