4.

The Tuesday Night Film Club

One of the most truly remarkable temples of movie obsession sits behind a dull faux-Tudor facade next to a place that sells barbecue equipment on a busy Burbank street. There’s no sign outside to mark collector and former dealer Ken Kramer’s office/theater/film vault the Clip Joint: walking by, the only hint is a faint, bittersweet odor of old film prints, which a projectionist friend of mine once likened to oil-and-vinegar salad dressing. But step inside and you’re greeted by a world like few others: rare one-sheet posters for Singin’ in the Rain, The Thief of Bagdad, and the 1940s Captain Marvel serial cover the walls. Rows of twinkling Christmas lights give a kind of magical, childlike glow to the shop. Everywhere you look, your eye is caught by pieces of movie history: a multihued Technicolor sign on the wall, a miniature Nautilus from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, a grinning Gremlins figure in drag with a feathery headdress. In the back near the entrance to Ken’s theater is an old-fashioned popcorn machine next to a life-sized standee of James Dean. What Ken calls his office is to the left, and it’s literally overflowing with totemlike stacks of 35mm film reels; in fact you’re lucky if you don’t trip over a print as you walk through the Clip Joint. Opposite his desk is a giant banner for Roger Vadim’s 1956 erotic classic And God Created Woman, starring one of Ken’s personal favorites, Brigitte Bardot. The actual film storage archive is in the back, and it’s a marvelous labyrinth cluttered with hundreds of classic and rare titles, where you have to crane your neck sideways to try to read the film titles. Part of the fun of the Clip Joint is simply wandering around and seeing what you’ll find. I’m convinced if Charles Dickens had seen this place, he would’ve titled his novel The Old Movie Curiosity Shop.

For several decades Ken was one of the most active film dealers and collectors in the country—not just most active, but best known, most controversial and most colorful. “I never believed in God and still don’t,” he says. “But I believed there was a god of film.” That god has been both kind and cruel to him. His private collection is one of the finest anywhere and includes such treasures as a 35mm four-track magnetic stereo26 Technicolor print of Otto Preminger’s 1959 musical Porgy and Bess, probably the best in existence;²⁷ a superb collection of original Technicolor Disney features from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s; plus one-of-a-kind items like home-movie footage of Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio shot during filming of The River of No Return and outtakes from George Pal’s sci-fi classic War of the Worlds. His arguments with fellow collectors, some stretching over decades, are legendary in the tight-knit underground community. He’s been assaulted by thieves dressed as cops over a fifty-thousand-dollar film deal, used psychic Peter Hurkos to try to find a rare Technicolor print of Gone With the Wind that was stolen from his vault, had his life threatened by the mob for selling dupe prints of Deep Throat, and, by his own admission, in broad daylight broke into the home of a fellow collector he thought had ripped him off. During the 1970s he bought and sold prints to some of the most high-profile collectors out there, including Dick Martin of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra Jr., Roddy McDowall, and Hugh Hefner. “When I was really wheeling and dealing in film, getting $30,000 a month—it took me a long time to address what money really was,” Ken observes now. “Because it wasn’t real.” He’s also shared a long and sometimes contentious personal history with my writing partner Jeff: the two were briefly partners as film dealers in the early 1970s, until Ken’s then-wife Lauren left him to marry Jeff, shortly after they were discovered having an affair at the 3rd Annual Witchcraft and Sorcery Convention. (Yes, the 1970s truly were another decade.) The long-ago rupture between the two men has since been healed—at least as healed as it can be—but remains one of the best-known personal sagas in the collector world.

Ken is now balding, with big glasses and increasingly frail—but in his 1970s heyday, when he briefly flirted with the porn industry, he would have fit right into the cast of Boogie Nights, with his dark beard, mustache, and paisley shirts. I wish I could adequately capture his sense of humor; he’s rarely serious and is always looking to make a bad pun. Like a number of film collectors, his sense of comic timing comes from growing up watching Abbott and Costello, Jack Benny, and Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. (Ken describes a high school friend as having graduated “magna cum moron.”) He’s a bit like Johnny Carson, Ed McMahon, and the Tonight Show band rolled into one.

Ken swears he hasn’t bought any prints in years—and then proceeds to talk about his latest find. He spotted an ad in The Recycler newspaper that advertised “Deep Throat poster, loose film reels—four hundred dollars.” Ken wound up paying twice that but got a 35mm print of Deep Throat with 50 percent color left and an excellent Fuji color print of The Devil in Miss Jones. “But that’s not even the good stuff,” he grins. “The guy had an original 35mm black-and-white print of A Hard Day’s Night and, even better, a complete British Technicolor print of Let It Be.” He claims someone’s already offered him over three thousand dollars for the Devil in Miss Jones print alone—but he’s not selling (for now). For guys like Ken, it’s almost impossible to give up wheeling and dealing after an entire lifetime in the underground film trade. “I bought a couple Disneys I already had, and then said, ‘Why am I doing this?’” he notes about another recent purchase of prints of Alice in Wonderland and 101 Dalmatians. “It was just the impulse, a bargain,” he says, shaking his head.

