Garbo Talks in the Public Domain

I already have a deep loathing of film stills with the Getty or Alamy watermark splashed all over them. Don’t even get me started. But it’s so, so much worse when it’s stills of movies that are in the public domain. I can do whatever I want with Animal Crackers or Anna Christie, and Getty shouldn’t get a dime out of it. If you want my opinion, it should be illegal for them to watermark those images and charge you for their use just as an image. Sold as a poster? Fine. Sold on a T-shirt? Fine. But I’ve seen images from the Apollo missions with the Getty watermark on them, and it’s infuriating. Especially when it’s the only copy accessible online.

But as of Thursday, I can run a business selling Hell’s Angels, and whatever confused remnant there is of the Howard Hughes estate can suck it. (I know I’m a week late on this, but what do you do; it’s a Wednesday column.) If you could find The Man With the Flower in His Mouth, the first British TV broadcast, you can sell copies of that, too. The Big Trail, the first starring role of John Wayne. Buster Keaton and Greta Garbo had their first talkies. Lon Chaney had his only talkie, his last film before his death. The first sound films from Italy, Poland, Argentina, and what was Czechoslovakia.

Some of the finest films of the era are public domain now. All Quiet on the Western Front, of course. Animal Crackers, also of course. The Blue Angel, which made a star of Marlene Dietrich. L’Age d’Or, that controversial surrealist work by Buñuel and Dalí. Films by Lubitsch and Hitchcock and Murnau, Ford and Whale and DeMille. Will Rogers and Maurice Chevalier, early Technicolor works by Eddie Cantor and Bing Crosby.

And, yes, Betty Boop and Pluto. Not Betty Boop as you perhaps picture her; that’s got a bit to go. But Betty Boop with dog ears. Flip the Frog and the beginning of Blondie, too. None of the best of the Silly Symphonies, but still, some of them. The original Mickey Mouse comic strip. The world of animation is slowly opening up into the public domain, and it is beautiful.

Other characters who are public domain now include Nancy Drew and her friends. Not all of them; Bess and George won’t be there until next year. But Nancy, her father, and her housekeeper. Miss Marple and Harriet Vane, the Little Engine That Could, and Dick and Jane. The full novel of The Maltese Falcon. The Collected Poems of Robert Frost. The serialized version of Destry Rides Again. He Done Her Wrong, an early graphic novel—wordless, so truly just graphic—by Milt Gross.

Which segues nicely into art. The Jules Rimet cup, better known as the FIFA World Cup, is in the public domain in the US now. “Transport and Human Endeavor,” in the Chrysler Building. Works by Mondrian, Klee, O’Keefe, and more. Taos Pueblo, the book by Ansel Adams, is public domain now. 1930 was a fascinating time in visual art, and it’s easy to explore that now regardless of what style of art particularly appeals to you.

In music, let us be clear that what’s in public domain is the composition, not the recording, from 1930. Compositions such as “Dream a Little Dream of Me.” You can’t play, for example, Mama Cass singing it without paying her estate, but you can record it yourself. You can have rhythm; you can have Georgia on your mind. You can get happy. You can have love for sale at ten cents a dance. It’s fine and dandy if your baby just cares for you. You can be falling in love again on the sunny side of the street.

But what if you can’t sing? Ah, well, there are indeed recordings for you. They’re just five years older. So you can listen to Marian Anderson singing “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong performing “Saint Louis Blues.” Eddie Cantor singing “Yes Sir That’s My Baby.” Ethel Waters singing “Sweet Georgia Brown.” Marion Harris singing “I’ll See You in My Dreams.” It’s still early days of the recording industry, but that just means we’re starting to encounter things you’ve heard of.

So look. I am, as a writer, a passionate believer in copyright. One of the reasons we don’t allow stuff created by LLM here on Media Magpies is that those things are built on plagiarism, and if anyone’s making money off my writing, it should be me or at very least the site in general; we could use the operating expenses. But I am once again angry about the copyright situation in general. As you may be aware, I’ve been creating In Memoriam reels for our YouTube channel, and almost no one I’ve covered was alive when Frank Capra’s Ladies of Leisure was made. Everyone involved in making it is dead, most of them well before I was born.

And as established, some of these works are orphaned copyrights. We mentioned Dorothy L. Sayers; she had one child whom she never properly acknowledged, though she left her estate to him when she died. So far as I can tell, he himself had no children. So who gets the royalties and why do they deserve them? He died over thirty years ago. And that’s a fairly simple case. What of movies made by studios that went out of business? Works for hire by companies that haven’t existed since the forties? And why should Disney keep earning money off the backs of people whose grandchildren are old?

I firmly believe copyright, when owned by a corporation, should be use-it-or-lose-it. In the era of streaming, print-on-demand, and other ways of releasing media to the public, there’s no excuse for keeping anything out of print. Out of print should mean losing the rights. If I can’t give you money for a thing, I shouldn’t have to. You’ve decided you don’t want it. You don’t get to just hide it away so I can’t access it. No more vaults; there’s no need for them anymore.