10,000 discs and more, but who’s counting?: Gary Tooze shares the story of DVDBeaver
Gary Tooze (pictured above) has been reviewing physical media on his website since the DVD era.
In this conversation with Gary Tooze, the owner and writer behind DVDBeaver, we discuss how he initially developed the website, his goals and ethos for his reviews, and a look at the movie’s that have meant the most to him.
What's the Idea: Good morning, Gary. Thanks for meeting today to talk about DVDBeaver.
Gary Tooze: Thanks for asking me, cheers.
What's the Idea: What inspired you to start DVDBeaver?
Gary Tooze: When I was a kid, I would watch the Chaplin Film Festival on PBS, and I went through VHS and LaserDiscs, if anybody remembers those. I used to frequent film forums, home theatre forums, and a couple of other ones. You meet people after you comment for a while, and I wanted to both contribute and learn.
“I went to a friend who was also a collector and he had a DVD... but my cover was different from his. So I brought mine over to his place, we played them both, and they were markedly different. ”
I wanted to know more about foreign films, so I contributed by creating a page where whenever a small group of us bought something, I would post it so other people could see what they bought and where they got it from. We were buying DVDs from a site called YesAsia, for example. They were coming from overseas, and we really grasped the idea of region freedom. You could watch Blu-rays from all over the world, so the sharing of that information allowed people to realize something was available, maybe a Kurosawa film that they'd only seen on a crummy VHS tape.
And then one day, I went to a friend who was also a collector and he had a DVD—I still remember [that] it was Broken Blossoms—but my cover was different from his. So I brought mine over to his place, we played them both, and they were markedly different. There were DVDs from different companies coming out from different locations in the world, so I thought maybe there could be a decent resource for identifying the differences, like which image quality is better, which audio is better, which extras are better, because back then there were some pretty shoddy DVDs coming out.
We developed a bit of a following, and it just expanded from there. It was really with the support of a lot of other people, a lot of similar minded, enthusiastic fans who wanted to own the best digital copy of their favourite films and develop a kind of library around it. I've had loyal people that are still contributing because they want to. You're not going to make a lot of money to invest, but they're passionate about it.
It evolved organically. There were a number of very supportive people who were doing it as well. There's a fellow who used to run a website called DVD Basen, in which he listed all of the DVD and Blu-ray reviews, and he developed a forum where people could upload their own comparison captures and somebody else could match them. They would time them and upload, and I could take that and put it on DVDBeaver for the world to see.
What's the Idea: For most Blu-rays and DVDs, you still need a multi-region player to play discs from other markets. What was needed back then?
Gary Tooze: We have the NTSC system and in Europe they have PAL, and I believe in South America they have SECAM. They decided to develop eight different regions for DVDs, and it became obvious to people who were serious film fans who wanted to really watch the best DVD of the film that they enjoyed that they couldn't see some of these films without importing. As Blu-ray evolved, they decided to shrink the region coding. I've still never seen a Blu-ray that is region C block.
When there was enough demand, somebody developed a player that circumvented the region coding, and eventually there were lots and lots of them. I used to sell them myself on the site. It was a Chinese company, and coincidentally their head office for all of Canada was a 40-minute drive from me, so I went there and I bought one for myself. It was a really small machine and played anything. I mentioned it [on DVDBeaver] to the people, and they said “I'd like to buy one,” so I bought [players] from [the company]. My wife and I wrapped them up and I think we mailed about a hundred of them out. We were always endorsing region freedom so people could see the best versions and films that they might not otherwise be exposed to.
Some of these film fans are really hardcore. They go to great lengths and extremes. They travel half the world to go to the Berlin Film Festival, the Venice Film Festival or Cannes. Buying DVDs was an outlet where you could see the film without the inconvenience of going there. So collectors became voracious around getting a library of these mostly, I would say, foreign films that they couldn't have seen outside of a retrospective or a festival.
