Random Movie Generator

What the random movie generator does

Somebody has to pick. You have scrolled past the same rows of thumbnails four evenings running, and the film you eventually put on is the one you have already seen twice. So hand the decision to something that has no taste, no memory of what you watched last week, and no interest in keeping you subscribed.

Press Generate and you get a film. It might be from 1976 or from last year. A few of the titles waiting in here:

• All the President's Men
• The Best of Youth
• Shiva Baby
• Silver Linings Playbook
• Old Henry
• She's All That
• Demolition
• Tolkien

Ninety years of cinema sitting in one pile, which is a stranger thing than it sounds. Most of the films ever made are not in any pile at all. They are gone, and the rest of this page is about how that happened and what it means for anything calling itself a list of movies.

How to use it

1. Press Generate for one film. Press it again if the first one does not appeal.
2. Raise the quantity to get a handful at once. Useful when you are picking with somebody else and want a shortlist rather than a verdict.
3. Type into Contains to narrow things down. A word, part of a title, or a year works. Enter a decade digit and you can pull a whole era.
4. Copy takes the results with you.

Where the titles come from

The films here were gathered and checked by hand, from across decades, countries and budgets rather than from one chart. Press Generate and the tool picks from that pool. Everything happens in your browser.

Three quarters of the silent era is gone

In 2013 the Library of Congress published the first proper survey of what remains of American silent cinema. The film historian David Pierce went looking for every American silent feature released between 1912 and 1929, nearly eleven thousand of them, and tried to find out which ones still existed anywhere in the world.

The answer was brutal. Only fourteen in a hundred survive in their original 35mm. Another eleven in a hundred exist only as foreign-language prints or in worse formats, cut down, scratched, missing reels. Everything else is simply not there. The Library's own summary was that three quarters of the creative record of that era has been lost.

It does not stop with silent film. Of the American sound films made between 1927 and 1950, an estimated half are also gone.

Read that again slowly. Not lost as in hard to find. Lost as in no copy exists on Earth. Whole careers, whole studios, films that people queued around the block to see, and nobody alive has watched them.

Why studios destroyed their own films

The obvious villain is nitrate. Early film stock was cellulose nitrate, which is chemically close to gun cotton. It burns without oxygen, it cannot easily be put out, and left in a warm vault it decomposes on its own into a brown sludge. Archive fires took whole libraries at a time.

But the sadder answer is that a lot of film was thrown away on purpose. Before television, before home video, before anybody imagined you might want to watch a twenty year old movie, a finished film was a used-up thing. It had played its run and earned its money. The reels took up expensive vault space, and the silver in the emulsion was worth recovering. So prints were scrapped for the silver, or dumped, or simply left to rot because no one saw the point of paying rent on them.

Nobody was being wicked. They just did not think anyone would ever ask.

The classics are the survivors, not always the best

Here is the part that changes how you should read any list of films, including this one.

The films we call classics are the films that survived. Survival was not a judgement of quality. It depended on whether a studio kept its vault, whether a collector in Australia or New Zealand happened to hang on to a print, whether a title was famous enough to be repatriated later, whether the negative sat in a cool building or a hot one.

So when someone tells you the old films were better, be careful. We are not comparing the best of 1925 with the best of today. We are comparing the quarter of 1925 that happened to be worth saving, mostly the prestigious and the famous, against everything being made now, including the rubbish. Survivorship does the flattering.

The same thing runs through every modern list too. A film has to have been digitised, licensed, subtitled and stocked to be listed anywhere. Availability quietly does most of the choosing before taste gets a turn.

Watching across ninety years of cinema

If a random draw hands you something from 1976 and you were expecting something from last year, that is the point. Old films are not slow films. They are films made for an audience with different habits, who had come out of the house on purpose and were not checking a phone.

A few things worth knowing before you press play on something from a decade you do not usually visit. Films before the 1960s often open with an overture and expect you to settle. Films of the 1970s tend to hold a shot longer than you are used to, and the payoff is that when the camera does move, you feel it. Anything before the mid 1930s may be silent, which is not a defect but a different language, closer to dance than to speech.

Give an unfamiliar era twenty minutes before you decide it is not for you. Not because you owe it respect, but because your eye is still calibrated to the last thing you watched, and it needs a moment.

Questions people ask

Can a lost film ever be found?

Yes, and it happens more often than you would expect. Prints have turned up in Australia, New Zealand and France, sent abroad decades ago and never shipped back. That is why the Library of Congress study built an inventory of who holds what, so American films sitting in foreign archives can be identified and brought home.

Are old films really better?

We cannot know, and that is the honest answer. Only a fraction of early cinema survives, and it survived because someone thought it was worth keeping. Judging an era by its surviving films is like judging a school year by the students who kept in touch.

Should I avoid subtitles?

No. Twenty minutes in you stop noticing them. Every year people rule out most of the films made on Earth to save themselves an adjustment that takes less time than the opening credits.

What if I have never heard of the film it gives me?

Then it is doing its job. Recognition is not a quality signal. It is a marketing signal, and the marketing budget was spent years ago on somebody else's film.

References

1. Pierce, D. (2013). The Survival of American Silent Feature Films: 1912–1929. Council on Library and Information Resources and the Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/prn-13-209/endangered-silent-film-heritage/2013-12-04/
2. Lost film, survival estimates for American sound films 1927–1950. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_film