Like all obsessive collectors, he remembers the ones that got away: “Years ago I went through one of those phases where I swore to my then-wife that I wouldn’t buy anything more. A guy called me up that month and said, ‘I’ve got the Cowardly Lion costume from The Wizard of Oz. Do you want to buy it for eight hundred dollars?’ I asked him if it included the mask.” He pauses, waiting for me to react. “That’s a joke—there was no mask for the Lion outfit. I turned him down.” (There were reportedly several Cowardly Lion costumes created for the film; one sold at a Bonham’s Turner Classic Movies auction in 2014 for over $3 million.) “I had one of the first movie poster stores anywhere,” Ken remembers. “I hired a guy to paint the sign outside the store, and instead of cash I told him he could pick out any poster he wanted. He picked an original one-sheet for Gone With the Wind, the one with the flower border. The thing sold for fifty or seventy-five bucks back then.” The list of lost treasures is endless: “I had the original Ming the Merciless costume from the Flash Gordon serial, the one with the big collar. Gave it to Debbie Reynolds when she was opening her costume museum in Vegas. Don’t know where it is now. Poor Debbie. So many people stole from her over the years.”

There’s a photo in the corner of Ken’s shop of one that didn’t get away: “I spotted an ad in the paper and called the guy up. He said, ‘I’ve got this big Frankenstein dummy. I think they used it outside a store or movie theater.’ He wanted seventy-five bucks for it.” Ken wound up with the dummy just ahead of a competing buyer but wasn’t sure what he’d bought. “I’m looking at it later, and I can’t quite figure out what it is. The face is really badly painted, so I send it to a friend of mine to repaint. He calls me up and says, ‘Ken, do you know what you have? I stripped off the paint and underneath is a life mask of Karloff’s face, beautifully painted in green.’ I say, ‘What?!’ He does some more research and calls me back: ‘Look at the final scenes of The Bride of Frankenstein. There’s the Frankenstein figure surrounded by flames. But if you look closely, you’ll see he’s not moving—it’s a model of him. They probably didn’t want to risk hurting Karloff. Your dummy has the exact same clothes, they’re torn in the same place. You’ve got an original prop from The Bride of Frankenstein.” I ask him if he still has it, but he shakes his head sadly, saying he sold it years ago at a memorabilia auction. “My Frankenstein dummy sold for $37,000. Imagine what it’d go for now.” To cheer him up I say, sure—but at the time that was a lot of money. And after all, a prop is just some plaster and paint that we assign an artificial value and meaning to. You sell this stuff and use the money for something more important, like buying a car or pursuing a pretty girl, real memories. Ken nods half-heartedly, but I can tell he doesn’t believe me—he’d rather still have the Frankenstein dummy or the Gone With the Wind one-sheet. That’s part of the illness of collecting.

On Tuesday nights Ken gets together with a bunch of buddies that I’d loosely call “The Cinecon Crowd” for dinner at the family Thai restaurant next to his office, followed by a screening.28 This particular Tuesday there’s about half a dozen film buffs—all men, of course. As we walk into the restaurant, Ken gestures to one overweight friend: “He’s got diabetes like me, but he doesn’t pay any attention to what he eats. He always falls asleep halfway through the movie. He’ll gobble down half a bowl of candy and then pass out from the sugar.” Of course, Ken’s theater is always well stocked with Twizzlers, bite-sized Hershey’s, and soda—very generous, but maybe he should hide them when his diabetic buddies are around. To say the Tuesday Night Film Club isn’t the healthiest bunch around is an understatement: they’re mostly mild mannered, but highly excitable when discussing film trivia, and look a bit like those odd albino cave creatures that grow genetically adapted to life in darkness. Ken’s had a series of major and minor health crises over the past decade—heart attacks, diabetes, you name it—which have slowed him down considerably. In one of his rare moments of seriousness, he talks about his declining health: “I can’t do many steps. It’s the diabetes. I went to a meeting on Wilshire a while back, and coming down the steps I misjudged the last twelve steps and fell backwards. It took two guys to help me up,” he says quietly. There’s a long pause. “It’s so hard. Your mind is still the same—but whose body is this? I always have to be careful when I walk in a room now. I have to look where I’m going to sit so that I can be sure to get back up again.”

Compared with popping a DVD in the machine, it takes a lot of energy and bother to project a film print. There’s a whole ritual involved, so it’s good to know that Ken is still doing his screenings for the faithful. Tonight’s crowd includes Mike Hawks, a slender man in a baseball cap who works at Larry Edmunds Bookshop on Hollywood Boulevard and recognizes me from my Cinematheque days. “The internet had already practically killed us, and now the recession,” he says about the book business. “I don’t know how we’re hanging on, but we are.” There’s also Stan Taffel, who’s one of the co-organizers of the annual Cinecon convention (with Robert S. Birchard). During dinner Stan mentions that he’s recently bought a film package from the estate of a deceased collector in Palm Springs. I ask what was in it, and he rolls his eyes: “I never met the guy, but he was a gay Nazi. I’m not kidding: a gay Nazi. He had a bunch of movies all about WWII and the Nazis. One of his prints was the Julie Andrews film Thoroughly Modern Millie. With it was a little metal can marked ‘Jew Outtakes.’ Remember in the movie there’s a scene where Julie dances at a Jewish wedding? He’d gone in and cut the whole scene out, and put it in this little can.” The regulars at Ken’s screenings come and go, depending on who’s squabbling with who, but there’s no denying the core audience is dwindling. “When we first started showing movies, people wouldn’t even ask what you were showing—they’d just turn up,” Ken recalls. “Now you say, ‘I’m screening Gone With the Wind.’ ‘Oh, really?’ ‘Yeah, and Clark Gable’s gonna be there in person.’ ‘Let me see if I can make it.’” He compares the death of film to—what else?—one of his favorite movies, director William A. Fraker’s elegiac 1970 western Monte Walsh, starring Lee Marvin. “He’s one of the last cowboys, and everything he loves is going away. Especially now, where everything we love is going away, I can really relate to it,” Ken says.

