Chris Collins
Liz Amundson, a librarian at Madison Public Library, in the basement room where the most popular DVDs are cleaned and buffed for easier viewing.
File this under “things we probably shouldn’t get angry about but do anyway.”
You check out a free movie from the public library, pop it into your DVD player at home, and...it doesn’t work.
Oh, the humanity!
Fortunately, Madison’s public librarians feel our pain.
In the spring of 2014, staff at the city’s nine branches began pulling copies of movies from the shelves that had circulated more than 300 times (or 200 for kids’ movies because, well, kids are a mess). Those copies eventually make their way to the basement of the Central Library and the cluttered cubicle of clerk Chris Markwyn.
Markwyn’s duty is thus: He slides the DVDs one at a time into a curious blue machine called the RTI Eco Senior 2, which uses distilled water and some nifty colored pads to buff, grind and clean the discs for up to three minutes. They come out looking — and usually working — like new.
Local libraries had refurbished damaged DVDs — and music or books on CD — this way for years, but only when customers complained. The new protocol of buffing oft-circulated movies, says librarian Liz Amundson, aims to proactively counter the reputation that library DVDs are like Russian roulette — you never know which one will skip.
Their project should make cheapskate cinephiles happy, but it’s also fun for librarians, who get a glimpse of Madisonians’ eclectic taste in movies, Amundson says.
For perspective, of roughly 10,000 “adult feature films” in circulation at the Central Library alone, about 700 have topped the 300-check-out threshold. Amundson shows me a shelf of titles awaiting their turn on Markwyn’s machine.
“See, here’s the pleasure of it,” she says, “Agent Cody Banks is next to Das Boot.”
One row down, she spies Ladies in Lavender.
“Have you ever heard of that film?” she asks.
Um, with apologies to Dame Judi Dench, no.
“Well at least 300 people have, because they’ve all checked it out.”
Critically acclaimed movies are well-represented, but for every Capote or American Splendor there’s a lesser-known Million Dollar Duck (starring the unforgettable Dean Jones!) or the 2004 Australian flop Oyster Farmer.
In other words, there’s no discernible rhyme or reason to which movies get into “The 300 Club.” They run the gamut from high-brow French documentaries to multiple copies of Anchorman.
“I think the truth is that people love their classics, and that does not necessarily mean Alfred Hitchcock,” Amundson says.
While more people are streaming movies every year, free movies at the library are still a hot commodity. Area residents checked out more than 1.1 million DVDs from Madison’s nine libraries in 2014, down slightly from the high of almost 1.5 million five years ago.
A few weeks ago, Amundson did Isthmus a solid and used her database to compile a list of the 100 most-checked-out movies of all time from Madison’s nine branches. Predictably, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean pepper the list. But there are some surprises. Proof, the 2005 drama starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Anthony Hopkins and the subject of mathematics, somehow ranks fourth. Nanny McPhee is 11th. Who knew?
But there’s a major caveat: When a library DVD is broken or “lost” (aka “not returned by a freeloading patron”), its circulation numbers disappear after a few years. So this list is more representative of movies that are both popular and have been well-treated by patrons. Which might explain why only one Star Wars movie cracked the top 100: Episode II: The Attack of the Clones at 77.
Top 10 most-checked-out movies
(click to see the top 100)
1. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: 3,876 circulations
2. Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: 3,730
3. Pride and Prejudice: 3,725
4. Proof: 3,656
5. Lost in Translation: 3,633
6. Love Actually: 3,621
7. Memento: 3,327
8. Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring: 3,325
9. Sideways: 3,309
10. Ocean’s 12: 3,263
