3.

The Theodore Huff Memorial Film Society

“I had a heartbreaking moment last week: I threw four films away, actually put them in the garbage can. Beyond stinky—unsalvageable,” Leonard Maltin sighs as Jeff and I settle into a snug back corner of his home office surrounded by densely packed bookshelves. In person he is just as you’d imagine him: medium height with graying hair and fuzzy beard, a relaxed, ingratiating manner—and a razor-sharp knowledge of cinema history. I ask what prints he had to toss out, and he winces, as if we were discussing abandoning his family pets by the side of the road. “A Ruth Etting RKO two-reeler called Derby Decade that I’ve always been fond of,” he replies. “As soon as I opened the can, whoops! It was oozing white goo. I said, ‘Let’s see if we can get it through the projector one more time.’ It was a singular experience in my life—the soundtrack played perfectly, unaffected. The image reversed polarity as we were watching. It turned to negative. We were watching the film vanish before our very eyes, and it left behind an ocean of white muck.”

Trying to cheer him up, Jeff mentions that the negative still probably exists somewhere. “But it’s lost to me,” Leonard says. “The fact that there’s some master copy somewhere in a vault does me no good.” For good measure he lists the other “close family members” he had to part with: “One was another RKO short, my very favorite comedy with the team of Clark and McCullough, who had been Broadway stars and made a series of shorts for RKO in the thirties. My favorite was called Odor in the Court.” The third blow was a WWII propaganda short starring Robert Stack called Keeping Fit. “That was a nice old Kodak print, gone,” he says wistfully. And the fourth? The Academy Award–winning The House I Live In with Frank Sinatra. Jeff mentions he has a pristine DVD copy of the Sinatra short he’ll be happy to pass along. “Sure. Why not?” Leonard shrugs, but it’s clear from his body language that he’d rather have his nice old Kodak prints back.

To call Leonard a “film lover” is something of an understatement. He is quite likely America’s most famous and prolific film lover: as a critic for the Entertainment Tonight TV show for over thirty years, as a historian and author of a dozen highly regarded books, as host of the marvelous Walt Disney Treasures DVD series, and as creator and editor of the wonderfully bulky little tome Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide, which became as ubiquitous in American homes as a remote control.20 (For good measure, he’s also been spoofed on South Park and Mystery Science Theater 3000.) It’s immediately apparent that for Leonard, “film love” is something highly personal—something that goes back to his earliest years as a collector and which has shaped his entire career and his home and even led to his marriage to his wife, Alice. As Jeff and I sit talking with him, we’re surrounded by a veritable museum of posters, animation cels, painted portraits, books, magazines—pretty much anything film-related that you can imagine, and some you can’t. (Alice even has an entire room in the house devoted to her personal hero, actor Ronald Colman of A Tale of Two Cities fame.)

“All I have ever collected were short subjects, live action shorts, cartoons, and some TV shows and trailers. No feature films,” Leonard explains. When I ask why no features, he flashes a sardonic grin. Like most collectors, he can remember every print, good or bad, that’s passed through his hands. “I bought for a very reasonable sum, maybe sixty dollars, a print of Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent, which proved to be incomplete. That began and ended my feature-film collecting hobby when I realized there were pitfalls.” Like many of the collectors Jeff and I spoke with, Leonard was part of the immediate post-WWII baby boom generation. Born in 1950 in Manhattan, the son of a singer and a lawyer/immigration judge, he was raised across the Hudson River in comfortably suburban Teaneck, New Jersey. “Our basement had a good throw,” he remembers fondly about his childhood home. It’s a reference only a collector or projectionist would get: “a good throw” means there was enough distance between the film projector and the screen for a proper image. “I grew up during that early stage of television programming when TV was a living museum of movies, and I became a TV junkie. So every day of my life, I watched Laurel and Hardy, the Little Rascals, and Warner Bros. cartoons, Van Beuren cartoons, Max Fleischer cartoons.” How times have changed: in the early years of television, networks and local stations were desperate for cheap programming, so they licensed vintage features and shorts in vast bulk from the studios.21 It is, paradoxically, how many collectors first fell in love with the movies, through a tiny black-and-white TV set screening afternoon reruns of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. It’s also telling, because Leonard more than almost any other film historian or critic has used the medium of television to share and spread his love for cinema—even his beloved Maltin’s Movie Guide was originally published as TV Movies.

