Martin Scorsese recently donated 50 storage boxes of tapes to the University of Colorado Boulder’s main library. Long before the internet and streaming, Martin hired a full-time video archivist in his New York office to record films and television programs from multiple VCRs and monitors, label the video tapes, and catalog them using a card system.

Recording it is one thing—watching all of this raw material, for research, is another. It doesn’t surprise me that Martin Scorsese truly studied film, the same way Robert Greene writes thousands of index cards for a book. Martin Scorsese took a longcut.