A Thousand Cuts: The Bizarre Underground World of Collectors and Dealers Who Saved the Movies

Introduction

This is a book about the death of Film. It’s not, of course, about the death of the Movies, which are still in very good health, thank you, both commercially and creatively. Before you jump to the conclusion that what follows is one long, sad dirge for the passing of old-fashioned analog cinema, a last call at the bar before the cowboys ride into the sunset, it isn’t. If anything, it’s a sort of mad Irish wake for an underground subculture of often paranoid, secretive, eccentric, obsessive, and definitely mad film collectors and dealers, who made movies their own private religion.

Certainly the movies face far more competition in the twenty-first century from other forms of media: the video game industry may have caught up with motion pictures in terms of annual grosses, but it hasn’t replaced the movies. If anything, there’s a fascinating interchange going on between the movies, video games, and other media: my son Sandor watches the Harry Potter movies so he can better play his way through the Harry Potter video games, and then goes back and reads the Harry Potter books to enrich and fill in what he missed. This recombinant-DNA intermingling of media new and old reminds me of a unique phraseology that’s recently popped up in Hollywood contracts: "in any media, whether now known or hereafter devised, or in any form whether now known or hereafter devised, an unlimited number of times throughout the universe and forever."¹ But my son, and his, will experience the movies in a completely different way than I experienced them, and as the dozens of film collectors and dealers interviewed for this book experienced them. There will still be that magical light coming out of the booth, as dealer Woody Wise remembers from his childhood at the Sylvia Theater in Franconia, Virginia, but that light will no longer be projected through a strip of film rattling through a Motiograph projector at twenty-four frames per second. And with that difference in experience, something in the relationship between audience and image, Man and the Movies, has changed forever.

Since it was introduced over one hundred years ago, 35mm motion picture film has proven to be one of the most durable, versatile, and well-loved formats in entertainment history. You can still, for example, take a multitinted, nitrate print of D. W. Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation (to name one treasure that collector Marty Kearns once held in his trembling hands), and, as long as you have a variable-speed motor and the right aperture plates, run it properly on just about any modern 35mm projector. (You can even run it without the variable-speed motor and plates, but you’ll get an image that’s slightly cropped and, worse, comically sped up in the way that’s made many silent films seem hokey by today’s standards.) For a little comparison, try playing an Edison sound cylinder from 1921 on a modern record or CD player. (Or better yet, try a Blu-ray disc in your DVD player.)² There were numerous changes and improvements in motion picture technology since its inception, from silent to sound in the late 1920s, from nitrate film stock to safety stock two decades later, but the basic format of 35mm film has lasted for over a century.³ A tremendous achievement for any technology. But its time has drawn to a close: it’s inexorably been replaced by digital formats, and there’s nothing we can do about it. When George Lucas came to the American Cinematheque’s Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood in 2003 for the opening night of an Industrial Light & Magic and Skywalker Sound tribute I’d organized there, I had a brief conversation with him in what passed for the green room—actually a cramped space outside the box office—about the impending change from film to digital. I mentioned a nitrate dye-transfer Technicolor print of Powell & Pressburger’s art-house classic The Red Shoes (1948) that the Cinematheque had recently screened. Lucas listened calmly and thoughtfully as I described how beautiful the print was, how watching it was like literally stepping into a time machine and seeing the movie the way audiences had originally seen it. Finally the creator of Star Wars nodded his head: I can do the same thing digitally, he replied. I can add scratches and noise to the soundtrack. I can make it look like nitrate, like Technicolor, or whatever you want. At that point I knew the writing was on the wall. Film was dead. Long live Digital.

