Rob Medich

Except for the color bursting from the reception-area movie posters - The Double Life of Veronique, Black Orpheus, and the Beastie Boys Video Anthology among them - the Criterion Collection's new Park Avenue South headquarters in Manhattan are styled in the same palette as many of the films that the company painstakingly restores and releases on DVD: black and white, with profound gray area

It was an epic effort requiring superhuman vision and hearing and, above all, heroic resolve. For in order to download the high-definition version of Superman Returns onto Microsoft's Xbox 360 at the Sound & Vision video lab, I, too, would have to return - and return, and return ...

The job would have to be done at midnight. That's when Mission: Impossible III was debuting at Manhattan's Ziegfeld theater. The six bootleggers didn't always have to wait until a movie opened to the public. Sometimes they'd get into private screenings, courtesy of a scalper who'd sell them tickets for a few hundred dollars.

The Tower Records store at New York City's Lincoln Center isn't seeing particularly heavy foot traffic these days. Stopping by, I find just a shopper or two per aisle - pretty typical, a saleswoman says. And the customer demographic seems a bit on the mature side - hovering around 30 or older. Where are all the Rihanna- and AFI-loving kids?