Scarecrow
Uniting People With Film
Support Scarecrow during our Spring Campaign!
Donor support of Scarecrow Video has helped us become the world’s largest publicly available video library. At 133,000 titles and growing, the Scarecrow collection is in the same league as institutions like The American Film Institute and The UCLA Film and Television Archive and our dedication to preserving these important pieces of our shared cultural history feels more vital than ever. Streaming catalogs continue shrinking, and more and more works can only be experienced through physical media. As long as we’re here, we will continue working diligently to keep them available for future generations of film lovers to enjoy.
But as a non-profit, we need YOUR help to make that happen. Your gift to Scarecrow Video allows us to:
Protect the Collection
Scarecrow currently holds nearly 15,000 VHS tapes…not because they’re “neat” or novel, but because they contain content unavailable on any other format and, in many cases, represent the only way that these works can be easily accessed. This segment of the collection is vulnerable because almost 3,000 of them are housed in cases that have become worn and damaged over the years.
Exposure to the air and elements shorten the lifespan of videotape and we’re working to halt that damage by replacing them with new, airtight cases. Donor support funds the time and materials needed to complete preservation projects like this to assure that these works remain available to be enjoyed by all.
GROW THE COLLECTION
An important way we fulfill our mission of connecting people with film is by thoroughly researching and acquiring important titles. Every year we add thousands and browsing our “New Releases” on any given week gives you a sense of the devoted care that goes into making sure micro-budget indie releases, long-overdue re-issues, and highly relevant documentaries are represented as thoroughly as Hollywood blockbusters.
While we add thousands of new titles every year, there are always some that are out of reach because of cost or rarity. These get added to our Wishlist Collection, a project directly funded by donor support. Every quarter, we add European imports, seminal avant-garde collections, and important missing pieces to our directors’ sections, often replacing titles that were previously available only on VHS if at all. Your support funds this never-ending pursuit of a comprehensive archive.
SHARE THE COLLECTION
Becoming a non-profit opened new and exciting opportunities to bring our treasures into the community. We show films at senior and community centers through our Silver Screeners program, providing important gathering opportunities for older adults. We offer a weekly Children’s Hour that combines story-time, films from the collection, and educational activities into truly unique arts programming at no cost to families. And we host free screenings and events at Scarecrow nearly every night of the week while making our space available to non-profits and their clients, like young people working with Youthcare to avoid homelessness. This past year, we also launched Movies in the Park, a program that invites everyone to enjoy family-friendly films in the beautiful surroundings of Magnusson Park while enjoying pre-film arts and crafts for the kids.
Your support keeps these programs free for the thousands of film-lovers who take part in them every year and allows us to explore new opportunities to use the collection to touch and inspire lives.
We need your partnership to achieve these goals. Please make a gift today to secure the future of this incredible collection. Meeting our $15,000 Spring fundraising goal will keep us on track for 2019 and enable us to provide the best service to our community of film lovers.
The Seasoned Ticket #40
Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. He will be contributing a series of “critic’s notes” to the Scarecrow blog—a chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connecting them to the riches of Scarecrow’s collection.
Cinema Jackpots! FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL
by John S.
Cinema Jackpots is a series that reviews films with uncertain origins which ultimately became popular smash hits. Everyone loves a good success story. Join us as we explore how these movies caught lightning in a bottle and triumphed.
THE CONTESTANT: Four Weddings And A Funeral
THE ODDS: The eternally boyish Hugh Grant is so strongly associated with the Comedy genre it’s hard to imagine him ever being in any other kinds of movies. Yet prior to 1994, most of Grant’s body of work was focused mostly on period dramas (Maurice, Impromptu), arty thrillers (Night Train to Venice, Bitter Moon), and one enjoyably bizarro horror flick (The Lair of the White Worm). Yet, in 1993 he was tapped to be the male lead of a relatively low-budget British romantic comedy about a charming perennial bachelor who is forced to re-think his ways when he is dazzled by an enigmatic American temptress.
The Seasoned Ticket #39
Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. He will be contributing a series of “critic’s notes” to the Scarecrow blog—a chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connecting them to the riches of Scarecrow’s collection.
The Seasoned Ticket #38
Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. He will be contributing a series of “critic’s notes” to the Scarecrow blog—a chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connecting them to the riches of Scarecrow’s collection.
The Seasoned Ticket #37
Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. He will be contributing a series of “critic’s notes” to the Scarecrow blog—a chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connecting them to the riches of Scarecrow’s collection.
As we head into Oscar weekend, I thought I would pull out an interview I did with Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who came to Seattle to promote The Lives of Others in February 2007. The film would go on to upset odds-on favorite Pan’s Labyrinth for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar—not a complete shocker, actually, as The Lives of Others is much more a traditional Oscar winner than Guillermo del Toro’s film.
The German director is nominated again in the Foreign Language category for Never Look Away, a very long (I mean 188 minutes’ worth) account of a young man growing out of the Nazi era and trying to be an artist in East Germany (and then, perhaps almost as challengingly, West Germany). The film opens March 8 in Seattle. It is, I am sorry to report, not good.
So, to happier times: A talk about The Lives of Others, a film born of von Donnersmarck’s irritation with the ostalgia craze, Germany’s fond flashback to the GDR. The piece originally ran in the Daily Herald.
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