Hey, remember how I told you all to tape or TiVo the Laurel and Hardy film, Our Relations, from Turner Classic Movies? It was a bit of a disappointment. What they ran was (apparently) an old Nostalgia Merchant home video print with a mediocre picture quality, a flat soundtrack and a few seconds missing here or there. Nostalgia Merchant transfers were okay in their day but what you got was a copy made from one 16mm print with no video restoration. So if that print was faded or spliced, that's how the tape came out.
In the past, when Turner Classic Movies ran a bad or incomplete print of something, it has usually been a matter of the rights holder, whoever it is, supplying a bad copy. It used to remind me of the NuArt Theater over in West Los Angeles. Back before home video, it was the main place many of us saw classic films of the past. They ran a different double-bill every evening so they went through a lot of movies and good copies were not always available. Each month, when the following month's schedule came out, it was a moment of excitement ("Hey, look what they're running!") but also of reservation ("Are they going to have that lousy, incomplete copy that's making the rounds?").
The NuArt had a problem that I suppose plagues every "repertory cinema" house. They have to advertise their schedule well in advance but they don't actually get the print of the film until a day or two before the screening date. If it arrives and is chopped-up, scratched and a mass of splices, what can they do? Often with older films, that's the only print the distributor has. I can recall times when people stormed out of a program at the NuArt and demanded their money back. I also recall one time when we arrived there for an advertised evening of (I think) obscure Billy Wilder films and a hand-lettered sign on the box office announced something like, "We received lousy prints of these films at the last minute. If you want to put up with splices and missing scenes, fine. If you don't like it and want to walk out, we'll refund your ticket price. Just don't get mad at us. It's not our fault."
(The NuArt is still open, by the way, still showing old movies, usually for a week at a time. They're even running The Rocky Horror Picture Show at midnight every Saturday and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls at midnight on October 13. Here's a current schedule. Sad to say, I haven't been in the place since vintage motion pictures began coming out on Beta.)
Anyway, when I hear of Turner Classic Movies getting stuck with a bad print, it used to remind me of the NuArt. But then I realized: This is the era of digital video. The company that owns the film can send them a copy well in advance. TCM can demand to see that print before they schedule the film and decline to schedule it at all until they have a good, complete copy. In the case of Our Relations, there are complete, excellent quality DVDs available overseas and plenty in this country. So there's no excuse for this. There really isn't.