What's the Idea: Your website is an amazing resource because there can be so many choices for the same movie. It’s helpful to know if you’re buying something that represents the artist’s intentions or has the most features or whatever’s important to you.
Gary Tooze: We were able to weed out the companies that were doing public domain stuff. They could just get a VHS and transfer it to a DVD, and of course the quality would be horrible. We weren't that concerned with that initially until the better quality evolved, then you saw the difference between these DVDs with blown out contrast and haze and damage and the DVDs from a legitimate company like Criterion who would transfer it correctly or restore it from the film. You could see the difference, and then gauge whether it's worth the investment or not.
What's the Idea: How much of DVDBeaver is your work versus the work done by your collaborative team?
“They’re showing more of the information that people are really interested in as opposed to superfluous information that they may not be interested in. We try to do it so that it’s the most comprehensive out there. That’s our goal anyway, whether we achieve it or not.”
Gary Tooze: Back in the day, it was much more of their input. I mean, I had a regular job, so I was doing it as a hobby and other people were doing it as hobbies, and we were all formulating this project kind of together. We used to have other people do reviews or especially screen captures, but now it's just me doing the screen captures and the reviews. My friend Gregory, who lives in the States, is very keen and helps out with a lot of noir lists and giallo lists, and there are other people doing work along that nature. My wife helps too.
What's the Idea: Is she a movie fan as well?
Gary Tooze: I wouldn't say she's specifically a film fan, but she helps with the logistic aspects, the writing, and so on, which I wouldn't say is my strong suit, that's more hers. There was a day 15 years ago when I posted 13 reviews in a day because it wasn't me, right, it was other people's, and I was just essentially posting them. I now try to do one a day, which is not as much, but I think they're better. They're showing more of the information that people are really interested in as opposed to superfluous information that they may not be interested in. We try to do it so that it's the most comprehensive out there. That's our goal anyway, whether we achieve it or not.
There is a niche of physical media people that consider themselves archivists, and they're actually archiving these films in a format that's supposed to stick around for 600 years. Carrie Coon, the wife of the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tracy Letts, who is a member of DVDBeaver, was on The Tonight Show, on which she mentioned that her husband doesn't like streaming. We used to have comparisons of streaming, and I think it's improved drastically, but it would crop and show edge enhancements and lots of weaknesses in the digital.
Classics like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest are available to anyone supporting physical media, but might not be so readily available to those insisting streaming is enough.
If a film is good, you'll know about it in five years because it'll still be talked about. It'll be around. And that's when you have a library, so those are the ones that you can revisit. I guess technology is going to improve the streaming and expand the range of it, so let's say you want to see Fellini's Nights of Cabaria, you will probably be able to do it with a snap of fingers at some stage in the future. We'll see.
What's the Idea: I feel like I'm not alone in feeling wary about corporate management of these catalogues. I hope companies like Criterion and services like Criterion Channel are around forever, but you never know what might happen. Could someone buy Janus Films at some point with a billion dollar offer and then make it disappear if they wanted?
Accessing media on streaming isn’t always easy, either. My dad's been trying to watch One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest for months now, and he can't find it; meanwhile, I still have the DVD from 2005.
Gary Tooze: A lot of people are going through that phase of making a determination of what they want to keep: if they saw it and they're probably never going to watch it again, or if it’s one of the rewatchables, the films you like to watch and it will make you feel good. It's important to cleanse your collection. I had 15,000 discs at one stage. That’s way too many. If they're just collecting dust on your shelf, give them to your postman as a present, give them to somebody who delivers to you, or to a relative or a friend.
What's the Idea: How do you choose what to review? I'm looking at your website now, and you’ve just reviewed the Criterion 4K of Barry Lyndon, which is a movie everyone checking out your website will know, and then there’s Clean and Sober, which is a movie I’m not as familiar with.
