Richard M.Roberts Banned from Nitrateville

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Richard M Roberts
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Re: Richard M.Roberts Banned from Nitrateville

Postby Richard M Roberts » Mon Mar 03, 2014 6:11 pm

Well, a look-see of the weekends nonsense on Nitratevile shows several unbelievable whiners, one in need of medication is just Shocked!!!!!! Shocked mind you!!!!!!, that 20th Century-Fox will allow only 16mm prints of their films to exist and how dare they not spend every possible penny to find further and better pre-print material so his virgin eyes can have better Blu-Rays and DVD’s (he also apparently does not understand the meaning of the word "replicated"). Another, who seems to think that the tiny fragments of nitrate he has managed to find and scan are the most important historical discoveries of the Twenty-First Century wants to make us hip to the jive that Warners is deliberately cropping the picture on SIT TIGHT with Winnie Lightner as to keep out certain stars and make us poor film buffs suffer through half a picture and heads cut off.

Perhaps he should cut off his own head and do us all a favor, since it doesn’t seem to be working enough to either think clearly or do enough research for him to find out that SIT TIGHT, along with a number of early Warner talkies, only survive in 16mm prints struck by AAP in the 1950’s for television distribution, and this is the only way he is lucky enough to see the film complete, unless he can find a lot more fragments than the pittance he has. Oh these poor suffering film buffs, being tortured by the mean old studios who are just trying to make available what they have on rare titles so the film buffs can see it at all.

Roberts Rules of Vintage Film Buffery once again, apparently it is needed:

1. You are not actually entitled to see any of this stuff.

2. You are damn lucky to be seeing so much that you are seeing and for so little.

3. Whining about imperfections in 80-100 year old films that may barely survive at all or in less then perfect condition only shows your ignorance and ingratitude, see rules 1 and 2, then put a sock in it.

Interestingly, Entrederriere’ actually disappeared from Nitratevile for nearly a day and a half, not posting anything, which I think may be a record. It made one wonder if he had been banned, especially after we saw an interesting Facebook conversation last week between a number of old-time Niratevilians and administrators who seemed to be dissing several of it’s current members (and even posted a bit more bullshit about yours truly when several seemed to be defending me or wanting me back). Yet, Entrederriere was back by the end of the weekend, perhaps he actually left his hovel and took in a bit of the fresh air, I doubt he went out to see a movie.


RICHARD M ROBERTS

Mike O'Regan
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Re: Richard M.Roberts Banned from Nitrateville

Postby Mike O'Regan » Wed Mar 05, 2014 3:58 pm

Richard M Roberts wrote:
1. You are not actually entitled to see any of this stuff.

2. You are damn lucky to be seeing so much that you are seeing and for so little.

3. Whining about imperfections in 80-100 year old films that may barely survive at all or in less then perfect condition only shows your ignorance and ingratitude, see rules 1 and 2, then put a sock in it.




RICHARD M ROBERTS


Yep. You're right ( but, you knew that).

I'm a member of another forum where I may use this, quoting you of course, if you'll permit it, sir.

Richard M Roberts
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Re: Richard M.Roberts Banned from Nitrateville

Postby Richard M Roberts » Wed Mar 05, 2014 4:15 pm

Mike O'Regan wrote:
Richard M Roberts wrote:
1. You are not actually entitled to see any of this stuff.

2. You are damn lucky to be seeing so much that you are seeing and for so little.

3. Whining about imperfections in 80-100 year old films that may barely survive at all or in less then perfect condition only shows your ignorance and ingratitude, see rules 1 and 2, then put a sock in it.




RICHARD M ROBERTS


Yep. You're right ( but, you knew that).

I'm a member of another forum where I may use this, quoting you of course, if you'll permit it, sir.



These rules may be used anywhere, spread the word.


RICHARD M ROBERTS

Richard M Roberts
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Re: Richard M.Roberts Banned from Nitrateville

Postby Richard M Roberts » Sun Jun 15, 2014 5:57 pm

Yeah, I know it’s been awhile since we’ve taken a look at that poor, pathetic site, once in awhile I’ve gotten emails from some wondering if I was getting forgiving or “did you see what they said!” notes from you. Well, the truth is that between program notes, travelling, recording commentary tracks for Gierucki, and working on Volume Two of the Book, who’s had the time to go peruse that hotbed of idiocy, and when I have finally gotten a bit of a breather, and it’s too damn hot here to go outside much, jeez, there really hadn’t been much of interest or worthy jeering at going on over there the last few months.

