What did we do before VHS?
1.) We waited fot ilms to be re-released. This used to be a major part of the film market. King Kong was re=released several times to major theaters into the 1950s, continuing to generate profits for RKO. Nowadays the only times films get re-released are when they’re important films (at least to the makers), and they think a lot of people will be interested in seeing them again, and (anymore) they’ve been Restored (Spartacus, Lawrence of Arabia) or had CGI/added scenes (The original Star Wars trilogy, ET). I first saw most of the James Bond films on such re-releases, years after they first came out.
2.) You saw them at art houses and second- or third-run movie theaters. (I saw a lot of classy old films at the Dryden Theater at Eastman house in Rochester, N.Y.0
3.) You saw them on TV.
4.) Organizations (Boy Scouts, YMCA, etc.) or film societies would rent them from specialty distributors.
5.) You could get some from libraries. When I lived in Rochester, the public library would loan out 16 mm sound copies of films. I rented a lot of old Superman cartoons, the Star Wars parody “Hardware Wars”, classic old movies, and silent films from them.
6.) You could own the films. Castle films sold excerpted 8 mm and super 8 clips from films – silent, of course. I owned copies of This Island Earth 9which helps explain my Board name), It came from Outer Space, and Creature from the Black Lagoon. Other companies, like Blackhawk films, did a brisj business in silent films, which were a natural for this market. Somebody sold the complete edition (well, at least the complete Ajmerican cut) of Metropolis (and quite a bit of other stuff) in the back pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland.
7.) A few well-off folks bought bootleg copies of major films. There was an article in the early 1970s magazine The Monster Times about this.
A lot of the time, though, you did without and hoped someone would put the film on TV or run it at a matineee somewhere. At one point I REALLY wanted to see the Harryhausen film the Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, which hadn’t been on TV or elsewhere around me for several years, and I tried to get the local venues (colleges, film groups) to show it, without success. I was delighted when it came out on VHS, and it was one of the first films I rented.