The industry trade paper Hollywood Reporter, in an April 15, 2013, article titled CinemaCon: The End of Film Distribution in North America Is Almost Here, wrote, By the end of this year, distributors might no longer deliver film prints to theaters in North America. Cans full of reels of celluloid will be a thing of the analog past. Fuji announced that same month that it had ceased production of motion picture film.⁴ Eastman Kodak, at one time synonymous with still and motion picture film, filed for bankruptcy in 2012. These are, without a doubt, echoes of the death knell for film. Media changes. New media come in, old media become obsolete. But it’s not only the technology that changes—lives and familiar habits are transformed too. We’re living in an era when record stores and video rental stores have quickly become a thing of the past. So has film, and it’s taking with it the bizarre network of collectors and dealers who obsessed, fought over, hoarded, and occasionally stole these precious images.

This book, then, is not just about the inevitable decay and death of the film medium itself, but it’s also about the often strange, and strangely compelling, lives of film collectors and dealers, many of whom are dealing with their own issues of aging and mortality as they approach or reach retirement. More than a few collectors said they simply stopped projecting films because it was too physically exhausting to heft film cans or do changeovers; one die-hard collector, Latino graphic designer-turned-truck-driver Rik Lueras, uses his projection booth now to store his medical equipment. This book is about a post–WWII generation of (mostly) white, male collectors and dealers, many (although not all, by any means) of them gay men, who pursued their love for the movies with a glorious, unreasonable passion—a passion that may never quite be equaled, simply because they grew up in an era when access to movies was so limited. How many collectors were there at the height of the underground market? It’s hard to say, but Donald Key, publisher of the collectors’ bible, The Big Reel magazine, says that subscriptions at their peak reached 4,800 in the late 1980s, which is a good guess for the number of collectors total at the time, at least in the United States.⁵ Most of the collectors and dealers profiled in this book are American, with the largest concentrations around the film production and distribution centers in the Los Angeles and New York areas (although there were and still are active collecting scenes across the country, usually near distribution depots where there was easier access to prints). Britain had a small but very active collecting community, as Kevin Brownlow and Patrick Stanbury attest to in their chapter, as did France (see Serge Bromberg’s chapter) and other countries—but the relatively smaller size of their national film industries also meant there were generally far fewer collectors overseas. It’s worth pointing out that while there is a distinction between film collectors and dealers, the lines are often blurred. Many collectors backed into dealing part-time (or eventually full-time) to fund their habit. A good rule of thumb is that while not every film collector became a dealer, almost every dealer started out as a collector.

But why film collectors in particular? Or as Gremlins director Joe Dante bluntly asked me when I came to interview him, So, what’s your reason for writing this book? Part of it is that film collectors are an endangered species. They are dying along with their obsession, and there is something particularly fascinating and moving about seeing them go down with their proverbial ship. Even in the age of the Kindle and e-books, hundreds of thousands of new books are still being printed on paper. Books and book collectors will be around long into the foreseeable future. The same goes for comic book, stamp, coin, baseball card, record, and almost every other kind of collector you can think of. But film stock is enormously expensive to make and process. Even for those directors dedicated to shooting on celluloid as long as it’s available—and that’s the key phrase, as long as it’s available—like Quentin Tarantino, Christopher Nolan, Judd Apatow, and J. J. Abrams, getting access to raw film stock and the means to develop it is going to be increasingly difficult as laboratories and suppliers shut down their operations.⁶ It’s not only lack of access to new prints that’s suffocating film collecting: the existing prints all carry the seeds of their own destruction inside them. The basic composition and processing of film slowly, inexorably eat away at the stock itself, producing a gripping odor and physical decay known as vinegar syndrome, or film rot. As my writing partner Jeff (a former film dealer himself) explains it, acetate plastic decomposes on its own over time; that produces the odor (acetic acid) that smells like vinegar. Things like unwashed chemicals, scratch-removal chemicals, and mostly heat and humidity all exacerbate a natural process. Properly stored, current film stocks should last for well over a century—but for older prints, the best guess is usually a smell test to see if there’s a whiff of vinegar syndrome, which can hop from print to print like an airborne virus. (Some collectors put their vinegared prints in the freezer to try to slow the process, a habit that probably sits well with the non-film-collector partner.) An added problem is fading. Until the introduction of Eastmancolor LPP (low-fade positive print) stocks in 1982, prints generally fell into two broad camps: dye-transfer (or IB) Technicolor, which is highly resistant to fading, and Eastmancolor-derived stocks like 20th Century Fox’s DeLuxe Color, Warner Bros.’ WarnerColor, and others, which have turned anything from bright crimson to riotous purple as they’ve faded. Over the years desperate collectors have turned to all sorts of homemade fixes to restore color to faded prints. In his 1974 16mm Filmland catalogue, dealer Evan H. Foreman advertised a Color Correction Kit for five dollars, designed to add blue tones to the film when projected by use of one or two blue filters in front of the projector lens. None of these fixes worked, despite the claims of many collectors to the contrary. Go into any used book shop (if you can find one these days), and it’s relatively easy to pick up a title from the late nineteenth century for a few bucks, but finding a good film print from the dreaded Eastmancolor era of the 1970s is difficult. Almost all original 35mm copies of Star Wars, for example, are badly faded—except for one of the legendary British Technicolor prints of the film. Finding a pre-1948 nitrate print has also become a significant rarity, although not impossible, as several of the interviewees attest to.