Gary Tooze: It’s funny you mentioned Clean and Sober because it's literally one of my favourite films of all time. I think Michael Keaton’s performance is amazing. I really gravitate toward that film. I was really pleased that it came out on Blu-ray because the previous DVD was 4x3. It was square, a pan and scan, and there was a widescreen DVD from Australia, so I got that as well and I compared them. It was really nice that Warner put that out. I think it's a very impressive movie.
I get sent packages from companies to review their content, and it's a process of determining what to do based on the popularity of the niche. What would my niche like me to review? But also, to be able to do it with any type of passion, I have to enjoy what I’m doing, so I indulge myself sometimes. There are the occasional ’50s and ’60s monster movies or sci-fi. For those, I have a web page that lists them, and I try to do all of them. I'm a big noir fan, so I do pretty much every noir that I come across.
I don't do a lot of modern film because of the thing I said about time being the judge of greatness. There are many other sites that are reviewing modern films, like rogerebert.com. They don't need my input on whether the latest Brad Pitt movie is good or bad or whatever, so I try to stick with vintage stuff, essentially, and interesting films, what they call genre films. Things that are maybe a little less normal, a little unusual, just because it helps expand your horizons. I remember Roger Ebert recommending Bicycle Thieves and I watched it and that changed my view of film. I watched Antonioni’s L’Avventura, and that’s a totally different language of film.
I'm not a big fan of a lot of ’80s gore stuff, but my reviewer Colin [Zavitz] was, so he would kind of cover that angle of stuff. If I find something that I really don't like or that might be distasteful, I might put a statement at the end of the review saying it's not my cup of tea or everybody's different, but you can't really dismiss any film because it just means that you didn’t like it.
“The idea of the screen captures was that you can make that determination yourself. You can look and see that this is vastly improved, this is moderately improved, and this is even worse than a previous edition.”
What's the Idea: In my mind, if you're clicking on a review of a disc, you're probably a fan of the movie or at least interested in it, so I’m checking out the review to find out, all right, if I purchase this disc, is it the right one for me? All that to say, sometimes I read a review and come to the end and see that you say it’s not for you, but it doesn’t really affect my expectations of the movie itself.
Gary Tooze: Yeah, you're absolutely correct, Matt, and I was never comfortable with making those determinations. The idea of the screen captures was that you can make that determination yourself. You can look and see that this is vastly improved, this is moderately improved, and this is even worse than a previous edition. My idea is really just to list and be as detailed as possible with the information I can, but not be as critical.
I remember a fairly strong commentator, and I think we were talking before or after an interview, and I was not keen on this director called Jess Franco. There are some of his films that I like, but a lot of stuff is really kind of slapdash, not a lot of focus on detail and just grinding these things out, but there's a nostalgia to some people. They like certain things for different reasons. I don't want to rain on anybody's parade if they like XYZ, but what the website allows me to do is post reviews of films generally that I like or genres that I like. I don't delve into areas where I don't feel comfortable.
What's the Idea: You put time into this every day, so you have to enjoy what you're doing, right?
Gary Tooze: You can't do it with any level of effectiveness or passion otherwise. If you're not interested, then you may as well go work for somebody else. I encourage everybody to start their own business. The Internet is the greatest thing for entrepreneurs. At first, you can do something as a hobby, then after doing it as a hobby, if you accrue enough of a following, guess what? Yeah, you can start a business.
That happened to me. I couldn't do this anymore because I was making zero money. I didn't have any Amazon links. I decided I'm putting too much time into this, so I just said to everybody, listen, if you want me to continue, I’ve got to do this for a living, so if you want to give me a PayPal donation… And enough people did that it allowed the site to keep going. So, yeah, I'm a big believer in doing what you want because you'll do it better than doing something else. It’s not true of everyone, of course, but it's amazing how effective you are when you're working for yourself as opposed to working for somebody else and you don't care about it and you just want the paycheck at the end of the day. You have a different level of passion if you're doing something that you like, that you want to do, that you feel is also contributing.