When I ask about his earliest movie memories, though, they are of the classic kind: “My first cinematic memory is my mother taking me by the hand into the Guild Theater on Fiftieth Street, right behind Radio City Music Hall, to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs on a reissue,” he recalls. “In those days there were continuous showings, so as soon as everybody was leaving one show, we went in, and I saw the last scene of the movie first. That was my first memory, seeing Snow White and the Prince going off into the sun in that golden finale.” It’s an ironic image, that Leonard Maltin’s love affair with cinema should begin at The End. The Guild Theater is also where he experienced a turning point at the age of seven when he saw producer Robert Youngson’s compilation film The Golden Age of Comedy. Although he’s mostly forgotten now, Youngson and his compilation films in the late 1950s and 1960s featuring clips of Laurel and Hardy, Carole Lombard, Jean Harlow, Will Rogers, Harry Langdon, Mack Sennett, and others, introduced a young generation to the bygone geniuses of early film comedy. “Seeing this collection on the big screen was a transformative experience,” Leonard recalls. “A couple of decades later I got to tell this to Robert Youngson, and that was a great delight.”

Like many young collectors, Leonard began buying 8mm reductions of much longer films sold by companies like Castle Films and the cut-rate Atlas Films and Ken Films for prices ranging from $1.95 to $5.95.22 “I had the Headline Edition of W. C. Fields in Never Give a Sucker an Even Break. Their version was titled, wait for it … Hurry Hurry. The reason was that it was simply a chase scene from the movie,” Leonard says with a smile. To this day he stays connected to his earliest years as a collector and proudly shows us time-worn but still charming 8mm film boxes he has in his office, including one for an Oswald Rabbit short from the long-gone Cine Art Films, which he holds as gently in his palm as if it were a newborn baby chick. “I am now nostalgic for the boxes, advertising, and even reels and cans, and I buy them sometimes as objets d’art,” he observes about the fragile ephemera of movie love that fills his, Alice’s, and their daughter Jessie’s home. In high school in Teaneck, he started a movie club because he was part of the audiovisual (A.V.) staff that maintained the school’s 16mm and slide projectors. “Another long-demolished institution in American life,” he sighs nostalgically. His memory for detail is astonishing, and he never forgets a good joke or a bad pun: when he rented a print of Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps to screen for the movie club for the sum of four dollars, he recalls, “one of our members said, ‘That’s like ten cents a step!’”

It’s no surprise that one of his first jobs was film-related, working for a man named Milton Menell at Select Films Library in Manhattan, where Leonard put together 16mm rental programs such as History of Animation, Comedy, and more. When I ask if his efforts were successful at increasing film rentals, he smiles: “Some of them were modestly successful—and even that may be an optimistic statement.” Leonard obviously has great affection for Menell, who was less a film buff than a film hondler, to use the Yiddish expression: “He’d buy anything in bulk because he could sell anything…. I have a print [from him] of my favorite two-reel Charley Chase called The Pips from Pittsburgh, co-starring the beautiful Thelma Todd. As Chase says to Todd in the film, ‘Did you come clean from Pittsburgh?’”

Not everyone inspires fond memories, though. “The most infuriating man in the film rental business was a guy called Charlie Mogull of Mogull’s Film Rental Library,” Leonard says, still irritated after more than forty years. “When I was writing my book Movie Comedy Teams, somebody told me Charlie Mogull had a print of Clark and McCullough’s four-reel Fox Movietone 1929 short called Waltzing Around. I’d been warned that Charlie was incredibly difficult to deal with. So I called him up. ‘Waalll, we’ll need references,’” he drawls, imitating Mogull’s voice, then follows with a laundry list of Mogull’s inane, time-consuming demands. “He was in business not to do business. Infuriating,” Leonard says, cheeks flushed with anger.