Oddly, as the prints themselves become harder to find, their value has dropped, in stark contrast to other collectibles, like comic books. More than one collector I interviewed has wryly commented on the fact that vintage movie posters were once routinely available for one or two dollars, at a time when film prints cost hundreds. Now it’s reversed, and those same posters are worth thousands or tens of thousands, while the value of the prints is negligible. RoboCop producer (and former Fillmore East theater projectionist) Jon Davison believes that this is a golden age for film collecting, because there’s so little competition, but he’s fairly alone in that enthusiastic judgment. Many of the interviewees for this book are former collectors or dealers. Some, like New Orleans native Mike Smith (or as he puts it in his infectious drawl, New Oar-leunz), changed heart when faced with the new technology: Smith decided on the spot to start selling his vast, expensive 16mm collection as soon as he saw a DVD of His Girl Friday projected at an audiovisual store in Baton Rouge. USC film school professor and screenwriter Tom Abrams recalls his excitement years ago at snagging a faded 16mm print of Roger Corman’s X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, which he’d loved as a child in the early 1960s; now, with the film easily available on DVD and the internet, he can’t imagine anyone wanting to watch a beet-red print of the movie. Others, like vintage television collector Ronnie James, decided to hold on to their collections while the value and demand for the prints plummeted; Ronnie’s fondest wish is that he could now travel back in time and warn his five-year-old self not to start collecting. There are still people paying decent money for good prints, and a handful of younger collectors pursuing treasures with the same passion as their elders. There are even collectors still willing to risk arrest and prosecution so they can liberate those last remaining prints: one man, who spoke on condition of anonymity, literally jumped up and down with uncontrollable excitement as he talked about reaching through a hole in a chain-link fence surrounding a film depot and grasping at odd reels of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, hoping to snatch enough to assemble a complete print. Not satisfied with that, later he and several friends broke into the depot and spent a long night huddled in a metal shed hiding from security—all for a few 35mm prints. But for the most part, film collecting is a dying art, as Joe Dante puts it, and it will be even deader in ten or twenty years when there are no more new prints being struck, and no more theaters—apart from a handful of private screening rooms and cinematheques/museums—even capable of showing 16mm, 35mm, and 70mm. To underscore the grim reality, Atlanta-based projection consultant and film dealer Steve Newton (who throws the occasional, ingratiating goodness gracious and oh gosh into his conversation) sent me photos of dumpsters outside his Cinevision offices filled with hundreds of discarded 35mm projectors and metal Goldberg film cans.⁷