What's the Idea: It makes such a difference to you're not working in a vacuum and to feel like you're contributing to something bigger. I spent a lot of time as a writer thinking fiction was the only way to be creative, so it’s really nice to feel like I can serve the different communities that I'm interested in and participate in them through things like these interviews.
Gary’s interest in films started early, and like many of us, he still goes back to those early favourites.
Gary Tooze: Everybody should have a Substack and they can write stuff about whatever. You might find a few hundred people that are right in your niche and they're believing in you. You're also meeting people who are of like-minded interests because, like you said, you don't want to live in a vacuum. You need people around you who can share stories and give recommendations. There was a site—IMDb made them close it down—called myMDB. Everybody would post their favourite films and then it would compare you to other people's top 10 favourite films, so you find somebody who had 9 out of 10 the exact same. I guess it was kind of akin to a dating app.
What's the Idea: It's really interesting to have the DVDBeaver archive as a resource because of great cases where you can see, for example, screenshots and a review of the 1999 DVD compared to the 2007 Blu-ray, then the 2013 remastered Blu-ray, and now you're reviewing the 4UHD. You can see the evolution, the changes, and it presents a historical resource for how film presentation has evolved.
Gary Tooze: There are people who really don't care, but there are people like us who do want to invest their money wisely into their collections, and they want to have the best, and they want to have the comfort of knowing that their decision was correct. I don't make any decisions on buying anything on the Internet without reading reviews, right?
What's the Idea: There might be an argument that the best value is from buying a good upscaling 4K player and then finding a decent DVD for a dollar at a used store. The quality is going to be good, at least most likely better than streaming.
Gary Tooze: It happens fairly frequently that the new technology—the TVs and the players—improve the past releases. So that goes to show you that the technology in itself, whether it's HD TVs or OLED or the players itself, can bring out the best of even what we considered HD presentations of the past.
“They want to sell more products, so if half the fans who are buying it are saying “I’m never going to buy from you again” type of thing, that changes them, and that’s good.”
What's the Idea: So how does it work when you get a package of screeners? Do you watch the whole movie?
Gary Tooze: I'm lucky because there's about 11,000 reviews on the site, so most of the time I've seen the movie and then it's easy to compare it. But obviously I'm still a film fan. I like new experiences, right? So, if it's a filmmaker that I enjoy and I've not seen the film, then I'll sit my butt down and watch it on the system. I used to make a lot of notes, but I don't do it as much anymore. I seem to remember examples quite vividly of where the quality was poor, where the quality was great, how the sound was, any dropouts, any hits, any distortion and stuff. But they've cleaned all that up so well that it's very infrequent that I give a bad review to something.
With over 11,000 reviews, DVDBeaver is an essential resource for anyone purchasing movies on physical media.
There was a disc, it might have been a Sony Noir Blu-ray, and they put nothing into it. It was bad. I got visibly angry in the review and one of my friends said, "Wow, you really went off on that." And I said, “I thought those days when we would have to do that stuff and make a big issue about them were over.” Because doing that as a community and complaining, it gets back to them. They want to sell more products, so if half the fans who are buying it are saying “I'm never going to buy from you again" type of thing, that changes them, and that's good. We did that with that MGM set of the [Ingmar] Bergman films because they were bad. There were heads chopped on a lot of stuff, and the Internet stood on its hind legs and made a big stink about it, and they changed it. I think many sites like my own were a little influential in shifting their processes of transferring. Many transfers now are dual layered with a maxed out bit rate, but that was not the case. Now the shift in focus has become on the extras.
We can get a little picky about the image quality because, like I said, everybody has different systems. We used to do this thing called HTPC where you got a projector and you'd connect your player up and you projected it on a wall. Because you projected the image 120 inches high to see, it really made it feel like it was filmic. But the larger you made that image, the more you were going to identify flaws. As we know about TVs, TVs look better the further away you are from watching them, right? They tend to look better because they're not focusing on the flaws. And that was one of the reasons why the early DVDs would boost the contrast to hide scratches or marks.
What's the Idea: You compile year end polls each year. How does that work?
