In Reference To...

From time-to-time customers would approach the counter looking for movies with only vague recollections of what the film was called or about. Someone once asked..."Do you have the one where the guy with a fast car likes the girl who is being chased by the cops?" Well, with such little to go on, a little cross-referencing was necessary to find the answer to the customer's question. Back in the days before online databases like IMDB.com, several different books were needed to do this. In our store three books were extremely helpful in helping customers identify movie titles they were looking for. First among them was Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide. Originally published in 1969 as TV Movies and then annually in 1988 as Leonard Maltin's Movie and Video Guide, the book is one of the most impressive listings of movies and reviews that can be found. The earlier printings boasted well over 7,000 titles including made-for-tv films, and star and director indexes. But as each year's volume got bigger and bigger, the indexes and tv movie listings were dropped. Maltin, who has been seen on the syndicated Entertainment Tonight television program for the last 24 years as it's resident film critic, edits the book annually, providing reviews along with other critics like USA Today's Mike Clark. What made the Maltin book indispensable, was it's listing of all movies including those that were not available on home video. In the early 1990's a similar reference book would be published called VideoHounds Golden Movie Retriever. A larger book in size, but not necessarily in volume, the retriever restricted itself to movies that were only available on home video. But what made the VideoHound so valuable was it's plethora of indexes. Cross-referencing with the VideoHound was a breeze. There are indexes by actor, director, composer, cinematographer, writers and a whole lot more. Like the Maltin guide the VideoHound is also published and updated annually.
The last of the books we used in our video store was The Film Encyclopedia originally published in 1979 by filmmaker, Ephraim Katz. Katz, who also updated his book annually until his death in 1992, was a film critic and documentary filmmaker. The Katz book is not an index of film titles, but rather an alphabetical listing of actors, producers, directors, composers, writers and their biographical information as well as a dictionary of film jargon and industry terms. The Katz book, which is still published annually today, was a great help coming up with weekly trivia questions for our store. (See earlier posting Trivial Pursuits 6/13/06) So in the end I'm happy to report that we did find the film the customer was looking for about "...the guy with the fast car who likes the girl." It was Smokey and the Bandit of course!