It’s been pretty much as we’ve predicted, the looneys have definitely taken over the asylum at Nitratevile, and the boring looneys at that. In the last year, the newsgroup has really degraded to a sub-TCM newsgroup sort of place, of which it had been heading for some time. I saw during one recent meltdown on the group Mike Gebert bemoaning and wondering why folk who are in the film preservation business really do not frequent the place. I have an answer for you Michael, as one of the folk who actually work in this area of interest, the other folk I work with think Nitratevile is a joke, peopled with whining weirdos who are never satisfied with any DVD or Blu-Ray release, have no actual idea how these thing make it to their home screens for so cheap, and very quickly become nothing but an odd humming background noise of weirdness in the feedback channels, so their constant nitpicking and whining gets tuned out, or the people doing this, none of whom get rich off of it, start to wonder why they are bothering and become convinced that there is no real reason to be doing this and decide to go off and do something that makes more money and has more satisfaction to it (we call this Kalton Lahue syndrome, as that is exactly what he did way before the proliferation of the Internet.).

The group has become a total joke in terms of the amount of actual historical information it can provide, one recent researcher asked if anyone could supply them with info regarding the 1934 Warner Bros film SMARTY, and, apart from someone posting a couple of Facebook pages on Warren William (something you’d guess any researcher had probably already Googled), the thread quickly degenerated into whether or not another Warren William film, SATAN MET A LADY, was actually any good or not and ended in the pompous announcement by one NNN (Nitratevile Nameless Nincompoop) that he considered the film SIX HOURS TO LIVE “lost” because he couldn’t see it in a professional Studio DVD made from a pristine 35mm print. I don’t think it’s the film that’s lost.

What other brilliance of recent, I see Bob Fells continues to deface film stills, now not just with his box of computerized crayons, but with his actual face, as well as that of old movie stars badly cut and pasted onto stills from films that they were never in. Is this more of that “alternate” (i.e bullshit) film history that someone with such a shaky sense of actual film history is only able to come up with, now we must include a shaky sense of entertainment value as well, what else can one expect of someone who thought we’d be fascinated by the book he wrote and published about how he learned how to play the piano.

I guess the most airheaded post of late that I can find was the “report” of the recent Cinevent 46, which might have been interesting as it was written by one of the few people there under 40, perhaps under 30, I don’t really know, you can read it here if you want to refresh yourself:

http://nitrateville.com/viewtopic.php?f ... 14#p132639

“Maliejandra” or whatever goofy made up Nitratevile non de plume she wants to hide under seems to have her feminist and PETA ideals offended by MR ROBINSON CRUSOE with Douglas Fairbanks, gad, these guys off “wasting months of their lives” (well, what else did guys have to waste months of their lives on, the Internet and Cable Sports Channels hadn’t been invented yet?) hunting Tigers down in Sumatra (down in, down in, down in Su-ma-tra Ra!!!!!), a plot point that is basically mentioned in a line of dialogue then forgotten, but it seems to bother her. Then, when Fairbanks ends up on his island, she seems to be more concerned for the continued cleanliness of his clothes than any actual adventure occurring in the movie. Then when the lovely Maria Alba shows up on Fairbanks Island and he rescues her from one of his animal traps and takes her back to his hut, Maliejandra hoots and hollers that the first thing she does when she comes too and discovers where she is wash the dirty dishes!

Well, what is she supposed to do, write her graduate dissertation, start a women’s shelter for other escaped Fijian Females? Hmmm, okay, Maria Alba is supposed to have escaped from a primitive tribe because she doesn’t want her front teeth knocked out as part of her forced wedding ritual, so go figure the women of this tribe have been basically taught to look after their men subserviently, and even primitive tribes have dishes, they eat off something, the disposable foam food packaging made out of cocoanuts didn’t come until Gilligan’s Island several decades later. We give Maria credit for having enough smarts not to want her front teeth knocked out on her wedding day (how primal and primitive, she should just get her tattoos and facial piercings like the civilized young Americans do!), but, I didn’t see a major Community College in her former neighborhood.

And let’s face it, this is Doug Fairbanks male mid-life crisis fantasy movie here, and Maria’s his male mid-life real-life girlfriend, but even in a pre-code movie the native girl can’t just boink the leading man without them at least being introduced.

