Hard though it may be to believe, there are still plenty of movies that have never seen the light of home video players. "Over the last 12 years," Susan King writes in the Los Angeles Times, "Warner Home Video has released about 1,200 vintage films from its vast library on DVD. But that still leaves about 3,800 feature titles that have yet to make their digital debuts. At the studio's current release rate of 100 per year, they wouldn't all be available until midcentury." Now, in a truly surprising move, WB has decided to get all Mom-and-Pop, hands-on in its efforts to stuff home editions of its back catalog into eager, waiting hands. Monday, the Warner Archive website began offering customers the chance to place on-line orders for movies that have been given the green light for "official" DVD release, because the necesary demand for them is presumed to not exist. But fans can now buy burns of any of 150 titles, with plans to add another twenty or so titles every month. Those available now range from obscure classics such as Peter Brooks's The Beggar's Opera with Laurence Olivier and the 1931 film version of Noel Coward's Private Lives to cultish oddities such as The D.I., with Jack Webb playing R. Lee Ermey and Yes, Giorgio, Luciano Pavarotti's mad fling at being a romantic movie lead, to films that plug holes in the careers of people like Clark Gable (Cain and Mable, Idiot's Delight, Honky Tonk) and Michael Curtiz (Mission to Moscow).

Although the DVDs are burned rather than pressed like official commercially released discs, Warner Home Video head George Feltenstein says that "these discs, burned with a oropietary technology, 'are as durable and playable as pressed discs. They're not like discs you burn on your home computer.' " They will also be released bare bones, without supplementary materials of any kind, except for original trailers where those are available. And, of course, they don't come in Blu-Ray. Given those limitations, the immediate response seems to have provided overnight validation of the project, which was two years in the making: Lou Lumenick of the New York Post took time out from his busy schedule of annoying the handicapped to tell his readers about a phone conversation he had before the end of the day with "a jubiliant WHV honcho George Feltenstein, who reports that within two hours of the site going live this morning, orders were placed for 140 of the initial 150 titles. 'And they might have gotten orders on those other ten by now,' he tells me. 'It's more traffic than we can handle.'" (So much so that the site was stalled for a while on Monday.) Considering that WBH is also making the titles available for downloading (at a cost of $14.95, compared to $19.95 for a disc), the rush on the DVD cart amounts to a gratifying reaffirmation of the appeal of a hard copy one can call one's own.