Staying cool has never been cheap, though. Stock Shots in Los Angeles sets its baseline footage rates between $28 and $250 per second, and a WPA official says only Hugh Hefner has ever acquired footage from the company for personal use (Hef was looking for footage of a "crooner," she says).

Everybody gets a chuckle out of those old-time squares, though. Both the Leno and Letterman shows are major customers for WPA's stuff, and both WPA and Dallas-based Image Bank brag that their archive material appeared in L.A. Confidential. Image Bank, according to senior vice-president Diane Fannon, recently made a big sale to Time-Warner - footage of workmen punching time cards and the construction of the Chrysler building for a series of Millennium-based ads (How'd they think of that concept?).

But laughing at the past is the kind of mordancy that eventually bites its own tail. Image Bank's main business is actually in more contemporary-looking footage - "lifestyle," "corporate," "wildlife," "landscape," etc.

"There's so much footage now that basically people specialize," says Mark Paul, senior editor at Chicago-based Screen magazine. This contemporary footage (which stands a good chance of looking hopelessly dated in the not-too-distant future: Anybody seen War Games recently?) is essential for film, TV and commercial producers who don't want to bother doing their own establishing and fill shots.

It's a good deal. One executive in an office looks about the same as any other executive in any other office. A shot of the Eiffel Tower is always a big clue that our scene is set in Paris. And really - if you've seen one tree you've seen them all. How many do you need to look at? This is pretty much the way Hollywood has made movies since Hollywood Year One.

But even if you don't subscribe to the culture studies thesis that the average idiot believes everything he sees on screen, the prospect of all-recycled movies is disturbing on a purely aesthetic level. We know those movies where New York = The Statue of Liberty. We know them as hackwork, and there's a good argument to be made against making life any easier for hacks. A big share of our emotional investment in history, or science, or for that matter America, comes from what we see on screen. It's depressing to think that we've seen it all before.