Maliejandra is apparently bugged and bored by Douglas Fairbanks Sr’s modus operandi, dismissing most of his work with the word “Slop” in a later response to a poster kindly trying to defend the film. Apparently male fantasy movies offend her “sensibilities”, I don’t know why, seems there are plenty of female fantasy movies around, mid-life or otherwise, if those teenage vampire TWILIGHT movies are any indication, but it is rather difficult to take seriously the opinions of any supposed silent film buff so dismissive of one of it’s major stars, I’m not really big into Mary Pickford movies, and find the “30 year old woman dressing up as a little girl” thing occasionally creepy, but her films are well made, she’s a good actress, and I certainly wouldn’t call her films “slop”.


I guess the quality of films like BULLDOG JACK and DOUBLE DOOR can’t even elude the likes of Maliejandra, but she does not seem to figure out the point of the Lon Chaney “fragments” (in fact, she does not seem to understand the meaning of the word “fragment”, though she is apparently not the only one in current internet film world nerdom. Let’s quote Websters, indicating that a fragment is “A small part broken off or detached”, in others words, a teeny-tiny, eenie-weenie piece of something. Those 90 second clips that Silencebound guy is putting up on Nitratevile, those are fragments. Several reels of, in fact the majority of footage from, a silent feature is not a fragment. Call them incomplete features, call them “abridged” as Blackhawk Films used to do, but please, make some attempt at correct usage of the English Language and refrain from calling them “fragments”). She labels the film TRIUMPH lame, well, it is indeed no classic, but the point of them being shown is the opportunity to see Lon Chaney footage that has been uncovered and not likely to soon turn up elsewhere. She also says “so-much is missing” from THE ROAD TO MANDALAY, again, see correction regarding the use of the word “fragment”, the majority of the film is there. John McElwee got the point immediately in his review of these two films on Greenbriar Picture Show:

http://greenbriarpictureshows.blogspot. ... -fine.html

Enough time has been wasted on a generally time-wasting review of the Fest, but part of the reason I have done so is a general feeling I’m gradually beginning to get about the pointlessness of trying to introduce the younger generations to the Golden Era of Moviemaking, they really do not “get” it anymore, they have been so removed from the period, have no concept of the history, and get weirded out due to their intolerance of the attitudes of the times (in fact, the so-called “politically correct” generation may be the most intolerant we have ever raised), that this writer and film preservationist is beginning to ask himself just who are we preserving this material for and why are we bothering? The main thing Maliejandra appears to be interested in is the costumes and clothing of the actors who are not Dick Powell, I am certainly not doing all this work getting the stuff out to be seen just for the creation of opinions so shallow.

In any event, I have spent enough time here giving the folk their jollies who keep this thread one of our record-breakers, for whatever reasons I cannot fathom, gad, several thousand hits since I last wrote something in March. If you are all fellows in contempt of the newsgroup, you’ll have to keep it going yourselves, there is just too much general blather in their shrinking post numbers to find new and original BS and idiocy to make fun of, the fact is that Nitratevile has become just too damn dull to wade through very often, if something really stupid hits the fan over there, let me know, and I might take a shot at it, but I really do have better things to do.



RICHARD M ROBERTS

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Re: Richard M.Roberts Banned from Nitrateville

Postby Gary Johnson » Sun Jun 15, 2014 8:33 pm

I recall attending film showings in the 70's where women in the audience would hiss the screen whenever the heroine would give up her job and career in order to marry the hero. I always found that an odd method of social protest -- hissing. It always compelled me to drag out Groucho's line, "What's the matter? Ya got a slow leak??" And if this young N-Ville lass has a problem with Fairbanks just talking about hunting tigers, for heaven sakes!, don't let her watch Doug's previous feature AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 MIN when Fairbanks and Fleming going on an actual tiger hunt. Doug bags three cats!
(He bags them. He bags them to go away......more Groucho lines!)
That movie creates a lot of time-tripping film analyses. I once read that 'rich, bored, white men like Doug Fairbanks are the reason the Bengal Tiger is near extinction and if he was alive today he should be brought up on charges.' Damn, and they have the film as evidence. It's good thing Doug died in 1939. I wouldn't want to see his head on a pike outside of PETA's Manhattan headquarters.
Fairbanks is also taken to task for having the temerity to laugh and joke around while visiting the Cambodian temples. How could he behave with such levity knowing full well the terrors that would befall this country 30 years later during the Pol Pot regime?
I think that writer watches too much STAR TREK and all of their 'travel back in time' episodes.

