As you read this, members of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Screen Actors Guild of America (SAG) are currently pounding the pavement in New York and Los Angeles, raising signs and rhyming chants to anyone who will listen. Most movie and television production has ceased, as have promotional campaigns. The work stoppage doesn’t appear to be ending soon, and studios have started rolling over their 2023 releases to 2024 — time to prepare yourself for an odd fall and winter at the movies and on TV.
The writers and actors are striking for many reasons, but their primary concern is the medium’s future. They want to ensure that the movies and shows you watch and fall in love with are envisioned by human minds and feature human faces. They want the form to remain an artistic expression, not just as another generative mint machine for a select few.
What can you do to help? Not much, really. I don’t think a battery of calls to Bob Iger or Ted Sarandos will speed up a contract negotiation. But if you have the means, donating to the Entertainment Community Fund will go a long way in helping out the below-the-line craftspeople caught in the middle.
In the meantime, the best thing you can do is help to preserve what we already have. The history of cinema is as fragile as anything else and in constant danger of disappearance through neglect or conscious erasure. And in an era where licenses change hands with every merger — with several falling into copyright limbo — and shifting cultural mores threaten our collective history, the best way to ensure that the American movies you hold dear remain seen and discussed for future generations is for those movies to be included on a list of titles that reflect “who we are as a people and as a nation.” I give you the National Film Registry (NFR).
Established by the National Film Preservation Act of 1988, the NFR is one of the many programs run by the Library of Congress. Every year, the National Film Preservation Board reviews thousands of nominations of American movies deemed “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” and selects 25 to add to the Registry. Scan the titles, and you’ll find undisputed classics (Citizen Kane, Casablanca), populist favorites (Star Wars, Iron Man) and lesser-known gems that deserve a large audience (Cooley High, Outrage).
But, as with any list, people tend to gravitate toward what’s not on it rather than what is. That’s where you come in: Anyone can nominate a movie for the Registry, up to 50 titles per year per ballot.
Nominations can be submitted all year round, with the inductees announced in December. Calls for the class of 2023 have closed, but that just gives you extra time to start thinking about your 2024 ballot. And the best place to start is by watching these movies. There’s nothing quite like spending a couple of hours revisiting a work of art that moves you, or discovering something that moves someone else.
Michael J. Casey’s 2023 National Film Registry Nomination Ballot
To keep things tight, I submit 10 titles because it’s a less overwhelming number. And since the only real rule the NFR enforces is that a movie must be at least 10 years old for eligibility, I dedicate one entry to that year. And for my 2013 slot: Inside Llewyn Davis, my favorite film from Joel and Ethan Coen and one of the best movies about how the cycles of artistic progress will always leave some in the back alley. And for no other reason than that’s just how the world works.
We’ll see which of these, if any, make the NFR cut in December. But even if they don’t, the hours spent watching them are far from a waste. Hell, watch them tonight, and you might find them on your own ballot next summer.
- Merrily We Go to Hell (Dorothy Arzner, 1932)
- The Wrong Man (Alfred Hitchcock, 1957)
- The Naked Kiss (Samuel Fuller, 1964)
- Chimes at Midnight (Orson Welles, 1965)
- Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (Sam Peckinpah, 1973)
- Born in Flames (Lizzie Borden, 1983)
- Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Andersen, 2003)
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004)
- The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)
- Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2013)
