The chronological broadcast of every motion picture in history.
Here’s an excerpt from a piece of speculative journalism written by Lester Bangs and published in Creem magazine in 1973. It’s entitled “Boob Tube Liberation Front Storms CBS, ABC, PBS & Quaking Independents from Coast to Coast,” and it’s an account of the freeform television programming offered after a supposed 1976 takeover of the airwaves by leftist radicals:
Largest viewer response, however, was gleaned by yet another L.A. station, which declared its aim, almost immediately after being seized by guerrillas, to the be the chronological broadcast of every motion picture in history. The began at 2:43 A.M. on May 11 with The Great Train Robbery, and continued without pause for commercials or announcements. Runners have been observed driving up to the back doors regularly in delivery trucks presumably carrying cans of film. At press time they had reached the year 1927, and viewer response was reportedly unprecedented, as vast numbers of California citizens rearranged their schedules and even quit their jobs to build their lives around the station’s output.
…Even if the rebels are not turned out of the studio by authorities (and the station’s owner is so pleased by viewer response that they might not be), the series can be expected, according to calculations on police computers, to conclude at some point in the year 1981, if at all.
The chronological broadcast of every film ever made! This astounding idea must have seemed even more astounding in 1973, when the only way to see a movie was to go to a theater, watch late-night television, or maybe find a friend that could project 16mm. There was not the sea of cable television channels and streaming online resources, both legal and illegal, to choose from.
Despite this wealth of contemporary resources, however, this particular project has never been attempted, as far as I know. It’s probably impossible (almost half of the silent films ever made are lost forever), but it’s exciting enough an idea, anyway, to devote a few minutes to a little thought experiment.
First of all, those police computers are way off. Such an undertaking would take much longer than the five years Bangs allots. How much longer? We’ll get to that in a moment. Let’s first imagine we are ourselves the California guerillas in question.
We begin with The Great Train Robbery from 1903. This is not, of course, the first ever film ever made, but it’s a very important one, and if it’s good enough for Lester, it’s good enough for me.
We then have to set certain criteria:
- We will exclude TV series, made-for-TV movies and direct-to-video releases (sorry to fans of Brian’s Song and Berlin Alexanderplatz).
- We will also exclude short films for the same reason — surely an important part of the rich tapestry of film history, but not necessary for the sort of overview we guerillas are interested in.
- We’ll open it to films of all countries, in all languages, in all genres — animation, documentary, whatever else. For thesake of simplicity, however, we’ll include feature length films only.
So, using IMDb to search for films made between 1903 and 1976, the number of matches returned is 155,576. We will chronologically be broadcasting 155,576 films in a row, 24 hours a day.
How long will it take? We can presume the average length of feature film is around an hour and a half, though stuff like Greed (four hours) and Burning of the Red Lotus Monastery (27 hours) will be much longer. Using that criteria, we’re probably looking at a little over 233,364 hours of broadcasting. That’s a little over 9,723 days, or around 24 years. And that’s just all the films made up until 1976, when the takeover begins.
Think about the richness of the experience! Imagine turning on your TV in the year 1998, the year I graduated from high school. I could have skipped my graduation ceremony (which was a snooze, anyhow), and in those four wasted hours, I could have watched the Indian college weeper Tears Have Become Flowers, followed by Leon Jervis and Lyn Logan in the Canadian “adult comedy” The Columbus of Sex. Imagine how much more memorable an experience that could have been for me!
The problem here is that by about the year 2000, our little guerilla group would have finished broadcasting every film made up to the takeover in 1976. Of course, one presumes we would keep adding to the chronology past the year of the takeover. Since 1977 and 2009, an additional 187,964 feature films have been released worldwide. Think about that for a moment: in the past twenty-five or so years, there have been more films made than in the entire period between 1903 and 1976. That seems hard to believe, but there it is.
So this year, in 2009, if my calculations are correct, the broadcast would have reached roughly the year 1987. So you ask yourself: would you rather be doing what you are doing right now, and or watching Jack Palance in Bagdad Cafe and wondering if you’ll be lucky enough to see RoboCop next?
(September 22, 2009)
NOTES: This may actually be one of my favorite posts of all time. I revised it quite a bit from the 2009 original — went pretty George Lucas on it, actually. But the math is more accurate this time, and I added photos. Thanks to Pat and Ilana for helping with some of the word problem aspects. If you find some of the math to be in error, let me know and I’ll correct it again.