Yet another compelling reason to write this book is that film collectors and dealers found themselves, for a few relatively brief but panicked years in the 1970s, in the legal crosshairs of the FBI, the Justice Department, and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) representing the major Hollywood studios. These formidable organizations harassed hundreds of collectors and dealers and even arrested a number of them on charges of copyright violation and receipt of stolen goods, their most high-profile target being Planet of the Apes actor Roddy McDowall. The legal rationale behind the FBI’s and MPAA’s actions is still hotly debated—my writing partner Jeff, who spent two months in prison on film-related charges, even suggests that the FBI was smarting from its public whipping in the Patty Hearst case and decided to go after a much easier target, namely, film dealers and collectors. Whether or not the inspiration for Citizen Kane’s granddaughter had anything to do with the so-called film busts of the 1970s, one thing is certain: collectors of film are almost unique in being targeted by the FBI for their hobby. Imagine being a rabid baseball card collector. You’re sitting at home one afternoon, drooling over your Hank Aaron and Stan Musial rookie cards. Suddenly there’s a knock at the door. You open it to find two federal agents standing there. They pepper you with questions: Where did you buy your baseball cards? Who else do you know that collects cards? Then they demand that you sign a blanket statement admitting your guilt and promising you’ll never collect cards in the future. Before they leave, they seize your collection, claiming it violates copyright law and has been obtained illegally. This may sound incredible, but in fact this exact scenario happened to dozens of film collectors in the early 1970s. The picture that emerges of the FBI and the Justice Department is not a very flattering or overly intelligent one: two massive federal agencies essentially at the beck and call of the Hollywood studios, directing their formidable resources against an almost laughably easy target. There were real film pirates and bootleggers operating pretty much in the open, as is apparent from a number of the interviews that follow, but by the time the feds got around to them, the problem was quickly morphing into video piracy, and now the nearly unbeatable digital piracy. In retrospect, film piracy looks almost quaint, like those sweaty guys who used to sell bootleg cassettes of Springsteen concerts on St. Mark’s Place in New York City. It was, as the MPAA’s former head of antipiracy operations, James Bouras, describes it, a frantic period, but one that the MPAA and studios might almost be nostalgic for, given the vast, untrackable digital landscape they now have to police.

We may be witnessing the final act (or the last reel) of movies-on-film, but the warning drums started sounding long ago. The introduction of VCRs and the laserdisc system in the mid-to-late 1970s was the opening shot. Suddenly, classic films from The Maltese Falcon to The Pink Panther that had been zealously pursued and fought over by a handful of private collectors were available almost everywhere, at a fraction of the cost of a good 16mm or 35mm print, and without having to own and operate a projector. Many collectors still defended their obsessive love for film, citing its far superior picture and audio as compared to prerecorded VHS tape. Not so once DVDs and, later, Blu-rays were introduced. As East Coast dealer and collector Dave Barnes laughingly puts it, "The Mysterious Mr. M, Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, The Great Alaskan Mystery—I have them on DVD now. Cost me ten dollars for a DVD. Used to pay four hundred dollars for a serial years ago."

