Here Comes the Judge (Epilogue): “Strange Bedfellows”

By the time that the Supreme Court decision was rendered in January 1984, thus ending a seven-year legal battle in the US courts (see Part 5), the climate in the home video market had changed dramatically. Sony's Betamax market had fallen to nearly single digits, and Hollywood was enjoying enormous profits courtesy of the VCR. By mid-1984, most of the major Hollywood studios were deeply committed to the VCR, and their home video divisions were often the most profitable units of the company. The fears that Hollywood had envisioned back in 1976 had evaporated, giving way to home video releases of major motion pictures that had long been retired from the theaters.

One notable example was the home video release of the MGM epic motion picture Gone with the Wind. Considered one of the most beloved, enduring and popular films of all time, Gone with the Wind would occasionally be played in select movie theaters, and it took nearly 37 years for it to appear on television for the first time, in 1976.

In 1985, MGM decided to release Gone with the Wind on home video, to coincide with the upcoming 50th anniversary of Margaret Mitchell's best-selling Civil War and Reconstruction period novel, which was first published in 1936.

Back in 1976, when dispute began, for Hollywood, blank tape was to the VCR what the bullet was to the gun. But, as is often said, politics makes strange bedfellows; well, so too did the home entertainment industry in the ’80s.

It was early 1985, exactly one year after the Universal vs. Sony Supreme Court decision that finally settled the issue of whether home recording violated US copyright laws. I had become the Marketing Manager for Maxell's consumer products (audio and video blank tape) in the United States, when one of our sales representatives from our Professional Products Division approached me with the news that MGM was interested in cross-promoting the historic release of Gone with the Wind on home video with Maxell.

After I had picked myself up off the floor and pinched myself, my marketing “genius” (sorry) came gushing out of my "frontal lobe," and I realized that duh, this was the “perfect storm,” a “10” “too magnificent for words” (I need to get a grip on myself). This was notwithstanding the fact that I had fallen asleep in the theater when watching Gone with the Wind as a teenager.

Not only was GWTW a motion picture that would endure for generations to come, but the notion that when it was released on home video it would be recorded on Maxell tape would have an enormous impact on our image as a quality supplier of blank videotape. But mostly, at that time, it signaled to me just how seismic the shift in Hollywood's thinking over the past eight years had been. And how well I remember MGM being courageous and forward-thinking to enter into this alliance with us devils. (The amount we paid didn't hurt, either.)

So, we all agreed to the cross-promotion, which labeled every Gone with the Wind box with the Maxell logo and included a free tee-shirt offer, but the centerpiece was a TV spot we co-produced and intended to air during the 57th Academy Awards ceremony, on March 25,1985.

However, like an instinctive, reflexive, knee-jerk reaction, some impulses were impossible for Hollywood to control. Hollywood still couldn't completely “exorcise” the concept that the VCR was “satanic” and its ally, the blank tape, was “diabolical”. The Academy “frankly didn't give a damn” about our ad, and refused to air it during the awards. But ABC did give a "damn"—about $200,000 worth. ($200,000+ to run the 30-second spot was a lot to pay, 20 years ago). Collectively, our ad agencies and ABC circumvented the Academy’s objection, and we ran the spot at 8:59:30 p.m. on March 25, 1985, right before the 9:00 p.m. opening announcements.

Now here is the commercial that ran back in March 1985. Maxell GWTW commercial (requires Windows Media Player).

Exactly 20 years later, the cross-promotion between Maxell and MGM on the release of Gone With the Wind remains one of my most cherished accomplishments…next to writing these newsletters, of course.

Later that year, Hollywood would finally and forever exorcise the VCR once and for all. In an event that not even Hollywood could have scripted, Universal City Studios was acquired by Matsushita Electric (Panasonic), a Japanese company with a leading share of the VCR market at that time. (Matsushita would ultimately sell off Universal to Seagram's, which sold to Vivendi, which sold to General Electric.)

And in the end, for Sony, even though they beat ‘em, they joined ‘em.

In 1989, Sony acquired Columbia Pictures, and to this day, Hollywood and the home electronics industry have lived happily ever after.

The End.