Pasquale Ventura
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Re: Richard M.Roberts Banned from Nitrateville

Postby Pasquale Ventura » Sun Jun 15, 2014 9:19 pm

She'll probably hate Laurel and Hardy's BLOCK-HEADS because Billy Gilbert talks about his big game hunting experiences blasting elephants for tusks. Heavens, not to mention the mounted animal heads on the walls. It's only a movie. Get over it, get a life, move on.

Pasquale

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Re: Richard M.Roberts Banned from Nitrateville

Postby Joe Migliore » Mon Jun 16, 2014 12:48 am

Richard M Roberts wrote:
It’s been pretty much as we’ve predicted, the looneys have definitely taken over the asylum at Nitratevile, and the boring looneys at that. In the last year, the newsgroup has really degraded to a sub-TCM newsgroup sort of place, of which it had been heading for some time. I saw during one recent meltdown on the group Mike Gebert bemoaning and wondering why folk who are in the film preservation business really do not frequent the place. I have an answer for you Michael, as one of the folk who actually work in this area of interest, the other folk I work with think Nitratevile is a joke, peopled with whining weirdos who are never satisfied with any DVD or Blu-Ray release, have no actual idea how these thing make it to their home screens for so cheap, and very quickly become nothing but an odd humming background noise of weirdness in the feedback channels, so their constant nitpicking and whining gets tuned out, or the people doing this, none of whom get rich off of it, start to wonder why they are bothering and become convinced that there is no real reason to be doing this and decide to go off and do something that makes more money and has more satisfaction to it (we call this Kalton Lahue syndrome, as that is exactly what he did way before the proliferation of the Internet.).


The climate over there now can only be described as "thickly stupid". There are a handful of people that are worth hearing from, but the people who post the most have the least to say. I just defended Dave Stevenson's Lloyd Hamilton discs after some guy warned everybody that they were "bootlegs", as if Earle Hammons is currently working on an "official" Blu-ray release, so wait for the HD transfers.

The complainers are not only consistently petty, and extremely vocal, but seem completely unfamiliar with what it was like to collect film before the advent of home video. It's always the same people too, so they create a false consensus that there is something fundamentally wrong with the product, when in fact there is something wrong with their bloated sense of entitlement deserving of a forum. At least two that I can think of need a professional to hook up their video equipment correctly, as no DVD yet manufactured has lived up to their standards.

Richard M Roberts
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Re: Richard M.Roberts Banned from Nitrateville

Postby Richard M Roberts » Thu Jun 19, 2014 2:42 am

[quote="Joe Migliore]The climate over there now can only be described as "thickly stupid". There are a handful of people that are worth hearing from, but the people who post the most have the least to say. I just defended Dave Stevenson's Lloyd Hamilton discs after some guy warned everybody that they were "bootlegs", as if Earle Hammons is currently working on an "official" Blu-ray release, so wait for the HD transfers.

The complainers are not only consistently petty, and extremely vocal, but seem completely unfamiliar with what it was like to collect film before the advent of home video. It's always the same people too, so they create a false consensus that there is something fundamentally wrong with the product, when in fact there is something wrong with their bloated sense of entitlement deserving of a forum. At least two that I can think of need a professional to hook up their video equipment correctly, as no DVD yet manufactured has lived up to their standards.[/quote]





That NNN to whom you defended the Hamilton “bootlegs”, so named “David of the Alps” or “David Alps” or some such, I’m not sure that he isn’t someone being a rather brilliant troll, because he gets the total cluelessness down to such a T, he always seems to come in with just the right amount of wrong information, and gets the whiny, even hysterical complaints down to such a perfection, and the breathless multi-!!!!!????? exclamations of his writing style, is it only I who hears the voice of Franklin Pangborn in my head when I read his prose? Can anyone in the whole wide world be as clueless as he in regards to this stuff, and not get the message when even the general Nitratevile population (a very low-bar standard to hit these days) can actually try to tell him something so simple and plain that yet still fails to penetrate his obtuseness? Perhaps he is one of us on the mafia having infiltrated the veil and giving a real anonymous go at driving the Nitratevile Ninnies into further, deeper lapses of common sense?

