It’s the season when a lot of things arrive on five. Yesterday Tony, who does authoring for us, brought in gorgeously authored doughnuts from the Doughnut Plant on Grand Street, in flavors like marzipan and pomegranate jelly. John Gudelj, our main subtitler, sent the perfect pastry. It immediately set us arguing over the word to describe it: Raspberry tart? No, cranberry galette. Someone threw in cherry walnut, and the battle was joined. Our favorite printer, Glenn Baken, brought us boxes of “Glenn’s Bacon," which he said was extra-delicious because it came from a farm where the hogs are fed nothing but Oreos for their last two weeks. I should have realized it was all a joke, especially when I saw the gorgeous printing on the package, but I'm embarrassed to say that I didn't catch on until “glenn’s bacon oreos” yielded no documents in a Google search.

At the old office, we were split between two floors. The kitchen was on the fifth floor, and nearly every day there was an "on five" email. People brought things in from all over the world. Mochi balls and green tea cookies; exotic, seasonally flavored Pockys from Tokyo; Mexican treats; absinthe candies from Paris and bourbon balls from Kentucky and chocolates from Belgium by Pierre Marcolini (whose website refers to him as "this creator of happiness"). Chocolate koalas found their way up from down under, maple cookies down from Vermont. We’ve had organic “Moose Munch” from Oregon and kippered buffalo from South Dakota, Scharffen Berger chocolates from San Francisco and macaroons from Fauchon, scary green key lime coconut patties from Florida, halvah with pistachios from Israel, and rugelach from Canter’s in L.A. Some treats come with an education (did you know that the honeybell orange, also known as the Minneola tangelo, is a cross between the Dancy tangerine and the Duncan grapefruit?); others with a personal touch—Julie’s homemade carrot cake, Johanna’s cookies, Jamie’s homemade cheese, Deb’s mom’s chocolate covered almonds, Fumiko’s brownies, and Kim’s banana bread (still gooey in the middle).

The point is not snacks. It’s that Criterion is not only a company—we’re a culture. It’s something we all work on, something we create together. Jon and I are proud that even in the roughest times we’ve never missed a payroll, but I think it’s almost as important that we’ve never missed a Friday lunch for the company. When someone takes the trouble to send a postcard or bring back a local delicacy or label every object in the office with a haiku, it’s a gift. No matter how frivolous or silly or indulgent it may seem on the surface, underneath it is a gesture of kindness and respect, and that respect becomes the foundation of Criterion’s culture. The most important product that Criterion is working on at any given moment is the company itself. In the end there is no difference between the respect we show each other and the respect we show the films or our business partners or the filmmakers and scholars and writers who work with us. It all takes practice, and now that we’re all on one floor, it’s all happening “on five.”

I don’t know if we’ll be posting over the holidays, so I just wanted to take this last opportunity to say how grateful I am to all the people who take the time to make the little gestures and have a little fun around here. Here’s wishing everyone at Criterion and all of our friends, colleagues, and customers good will and good cheer, the happiest of holidays, and the very best in the New Year.

Well, it’s not exactly writer’s block, but it’s related. I’ve been trying to get this blog entry posted since Tuesday afternoon, but there’s always something that takes me away from the task at hand. I’m procrastinating, and I know why: It’s really kind of a momentous occasion. We are launching a new line. The news will be official on Friday when we ship out PDFs of the first sell sheets for Series 1: Early Bergman. For the past couple of days, we’ve been ironing out the last details of the packaging and finalizing the twenty-six words that will appear on the back of every cover: “Eclipse presents a selection of lost, forgotten, or overshadowed films in simple, affordable editions. Each series is a brief cinematheque retrospective for the adventurous home viewer.”

There’s something perilous about writing mission statements. Jon mentioned the famous one from Kane in an earlier blog. That one comes up in conversation a lot. It’s hard to walk the line between idealism and practicality, but that is exactly what we are trying to do with this new line. We’re nine years into the DVD market, and there are still hundreds of important films that can only be seen in old VHS versions or, if you’re lucky enough to live in a town with a good repertory theater, a new print might come around once every ten years or so.

We want those films to be more readily available, and that’s why we’re creating Eclipse. Each month we’ll present a short series, usually three to five films, focusing on a particular director or theme. There will be no supplements and the master materials will be the best we can find, but they won’t be full Criterion restorations. Retail pricing for each set will average under $15 per disc, and we are examining the logistics of making the sets available at an even more favorable rate on a subscriber or club basis. The goal here is to make these films available, to make sure that Criterion’s own work style doesn’t contribute to the continuing unavailability of these films. Once our producers and restoration crew get started on a Criterion edition, the project takes on a life of its own. Months later, with a little luck, we’ll have something really special to show for it, but at that rate we can’t make a dent in the number of important unreleased films that we’d like people to be able to see.