Then there are the lost treasures, the precious images that would have disappeared into the vastness of history—like most of Sophocles (of a reported 123 plays, only 7 survive), Leonardo da Vinci’s lost painting The Battle of Anghiari, or John Barrymore’s stage production of Hamlet—were it not for the possessive fingers of a handful of film collectors. I was amazed that almost every collector Jeff and I spoke with had at least one story of a unique film element that passed through his or her hands. For New Zealand exploitation buff and Incredibly Strange Film Festival creator Anthony Timpson, it was the sole surviving copy of an early 1960s Doctor Who episode entitled The Lion. For noted French preservationist Serge Bromberg of Lobster Films and his partner, Eric Lange, it was a once-in-a-lifetime find of dozens of pre-1906 nitrate prints, including a number of lost Georges Méliès films, which they dubbed the Treasures from a Chest. For dealer Bob DePietro it was a unique copy of legendary Russian director Sergei Eisenstein’s very first film experiment, Glumov’s Diary, a 1923 short Eisenstein shot for use in a stage production. Glumov’s Diary was literally twice buried, hidden inside a newsreel by Soviet director Dziga Vertov, which had then been tossed into a dumpster in New Rochelle, New York, where it was plucked up by DePietro. For Philadelphia-area collector Wes Shank, it was realizing in a blinding flash that he’d laid his hands on four minutes of missing footage from the original 1933 production of King Kong, including censored images of Kong the ape toying erotically with Fay Wray’s dress and stomping/munching on a handful of doomed natives. As Shank remembers the moment of the discovery, "I started unwinding the film and letting it go onto the floor. ‘That’s interesting … wait a minute. I don’t remember any such scene in the film.’ Then it hit me: ‘invaluable’ … ‘Kong.’ Could it be? I went down and put it on a pair of rewinds. Oh my god. This is the lost footage. His sense of breathless excitement almost reminds me of the moment archaeologist Howard Carter first peered through a hole into the long-sealed tomb of Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings; when asked by Lord Carnarvon if he could see anything, Carter answered, Yes, wonderful things." Not every collector, of course, found missing footage from King Kong or the lost stereo soundtrack elements to James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause (as did the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood’s head projectionist Paul Rayton), but almost every collector and dealer Jeff and I spoke with had found something rare and interesting. And interesting or worthwhile is truly in the eye of the beholder: sexploitation guru and Something Weird Video founder Mike Vraney spoke with the same sense of excitement about rooting through an antique shop in Everett, Washington, and discovering a treasure trove of softcore nudie cuties from the 1940s and 1950s, films that were so far off the radar screen that few people even knew they’d ever existed or were lost. One man’s porn is another man’s gem.

There was a social, or maybe I should call it sociable, aspect that went hand-in-hand with collecting, and that was the basement or backyard screening. The image of setting up a 16mm Kodak Pageant and a portable white screen, and showing a slightly-less-than-legal print of Goldfinger for your family and neighbors—amazed that you could bring a touch of Hollywood magic, the movies, into suburbia—evokes a bygone era in American life, one that will never return. Some collectors went to extremes with their home theaters. Radio deejay Jim Zippo, something of a fanatic’s fanatic, recalls his now-demolished private theater that boasted a handmade opera curtain controlled by electric motor. He and his former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader wife, Lori, would go all out, once hiring Russian musicians to accompany a screening of Dr. Zhivago in their home. More than one rabid collector cut holes in the walls to create a makeshift projection booth. Former film rejuvenator and 1960s garage-band drummer Bob Krasnow showed me the sad remnants of his former booth in his garage, pulling aside a set of curtains to reveal two glass portals. I used to shoot out of these windows, he said wistfully, but we got rid of all the projection equipment and converted it into a bathroom a while back. All that’s left now are the two square glass eyes on the wall. Mark Punswick, at the time a Houston-area teenager in the early 1970s, recalled defying his parents’ church-going habits to stay at home with his precious movies: I said, ‘I’m not renouncing your God, or God in general. I just have better things I want to do with my time.’ One Sunday, I’m in my bedroom and there’s a wall, and there’s the living room. I realize if I cut a hole in my wall, my bedroom becomes the projection booth. So I do it. I get my dad’s jigsaw and mark it out both sides. My parents came back from church, and I said, ‘You wanna see what I did?’ He paused a moment, then added, Of course, looking back, they should’ve killed me.