It was, in fact, while researching and writing his books Movie Comedy Teams and The Great Movie Shorts in the early 1970s that he got hooked on collecting. “I started collecting with an academic purpose, the most lethal kind of collecting, because I need an example of the Strange as It Seems series. It’s not very good, but I need to have an example of it,” he sighs, but it’s clear that he didn’t put up much of a struggle against the collecting bug. “Then I started a class on the history of animation in 1973 at the New School for Social Research in New York City. They gave me a rental budget, and I intended to rent Disney cartoons and silent animation from the Museum of Modern Art and various 16mm distributors. Nothing went right. Everything went wrong,” he recalls. “So I started collecting cartoons purposefully, which was a dreadful path to go down. Because now I needed an example of an early Terrytoon, a middle period Terrytoon, a late period Terrytoon, etc. That’s how my cartoons collection suddenly expanded.” It’s worth pointing out that the so-called dreadful path Leonard went down gave birth to his masterful, hugely entertaining book Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons in 1980, still the definitive work on the genius of Chuck Jones, the Fleischer brothers, and other titans.

The New York film buff community in the 1970s was filled with fascinating, long-gone characters like collector Herb Graff and Leonard’s self-described “hero and unwitting mentor,” William K. Everson. The soft-spoken, genteel, and veddy-British Everson was a hugely important and influential figure as a film historian, professor, collector, and archivist. After a brief career in the early 1950s as a film publicist, Everson dedicated himself full-time to writing about and teaching cinema, and to preserving as many endangered films as he could get his hands on. (He also, coincidentally, worked with Robert Youngson on the silent-comedy compilations that so impressed the young Leonard.) I studied with Everson myself at NYU in the mid-1980s, where he screened forgotten gems like the superb Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back (1934) from his own private archives. I once delivered a term paper to Everson’s apartment and got a quick peek at his legendary film collection, which was stacked in hallways and rooms everywhere I looked, the apartment floorboards sagging under the weight of prints.

Leonard’s friendship with Everson literally changed his life. “Bill ran a film society called the Theodore Huff Memorial Film Society.23 Theodore Huff wrote the first great book on Charlie Chaplin, which is on my shelf there,” he says. “It was a secret film society: you simply had to know about it, it was not printed anywhere. Everson rented a hall on Union Square. The group later moved to the School of Visual Arts, where he used an amphitheater room. At the Huff Society he showed rare films every week.” Besides Leonard, other regular attendees at the secret Huff screenings included noted writer and filmmaker Susan Sontag and Castle of Frankenstein magazine publisher Calvin Thomas Beck, a bizarre figure long rumored to be one of the inspirations for Norman Bates in Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho.²⁴ “There was more collective knowledge in that room than in most institutions of higher learning. These were the ultimate film buffs—if not the most socially adjusted human beings in New York,” Leonard observes with a chuckle. “One night we were watching a film that wasn’t very good called The Wrong Road, a Republic picture starring Richard Cromwell and Rochelle Hudson, where Cromwell was being unjustly pursued for a crime he didn’t commit by a dogged Lionel Atwill.” As the film ended and the lights came up, Leonard echoed one of Atwill’s lines of dialogue, whispering aloud, “‘You kids can start laughing right now.’ Then the guy behind me said, ‘I started laughing when I sold Bill [Everson] that print.’ That’s how I met Herb Graff,” Leonard remembers. “Herb was in the garment business and worked for a shirt company, but movies were his passion. Another great story is when sometime later I ran into him coming out of a screening and he had a new overcoat on. I complimented him on it. He replied, ‘Do you like it? This cost me Top Hat.’”

“Many collectors I met like Herb didn’t have good marriages,” Leonard says, echoing an observation I’ve heard a number of times. “Because this was their pursuit and not their spouses’—and they didn’t share the hobby with their spouse. Which is why it was considered near miraculous when I met Alice at the Theodore Huff Society.” Graff had invited Alice to come as his guest to the Huff that night but conveniently took sick—and asked Leonard to keep an eye out for her. “So that was our first evening together, watching two rare silent films.” I ask if he recalls what movies they watched that night: “Of course,” he replies without hesitation. “Open All Night with Adolphe Menjou and Maurice Tourneur’s The Whip. We were probably the only couple—the only heterosexual couple—to emerge from the Theodore Huff Film Society. When we were engaged we went to Bill Everson’s apartment, where there was film stacked in every corner and nook and cranny,” he says, in a repeat of my own recollections of Everson’s place. “Alice looked at me in horror and said, ‘Our apartment isn’t going to be like that, is it?’ And I assured her it wouldn’t be. And it never was. They’d say, ‘Does she like films?’ And I said, ‘How could I get married to someone who doesn’t like films?’ But that was the prevailing stereotype among film collectors. You hear about football widows, and there were film collector widows.”