The early films of Ingmar Bergman, the documentaries of Louis Malle—these are extraordinary and important films that are very hard to find outside the revival-house circuit. At the moment, you’ll find more Mizoguchis in theaters (thanks to a traveling retrospective) than in the video store, and that’s certainly also true for Naruse, Ozu, and Imamura. While Criterion is working on new special editions of individual pictures by all of these filmmakers, at a rate of maybe one or two a year, we’ll never be able to represent the breadth of their bodies of work. Eclipse will help to fill that gap.

And then there will be discoveries. When you work at Criterion, everyone introduces you to films you’ve never seen, many of which have never been released in the United States It’s surprising how many films of extraordinary quality have never been seen here. (If you don’t believe it, just check out the New York Film Critics’ Circle awards, where Army of Shadows, a 1969 film, was selected as best foreign film of 2006. Congratulations to our friends at Rialto on doing a spectacular job bringing this film out from the shadows!) We’re looking forward to introducing quite a few new filmmakers to U.S. audiences, starting with Raymond Bernard whose 1935 Les miserables is the best version of Victor Hugo’s novel ever brought to the screen, and it deserves to be seen alongside his antiwar masterpiece, Wooden Crosses.

Okay I’m going to post this now before I start tinkering with the mission language again.

Almost exactly twelve years ago, we were fervently working on the launch of a big website with tons of content called voyagerco.com. This was in the fall of 1994, and if you're wondering how long ago that was in web years, Netscape 1.0 wasn't even released by mid-November of that year.

A bit of history here. The Voyager Company was started in 1983 by Aleen Stein, Bob Stein, and Roger Smith. That year Voyager published the first titles in the Criterion Collection–Citizen Kane and King Kong—on laserdisc. Janus Films got involved the following year when it licensed many of the movies that would become the backbone of the collection over the years, and soon thereafter, Janus became a partner in Voyager. The most important line that the company published was the Criterion Collection, but Voyager had a much larger mission than releasing great movies on laserdisc. In 1989, we started publishing CD-ROMs, and our CD companion to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is still one of my favorite things we’ve ever published. By 1992, the Internet started to evolve into a viable tool for reaching the world—as a way of selling to our customers, and equally important, delivering content. While basic by today’s standards, the home page that Peter helped develop was driven by content, ease of use and our overall publishing efforts, much as our website is today. Now back to the story…

The Voyager Company was set to launch its website, and without much debate we all agreed that the URL should be voyager.com. Not that there was much already registered in those days, but voyager.com was gone. We did a quick search and settled on voyagerco.com (co for company.) We knew it would have to do until we could liberate voyager.com. The website went up and voyagerco.com was a small success. We delivered content from the Paris Review and others and asked viewers to “Bring Your Brain.” We showcased our titles and we offered downloads for sale years before it became the thing to do. A section of the site was devoted to the Criterion Collection, but only a small part. Then we debated. How much was the Voyager name worth? The company that owned voyager.com wasn’t using it.

Was it worth $5,000 or was it $50,000 or was it priceless? Could Voyager be successful if it didn’t own voyager.com? We debated and argued and finally offered the $5,000 and yes they came back with $50,000. Long story short, we passed and so did much of the CD-ROM market. By 1997, we sold what was left of the CD-ROM business and the Voyager name to concentrate on movies and Criterion. We were still a year away from Criterion's launch of DVD, but we felt it was necessary to concentrate on our core business. It was time for a new website and clearly criterion.com was our choice. By this time, our luck was the same, and it was gone. We registered criterionco.com (co again for company not collection). We were used to the “co” and it felt like home. We didn’t spend much time thinking about the URL until earlier this fall. People knew where to find us. We liked the link to the past. All in all, it worked.

Peter and I were having lunch, and on a whim I asked whether he thought we should try and secure criterion.com? We talked for a bit and ended up on “sure if it’s not too expensive.” Not much debate, not much angst. Well, we made an offer, they came back with a counter, and we settled in the middle. As some of you may have noticed, criterion.com is now our home too. You’ll see it on our stationery and in our email addresses. I missed the “co.com” for a day or two when I was talking to people, but just plain criterion.com feels right. I feel a bit like we closed the loop we started fifteen years ago.