I wonder.

The calling of public domain DVD releases “bootlegs” is another wonderful example of the “down is up, night is day” insanity and stupidity of Nitratevile, and some of the hyper-whiny internet film nerdom as well. I don’t know if we can give that idiot Phil Hall in his column, THE BOOTLEG FILES credit for starting that stupidity, but I think it is yet another example of the sheeplike acceptance of corporate screwing and brainwashing that has so become our daily meat that people not only accept, but cheer it on when they boo the horrible concept of “public domain” as meaning only bad “bootleg” copies of DVD’s to offend their virgin eyes. As far as I’m concerned, all silent films and quite a lot of thirties talkies would now be public domain (in other words, OURS) to do with as we wished except for that criminal asswipe (in other words, “politician”) Sonny Bono (may he roast eternally in Hell over a nitrate film fire) and the Corporate Movie Biz’s duplicity in stealing it away from us.

You also speak very true of the false consensus Nitratevile creates of practically everything these days, since there are few who even waste the time (or have been banned like I have, because of their fear of being told and proven wrong) to set matters straight. I loved that one of the whiners complaints against me was that they were afraid to post lest I come and correct them, if that were true I was glad that my mere presence on the group kept the intelligence level farther upwards for a few years. The only positive these days is the fact that Nitratevile is indeed being perceived more and more as a joke among the actual film preservation and history profession, so its influence is less and less. This appears to be the continuing downward trend for the group.


RICHARD M ROBERTS

Richard M Roberts
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Re: Richard M.Roberts Banned from Nitrateville

Postby Richard M Roberts » Thu Sep 04, 2014 4:23 pm

Well, what has it been, over two months since we have added to this thread? Well, we have had much better things to do and it has become so dull and predictable over there at Nitratevile, same nameless or named nincompoops whining about frames missing from THE IMMIGRANT, someone whining about the window boxing on the Mack Sennett set (probably the same folk who would whine that the tops and bottoms were cut off by their monitor if it wasn’t windowboxed), what looked like a good bust-up between Ass Jazzman and LouieD before it got wiped by the Nitratevile thought police, and say, were our ears burning recently or were they talking about our little group over there?

Ya gotta love it when even the mention of our website gets some of the Nitratevile Ninnies Noodling, even trying to shout down those saying nice words about us. And Rodney Sauer calls me a “bully”, I never had a conversation with Sauer that he didn’t start, but at Nitratevile, you’re a bully when you stand up to others bullying and hit them with too many facts. Poor babies, some of them were not bullied enough in their childhoods apparently to know what it really means, or to see it in their own behaviors.

The only entertaining one of recent was the nameless one who is “horrified” that some of Warner’s early Two-Color Technicolor musicals were only transferred to 16mm black and white for television and wondered why these obsolete Technicolor negs weren’t given to some archive for preservation. Well, that horror should be a thank-you to AAP who made those black and white prints in the late 50’s, for films like GOLDEN DAWN, SALLY, SUNNY, THE SHOW OF SHOWS and a number of others would be otherwise completely lost rather than just missing their color. There were no archives that would have taken the two-color negatives at the time, much less had any way of printing or restoring them. Eastman House was just getting up to speed and Iris Barry at MOMA would have turned up her nose at the material and refused it. The Library of Congress did not even have a Motion Picture Division until the 1970’s.

So rather than whine and be “horrified” in typical uninformed and internerdly fashion, be thankful that someone did what they could at the time and not only preserved those films, but made them available to be seen on television and elsewhere from the 50’s forward and today, far better than most of you whiners deserve.

But really, even though this thread is heading towards 19,000 hits, cause all you NNN’s do come over and read us, whether you’ll ever admit it or not or your computers actually work, and so many others hate you or like to read someone making fun of you, it’s a win-win in terms of numbers, it’s getting boring for me to have to write this stuff, made more boring by me having to go over to that newsgroup and read it that particularly closely. Either you will have to come up with more original and interesting stupidity to jeer at or I’m afraid it will be even more months before we update this thread again. We’ll see.



RICHARD M ROBERTS

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Re: Richard M.Roberts Banned from Nitrateville

Postby Louie Despres » Thu Sep 04, 2014 6:22 pm

DON'T GET ME STARTED ON THE IMMIGRANT'S MISSING FRAMES!!!


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