A couple of notes I found:
- For years, I assumed it would be impossible to get the "Vic and Sade" audio that belonged to the Library of Congress. I am sure a lot of you assumed the same thing. Well, I just found out that Barbara Schwarz obtained a lot of that material from the LOC for The Friends of Vic and Sade, (I assume in the 1980's). Seems logical, although, I never knew about it until today. I'm pretty sure this is the material we have from the 1944 run.
- In the early days of the internet, there seems to have been quite a fear from The Friends of Vic and Sade that if they posted any "Vic and Sade" audio online that the FBI would come calling.
The LOC collection wasn't made available to Friends of Vic & Sade till the mid-'90s, and it was a very top secret matter. When we had our west coast meeting in '97, Barbara waited till a few newbie members and guests had departed till she told the rest of us what was new with the LOC releases. It was released in installments.
ReplyDeleteAs for the fear of posting audio online: had anything from the LOC collection gone out-of-bounds of Barbara's agreement with the powers-that-were, the whole thing would have been shut down. I don't know the particulars, whether it was NBC, Paul Parke Rhymer, or the Library itself that insisted on a gag order, but that was the rule. As I mentioned in an earlier communication, somebody tried to insinuate his way into my trust in '99 or thereabouts, asking what I knew about episodes the club was keeping secret. I don't know what his game was but it went nowhere with me.
ReplyDeleteEverybody needs to remember that this 'net thing that we are so free and easy and careless with now was still pretty new, in its public version, in the mid '90s. And many Vic & Sade fans, myself included, were film collectors, and we'd seen what the studios and FBI had done to that collecting scene in the '80s, especially when the studios got spooked by home video. What would be the implications of putting material online (provided you learned how to do it)? This was a new and spooky frontier. Looking back, it seems ridiculous that anybody worried, but given the restrictions on those LOC episodes, nobody wanted to take chances.
The LOC collection consisted of about 100 episodes from 1939 through 1944, omitting 1943. I still have the catalogs for each installment of the collection if you don't have them in the material you've been given.
ReplyDeleteI think it would also be safe to say that Barbara Schwarz was wary of the online world even as she realized it would displace/replace what she'd been doing via paper and snail mail for decades. There was a recurring strain in her last few mailings about "A couple Vic & Sade websites...making me wonder how much longer this will be worth my efforts." Though it's worth noting that one of her final communications was in regard to that little collection that a university put online and was later supposed to turn into a website. I don't know if they ever went that far, but a lot of us, including Leonard Maltin, accessed those episodes, and a few of us figured out how to record them.
ReplyDelete