Gary Tooze: I don't know how much longer I'm going to do it. It's a monumental amount of work, but the communal effort and the appreciation always makes me feel good, and people like it. It infuses them into DVDBeaver. They get to see their name and their quotes of how they feel published, which are just as important as mine or anybody else's.
So I like to do it, but it kind of usually wrecks my Christmas holidays because I have got to do it then. The last time I did it for the 2024 Blu-rays, I just wrote a certain amount every day, maybe a couple of hours, and eventually over a couple of weeks, it gets to a phase where you're seeing light at the end of the tunnel.
“ One of the followers is losing his hearing, so he wants subtitles on the extras because he likes the extras... Maybe some exec sees it and says maybe it’s not that hard of a thing for them to do.”
I will post anybody's comments as long as it's not defaming anybody or filled with swearing or something. At the end, we have the rants and praise. It’s important for some people. One of the followers is an old man and he's losing his hearing, so he wants subtitles on the extras because he likes the extras. Good point. There are companies that do that, and there are companies that do it not only for foreign language extras, which they should be doing anyway, like Criterion does, but through other extras too. Some even do subtitles for the commentary. So he can vent about that, and maybe some exec sees it and says maybe it's not that hard of a thing for them to do.
There are hundreds of people that do that and it gets a reasonable number of hits, maybe 20,000 over the year. It isn't a million hits or something, but it's enough that it encourages me to continue to do it. But I'm actually in a very, very strong work mode at the present. I posted two reviews yesterday, three the day before, and I'm hoping to post three today, which is very unusual for me. Like I said, I've struggled with maybe one a day, one good one a day, and then prep for the next one, and maybe do calendar updates or something.
My other goal with choosing what to review is I want to be ahead of the curve because I want to show people what the disc is like before they buy it. Pre-orders used to be a significant saving percentage. You would save maybe 30%. I don't think it's as much anymore, but if you can get the review out before it comes out, people can see, they can decide, yes, I want to buy it; I will get the percentage discount from the pre-order and save money.
Before we end, what is one of your favourite films?
What's the Idea: There are a lot, but I love Nashville.
Gary Tooze: Do you like Robert Alman?
What's the Idea: Oh yeah. I’m slowly discovering more and more of his filmography. He's so good.
Gary Tooze: Have you seen 3 Women? That is definitely one of my rewatchables. I can watch it every four months, every six months.
What's the Idea: Absolutely. I actually watched Nashville and 3 Women one night as a double feature with one of my best friends, and it’s one of my favourite movie watching memories. The contrast of the enormity of Nashville and then the tiny, dream-like story of 3 Women from the same artist so close together is unbelievable.
Robert Altman, one of the best directors of the New Hollywood era, created two of his masterpieces, 3 Women and Nashville, nearly back-to-back in the 1970s.
Gary Tooze: Amazing filmmaker. And a lot of the stuff he did was kind of ad hoc, like the skewed camera and the music, and the great performance from Shelley Duvall was because she had a boyfriend when she was in Texas—this is what I recall, I hope I'm remembering correctly—and her boyfriend was a painter and he was having a gallery show and he couldn't attend, so she was there standing around with all of his paintings and two CBS executives came up, they saw her, and they said, “You should really be an actress.” They kept pushing, and that's how they got her into film. She’s an amazing persona on film. Yeah, that's a hypnotic film, 3 Women. I'm going to watch it right now after this.
What's the Idea: I started a booklet review section on my website for the books that come with physical media, which will be a component of my website. I've been searching for years for somebody to talk about the books and whether they're worth reading or worth owning, so I figured I would do it.
Gary Tooze: I always mention the booklets and who does it and if it's 36 pages or whatever, and sometimes I mention the name of the essay, but that's not a bad thing to do because those things go out of print. The limitation of the special edition is not just for the disc and the license holder, it's for the booklet itself, so those go out of print and people want that information.