Like his friend and mentor Everson, Leonard has taught film history for over four decades, currently at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. “One of the reasons I still show 16mm to my class is simply to keep the projectors whirring and to put a film image on the screen,” he says. “I also like to show my students what film looks like. I’ll unspool part of a reel just to show them film and sprocket holes and show them there was a relationship from one frame to the next that you can see with the naked eye.” Jeff points out the perhaps sad but inevitable fact that most movies will never be experienced on the big screen again in front of an audience.25 Leonard pauses for a moment: This is obviously a topic that cuts close to the bone. “Something’s been lost but something’s been gained,” he finally replies. “We could have never envisioned in our wildest dreams something like Turner Classic Movies. That there is a channel showing pristine, uncut copies of classic films twenty-four hours a day? Unheard of. On the other hand, you used to be able to watch films in New York, on seven channels around the dial, every morning, every afternoon, all night long. I know that some of the oddities I have in 16mm will likely never turn up again in any other form—because they have no commercial value and only marginal historic value.” So for every print of Derby Decade that turns to white goo and has to be tossed out, something small but significant has disappeared from our collective film consciousness.

In addition to his students, Leonard has passed his love of film directly on to his daughter, Jessie, who now works with him at his production company. “At one time she could thread the projector,” he says. “She regrets that she’s forgotten, but we may need to have a refresher course soon.” Does he still screen his 16mm prints at home? “Not a lot. We used to do it fairly often, and it was fun having an audience. Our calendar and lifestyle changed, and that’s the only reason we haven’t done it too much lately.” When I ask for his thoughts on the death of 16mm and 35mm film in the digital age, he purses his lips: “I find it amusing, as all these things disappear from our midst, that the iconography remains. If you want to say film visually, you show a strip of film. If you want to indicate a theater and projector, you show reels with a beam of light.” Before we can continue with this melancholy topic, he interrupts with another Herb Graff/William K. Everson story. Apparently Herb had scored a prize contact at a film laboratory that had access, wonder of wonders, to the vast Warner Bros. library. “He said to Bill, who he loved, ‘If you could have any Warner Bros. feature in your library, what would it be?’ And Bill said, ‘Mr. Cohen Takes a Walk.’ It was a 1930s British quota-quickie which Bill had seen as a boy and always remembered. Herb requested it and got the print—which incidentally turned out to be a charming film—but it blew the connection, because no one had ever requested this negative before. This created such a wave of suspicion that the whole operation was immediately shut down!” It’s a story only a film collector would love: how you’re given the keys to the kingdom and blow it by requesting a title that’s too obscure.

As much as Jeff and I would love to stay, we realize it’s time to go, but even as I pack up my things, there’s always one more story, and another story, from Leonard about his early collecting days in New York City, when he fell so madly in love with the movies. He remembers a close friend, Harvey Chertok, who worked at Warner Bros.-Seven Arts and hired him to write text for a film catalogue. He found out that Leonard was writing his book Movie Comedy Teams on the side and was desperate to see some rare titles. “Harvey picked up the phone and called someone at Bonded Films on the West Side and said, ‘I’m sending somebody over, and you can let him borrow anything he wants, two prints at a time.’” It’s a small act of kindness that Leonard still obviously cherishes. But then there are the wounds that never heal: “There was a man at Paramount, much like Charlie Mogull. When I tried to rent Martin and Lewis movies from Films Inc. with my hard-earned money, he had to approve every rental. They said, ‘You’ll have to write a letter.’ I said, ‘Why? It’s in your catalogue for thirty-five dollars.’ He wouldn’t let me rent them, for money!” Leonard recalls with the indignation of a collector denied. “And then I met Harvey and found out how easy it was. For Harvey it was picking up the phone and making a call and showing a kind gesture. As opposed to that putz who was in business not to do business: ‘Do you know what we have to do to screen one film? We have to call the salt mines in Kansas City and pay somebody to inspect the print!’ He gave me this whole long song and dance,” Leonard says, shaking his head at the bureaucratic nonsense. Then he adds, almost as an afterthought: “Not that I’m bitter.”