Last week, I attended an event at the Chicago History Museum, which was baseball themed, and ran into two of the other usual suspects who attend the Noir City Festival at the Music Box Theater.

When the discussion turned from baseball to noir, the hard cases worried about the availability of new titles. Of course, it is important to show some of the perennial favorite titles for the purpose of educating the newbies, but for the old hands rarities and seldom screened titles are of much greater interest. The fear expressed is that after so many festivals that the programmers are running out of films to exhibit.

Programming a festival cannot be easy. For every suggestion from the fans, there are many considerations such as rights to the movies and whether or not decent prints or copies exist.

Repeats are inevitable.