Sometimes you didn’t even need a hole in the wall, or a basement screening room. Former New York–area projectionist Mike McKay fondly remembers snagging a 35mm print of Jaws while it was still playing in commercial theaters: "By this time it’s four days into its run on Broadway—it’s a huge hit. There’s lines around the block. You can’t get a ticket to save your life. I decided I was going to put my projector up to my window and show Jaws on the building front of my neighbor’s house, across the street at 1876 Bleecker Street in Ridgewood, Queens. I dropped the speaker out, spliced in extra-long wire, put the speaker downstairs, and ran Jaws for my neighbors. Even the cops stopped." If there’s one melancholy refrain that runs through nearly all the interviews that Jeff and I conducted, it’s the loss of that communal feeling of film collecting: gathering friends and family around the cinematic campfire and watching a print of Singin’ in the Rain or Gone With the Wind. (The tradition of backyard screenings isn’t completely dead: editor/filmmaker Mike Williamson continues to show 16mm horror and sci-fi flicks like The Lawnmower Man, Nightmare on Elm Street 4, and Piranha: The Ultimate Edition in his leafy backyard in Burbank, California.)

For me, the most remarkable aspect of writing this book has been listening to the personal histories of the collectors and dealers Jeff and I interviewed. Many of their memories had nothing to do with film directly or revealed their connections only later on. Some memories floated by, evoking brief snippets of lost eras, like former film rejuvenator Allan Scott (the source for literally tens of thousands of prints in the collectors market), who recalled, My dad had a bar, and he put bands on, on the weekend. He gave Big Jay McNeeley a start, and I believe Fats Domino played there, before Fats got started. We’re going back more than fifty years, trying to remember this. It was rhythm & blues and rock & roll. The bar was at Broadway and Main … no, Main and Washington. A surprising number of collectors lost at least one parent at an early age. Mike McKay remembered his New York City ­­policeman father buying him prints of Godzilla films out of a sense of guilt over the suicide of McKay’s mother. Some of the most moving childhood memories came from Boris Zmijewsky, who was born in a refugee camp in Regensburg, Germany, to Ukrainian parents who’d been forced into slave labor by the Nazis. After immigrating to the United States, Zmijewsky recalled, There used to be a movie theater called the Charles Theater on the Lower East Side, on Avenue B. That was my hangout, because my parents weren’t around, so I used to spend a lot of time in the movies. At that time they used to show two movies with cartoons and everything, so that was like babysitting. When I asked if his parents were ever worried leaving him at the movie theater all by himself, he responded: We used to be by ourselves in a wartime country, so being at the movies was safe. I felt safe. When you’re talking about war-torn Europe, you’re talking about buildings that were abandoned that we used to play in, so this was nothing. For these men the movies were obviously more than just a diversion or an entertainment. Many childhood memories were humorous or underscored cultural differences in postwar America: Michael Schlesinger, producer and former Sony Pictures executive, recalled that "the Victory Theater downtown in Dayton [Ohio] was the Disney house. So 101 Dalmatians was opening on Christmas Day in 1961. Mom said the day before it opened, ‘You should go tomorrow.’ And I said, ‘Mom, are you crazy? It’s opening and the line’s going to be around the block.’ She said, ‘No, that’s the day to go, because the goyim will be home opening their presents!’" The more I heard, the more I realized that a lifelong passion for the movies has to come from somewhere, whether that’s the tiny Sylvia Theater at Ward’s Corner in Franconia, Virginia, during the Depression, or from a multiplex in Salinas, California, in the early 1980s, soaking up Top Gun, Predator, and Ghostbusters, as it did for soft-spoken horror and sci-fi collector Phil Blankenship. Many of those somewheres, theaters with such evocative names as the Ingomar, the RKO Missouri, the Yeadon, the Commodore, and even the western-themed the Hitching Post, are now as much a part of the past as the prints that screened there.

Writing this book offered a rare opportunity to visit many of the collectors in their own strange, wonderful, cluttered little film worlds, whether that was former Broadway gypsy Tony Turano, surrounded by costumes from his beloved The Ten Commandments and clutching one of Marilyn Monroe’s sequined tops, or electrician and collector Peter Dyck in his truly maddening and mesmerizing House of Clocks, in Inglewood, California. Collector and