I had said that I was going to write about growing up with a projector in my attic, and Peter’s writing about home last week brought back some memories. Movies were cool. In the late sixties, my father would bring home the Films Incorporated catalog (they had new American films), and I got to pick something for him to bring home on 16mm. We screened lots of movies over the years, and several stand out. From Russia with Love—what could be cooler than having Bond in your attic? Here Comes Mr. Jordan—it’s sweet and made me a Claude Rains fan forever. A Night to Remember, which didn’t seem as sad to me as a kid as it does now: I had my first kiss with my high school girlfriend during that movie. The Lady Vanishes was perhaps my favorite of all. I traveled to England with my parents in the early seventies when my dad was meeting with Rank Film Distributors, and I looked for “Froy” on every train window. We screened a new print at the Janus 50th celebration in September for over 400 people. The reaction was wonderful, and seeing it on the big screen with an audience was a treat. I’ve seen each of these dozens of times and always look forward to the next time.

My knowledge from home made me the official audiovisual person at my elementary school. I was called in to thread the projector whenever the school was showing a film. Occasionally I would bring in a movie. It’s been almost forty years, but I remember like it was yesterday the day I brought in Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman. We showed the movie for the entire fourth, fifth and sixth grades, and for the last twenty minutes—the football game—the entire auditorium was on its feet, screaming. It didn't necessarily make me want to get into the business, but it's an experience that firmly etched into my mind the power of the movies. The Freshman is out as part of the Harold Lloyd collection from New Line. Rent it or buy it, and sit down with lots of people (Lloyd really needs an audience) and enjoy.

Another vivid memory is from January 1976. I was sitting around the dinner table with my parents, and my father mentioned that Paul Robeson had died. He asked me if I knew who Robeson was, and I said “Yes, a black communist.” I was proud of myself for having seen an obit on CBS news the night before. They had shown a short clip of The Emperor Jones, and I had noticed that they had included the Janus logo. I had never heard of Robeson before that. My father jumped up from the table and made calls to my brother and sister, who are much older than I, and he asked each of them a simple question, “Do you know who Paul Robeson is?” Both answered no and at that moment my father decided to make a movie about Paul Robeson. He said he found it staggering that a generation could have no knowledge of someone who was so significant in his life growing up. My father’s short film, Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist, was born that night. His film isn’t about Robeson’s politics and remained remarkably neutral on the subject (there’s only one politically leaning line in the narration). It’s about Robeson, the man, and his amazing achievements. In March 1980, my father received the Academy Award for Best Short Documentary for the film.

The year he won the Academy Award, I wasn’t nearly as interested in the movies as I was in space, as I was working for NASA. But that’s for another day. For now, I proudly display the Oscar statue in our den.

We left St-Michel feeling uplifted and took a nice stroll south, past the Closerie des Lilas, the restaurant made famous by Hemingway, and through the Luxembourg gardens, where a film crew was laying dolly tracks and fitting counterweights on a small crane. There were no huge campers or craft-service trucks, no roped-off barricades of orange cones and police tape or PAs with squawking walkie-talkies. Making a film here seems as natural as shopping for bread or training the cascades of chrysanthemums that tumble from urns over the walls of the garden. We kept walking south, down past the cemetery and into the sleepy fourteenth, when we arrived finally at a little street called the rue Daguerre.

This perfectly Parisian enclave, practical and casual and very vividly alive, is the world of Agnès Varda. I had a sense of it from a lovely film she made called Daguerreotypes, but being there brought the film to life for me, much more than the other way around. This self-sufficient one-way street is a neighborhood unto itself, not trendy or hip in the least, just a pleasing mix of traditional French storefronts—the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker—interspersed with a couple of Southeast Asian food shops, a few clothing stores, and a remarkable representation of traditional craftspeople. Here you will find the cobbler and the chair-caning workshop, and over there, in that vitrine, is the neighborhood filmmaker. You will know her by the poster for Le bonheur in the window and the case of DVDs of Cleo from 5 to 7 and Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi) just inside the door.

The scene is at once ordinary and bizarre, but it makes perfect sense. Here is the quintessential independent filmmaker, often credited with directing the first film of the French new wave (La pointe-courte), and she has set herself up much like the other artisans up and down the street. You could walk in off the street and buy a DVD, but it is not exactly a store. Just inside the door is an editing table, not an old-fashioned museum piece, but a working piece of equipment (when we walked in there was an intertitle up on the screen, something about cinematographer Willy Kurant and Varda’s 1966 feature Les créatures). Across the room is a very contemporary digital editing rig, also actively in use, with footage intended for a project Agnès says will have to be a secret until February. She asked us for a bit of patience as they were about to film a shot—did we mind? Of course not. “We’ll start outside,” she said, and then to us, “Just stay behind the camera.” And for her it is that simple. They traipsed across the street, no worries about permits or traffic or passersby, and made the shot: three people crossing a street. “Too fast,” she said. “We’ll do it again.” And then inside the shop for another shot (just a moment to set a single light). And it was done. “Now we have lunch.”