I'm always impressed with a company like Indicator, the amount of effort they put into creating those books, whereas a company like Kino doesn’t do liner notes. Criterion does, but even Criterion is repeating all of their extras in the booklet for their 4K UHD editions. I have the ones from those Columbia 4K UHD box sets with five films in them, sometimes six films. They came with a book, and these are good books. They're colour photos and there's information inside.
But yeah, the essays themselves from Indicator books, archival interviews, sometimes images from behind the film… I have the French version of 3 Women. I was so keen on it. Unfortunately, it's got burned-in English subtitles, but I still reviewed it, and I have the booklet and the package.
In my case, I don't get the book when I get the screener. I get the disc and then later, after the reviews come out, because I did the review before, they send me the complete package. In a lot of cases, I like to keep them sealed—not that I'm going to sell them.
Thank you for identifying that because maybe I should focus a little more on the content of the books, the essays themselves, as opposed to just listing the people who wrote the essays.
What's the Idea: I hope I’m not the only one wanting more info on these books.
Gary Tooze: The books themselves are high-end packaging books. Again, I'm so impressed with Indicator. They are usually a nice mix of essays and archival materials, like thoughts from the filmmaker. I can't say enough good things about that company. And they don't have the budget of Criterion, so they can't get licenses for many films, but when they do work on something, like those Jean Rollin films, it’s magnificent. 10 out of 10.
What's the Idea: How many visits to your website do you expect for a popular release, something like Criterion’s Barry Lyndon, let’s say?
Gary Tooze: If it's really popular, generally it can be 3,000 or north of 3,000 hits. But for a standard Blu-ray, I’m always looking at 2,000. That has been dropping, but it's all a matter of time. Over the course of a week, it'll be that, but if I look at it a year later, it's got more views because they're not going anywhere. Barry Lyndon’s got 3978 views and I did it a couple of weeks ago, so that's pretty good. I'm comfortable with that.
What's the Idea: You mentioned your love for 3 Women. Are there any other big discs or movies that are favourites that you'd want to call out?
Gary Tooze: The trouble with my favourite is that it has become so fluid. I had Vertigo on the list for probably two decades, but I look at the film a little more critically now, and it's such a silly story. It's so preposterous, but it's such a beautiful film. The Birds, I don't know, I always gravitated toward that film. And of course Rear Window. Lots of Hitchcock.
Hitchcock’s classic filmography has been the subject of endless re-releases with each format.
But probably my most impactful film experiences are with maybe Antonioni films, like L’Avventura or The Passenger. That guy was tapped into something in film language that other people don't. Robert Bresson, all of his films. They're unique filmmakers. Auteur is probably not a strong enough descriptive word to describe their method of film making, which is unique and personalized. You eventually get it, but it's an acquired taste, and once you get an acquired taste, it never really goes away.
And of course, I love all those junky ’50s and ’60s Cormanesque sci-fi Blu-rays. It's embarrassing because I watch them all the time when I'm doing a review and I want some company. I throw on these movies and I don't need to pay attention because I've seen the movie 20 times before. I can take a break and pause and just have that warm nostalgic feeling.
I consider Casablanca to be the anti-noir because he goes from being a sour person to being very magnanimous in the end and letting her go. Casablanca would probably be my favourite film of all time. Bogart is probably at his most cool, Bergman looking her most angelic, and the supporting cast: [Sydney] Greenstreet, [Peter] Lorre. Great score. Everything just worked and it's beautiful. And Warner keeps their stuff in pristine condition, so the 4K of that is mindnumbingly beautiful.
What's the Idea: Thanks Gary. I appreciate your time. This was really great to learn about you and how you’ve built DVDBeaver.
Gary Tooze: Thank you, this was fun.
The interview was recorded using Google Zoom in September 2025.
The transcript was edited by Matt Long, with additional copy editing by Anthony Nijssen of APT Editing.
All photos of Gary Tooze are the property of Gary Tooze. The photos of the physical media cases were taken by Matt Long.