Then, at seventeen, I was struck by lightning-Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless.” It was a conversion experience: I knew from that moment on that my life would be intimately bound with movies. Like most people, I went to see popular movies with friends, and took the occasion to be a social one, not at all an artistic one that was comparable to the gratification I got from music or books. My passion for Hollywood is rooted in my own experience-namely, of having long been dismissive of it, as a child of the sixties who considered Hollywood to be an ambulatory Las Vegas. What follows is a personal list based on what I love about that system in that era: the directors who worked there then. The short answer: movies from the reign of the studio system, from the early days of Hollywood film production in the nineteen-tens to the historical dividing line of 1968. (Dig around things turn up.) But offerings of what, exactly? If not, take your chances online, where the offerings are haphazard-in some cases, cheeringly copious, and, in others, direly depleted. If you’ve got physical media, cling to it for dear life. That’s the dire situation with classic movies and, indeed, with the homegrown classics of Hollywood, which-long at the mercy of film distribution, then of VHS and DVD and Blu-ray release-are now at the mercy of streaming services’ contracts and policies of calculated scarcity. Imagine that your local library has a dozen of Shakespeare’s plays, a couple of novels by Toni Morrison, and a random smattering of Henry James-and there isn’t even a central research library for on-site consultation of classics unavailable for home reading.
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