Just across the way, through a small door, is a dining room, perfectly sized for a table for six. In the adjoining room we stopped for a moment and sank into comfortable antique chairs covered in burgundy fabric, amid neat piles of books all around. In a discreet case nearby, Fumiko noticed a veritable menagerie of those dancing bears cavorting. We talked for a little while about the death of Phillipe Noiret, and about the films of Bertrand Tavernier, whom Agnès had seen at the funeral, and especially Coup de torchon, before Agnès said, “Are we ready to eat?” Agnès is known for her cooking, but this day, because she was working, she had someone helping out. “She has something to do at the last minute with the vinegar and the sugar. We must respect the timing of the kitchen.”

In the dining room, we are joined by Rosalie, Agnès’s daughter with Jacques Demy, and Cecilia, who has worked with Agnès for years. Ciné-Tamaris, as her company is called, has the feeling more of a collective or a family, and inevitably her family has been swept up in the creative ferment. Rosalie has served as a costume designer from time to time both on Agnès’s films and her father’s, and their son Matthieu is an actor who first appeared on-screen at the age of five, in Varda’s One Sings, the Other Doesn’t. Like this lunch, everything around Agnès is handmade of honest materials and of uncompromisingly high quality. For all the straightforwardness and simplicity of her life and working style, she is a meticulous, sophisticated, and hardheaded thinker. The conversation ranged from DVD supplements and restoration to the difficulty of color-correcting a scene in Peau d’âne, one in which director Jacques Demy created a dress out of the material used for movie screens, then projected film of blue sky onto it. Eventually, maybe inevitably, the conversation turned to politics and children and community and all the ordinary things that make life meaningful. Agnès has brought them all together here, and there is really no reason for her to leave this pretty street, tucked away safely, where the can-do spirit of the French new wave is alive and well.

We had two other meetings that day, and four more yesterday, and it is all becoming a blur. In a few minutes I'll be boarding a plane for New York. I am exhausted and looking forward to getting home to my son and my wife and our new baby. Fumiko will be staying on for another week, joined by our technical director, Lee Kline, to make a round of HD masters for future releases. For my part, as much as I love Paris, I can't wait to get home to my kitchen, where I have some experiments to do, including one that requires a little vinegar and a dash of sugar just at the last minute.

We've been all over the city in the past couple of days, lugging around the fourteen-pound Janus box in a prototype Janus tote, feeling a little like traveling salesmen, but it's okay, because Paris is just so beautiful, even on these gray fall days. Yesterday we were on the Left Bank, starting near the fountain at St-Michel, where, in a small court behind a big carriage door, are the offices of Les Films du Jeudi, the production company of Pierre Braunberger, now run by his smart and charming daughter, Laurence. As we sat and chatted about Renoir, the Hakim brothers, and the mysterious French legal/business conundrum known as "authors’ rights," my eyes kept drifting around the room. There is so much to look at. Off at the far end are full-height back-lit translucent panels checkered with what appear to be frames of old color film. Staged in front of them is Braunberger's collection of antique camera equipment. Everything there is related to film. Drawings, posters, postcards are everywhere. Scattered throughout are the mischievous grinning cats drawn or printed by Laurence's good friend Chris Marker. It is one of those places that oozes a certain kind of comfort, more atelier than office, a genuinely safe place for art and artists.

From the end of the silent era through his death, in 1990, Pierre Braunberger is credited with producing about 100 films by such filmmakers as Godard and Truffaut and Resnais and even Renoir. (His only credit as director is for a little-known film called Bullfight, which has the distinction of being the first film ever released by Janus Films.) One of the things that truly set Braunberger apart is that nearly half of the films he produced were shorts, those works that are often least commercial and most personal or experimental. For an example, see Charlotte et Véronique, ou Tous les garçons s'appellent Patrick, written by Rohmer and directed by Godard, on our edition of A Woman Is a Woman. As we got ready to leave, I noticed for the first time a small collection of statuary on top of a bookshelf—the Oscar and the winged lion of Venice are the easiest to recognize, but there are certainly more than a dozen others keeping them company. It is without question the most impressive array of awards I have ever been that close to, and what struck me was how simply and humbly gathered they were, cluttered together on top of a small antique bookcase maybe two feet wide. And like a good host making sure we didn't overlook a favorite guest, Laurence gestured across the room to a spot on a different shelf, not far from one of those Chinatown cats with one paw raised, where the Golden Bear of Berlin was off dancing by himself.

That was the start of the day, and our next stop was a visit with Agnès Varda, but I don't want this post to get too long, so I'll save that part and post it tomorrow before I fly home.