He was born in 1943 in Plainfield, New Jersey. His father worked in the jewelry business early on but kept feeling the tug of show business: at one point he worked in vaudeville with famous western swing bandleader Spade Cooley, who later went to jail for the murder of his second wife, in 1961. “He was always ‘on’ like me, and they never saw the anger. He had a good sense of humor, he used it all the time,” Ken recalls of his father. The family relocated to the West Coast when Ken was growing up; he remembers a stream of colorful visitors to their house, including midget star Harry Doll of Tod Browning’s Freaks. Ken started buying 16mm prints in his mid-teens from a family friend named Leroy Scott, who had secret contacts at local film labs—Ken’s earliest exposure to the black-market film underground. One of his first illegal film raids was breaking into the Gilboy film depot as a teenager with a high school friend to grab a print of West Side Story that happened to be sitting outside. “We were running away, and [my friend] kept yelling, ‘We’re going to get caught, Ken!” he recalls with a chuckle. “And I said, ‘We will if you keep shouting my name!’”

After high school he began working at Hollywood Film Enterprises lab in the mid-1960s, followed by MGM Studios Film Library and Technicolor. But he soon found himself in trouble again, this time for breaking into United World Films, Universal’s 16mm division, to steal prints, for which he spent three days in jail. His partner in planning the break-in was his young wife, Lauren. A dark-haired beauty with a white streak in her hair, she was born in 1947 and as a child was a victim of the infamous Georgia Tann/Tennessee Children’s Home Society black-market baby scandal.29 As a result she struggled with abandonment and health issues for the rest of her life. She met Ken in her early teens and by age fifteen had already had a child with her first husband, Ira, whom she soon divorced. Together she and Ken had one son, Jay, in 1965, who recalls growing up in something of an unconventional environment: “We had a dining room table; always on top of it was a projector. We never ate at the table.” Jay would occasionally accompany his father dropping off film to customers. “I remember several trips to the Playboy Mansion, growing up,” he says. “As a kid I didn’t know what the Playboy Mansion was. I remember driving up, and security came up, saying, ‘Thanks, Ken,’ and taking the film inside.” I ask Jay if he was aware of his father’s unusual line of work, and he stifles a laugh. “I thought that was a career. As a kid, I didn’t know it was illegal,” he replies. “I thought money grew out of his pocket, because he always had money. He’d always pull out big wads of money.”

One of the deep ironies of the rivalry/friendship between Ken and Jeff is that Jeff has become something of a personal historian and Boswell to Ken, having inherited many memories and even personal effects through Lauren, who was married to both men. (She passed away in 2007.) Many times during our discussions, Jeff gently corrects Ken’s occasionally bumpy recall or produces personal items like Ken’s first union card to help prod him. “I’m sorry, I’m a little shocked,” Ken says at one point in amazement, staring at long-lost photos from an amateur porn film he directed in the early 1970s, which Jeff hands to him. Another time Jeff produces an old ad Ken took out announcing, “Repairs anyone! I repair 16mm sound projectors.” Jeff confides, “Lauren was the one who actually did the work, but Ken had to be the front for it, since she was a girl. Nobody would hire her if they knew it was a girl repairing film projectors.” Although Ken tends to deflect questions about his and Lauren’s marriage with a joke, Jeff—who met the couple in May of 1971—recalls that theirs was not a peaceful marriage. “Have you ever been around a couple who are just screaming at each other all the time?” Jeff recalls. “And Lauren gave as good as she got when it came to arguing.”

In 1971 Ken also began his brief flirtation with the adult film business, shooting amateur porn loops—often eight or nine a day—at a building on Las Palmas in Hollywood. “Guys got paid fifteen dollars a session, girls twenty-five dollars, and I’d hear their boyfriends telling them, ‘This is a great way to break into the movie business.’ I’d take the girls aside and tell them, ‘Listen, if you ever want to work in the film business, don’t shoot porn,’” he recalls. Ken soon branched out on his own and with backing from his film-collector friend Dick Martin directed a porn spoof of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. super-spy series called The Man from S.N.A.T.C.H.—now, perhaps thankfully, a lost film. It wasn’t his last brush with porn: when Deep Throat (1972) and The Devil in Miss Jones (1973) became huge hits, Ken got in on the action by making illegal dupe negatives of both for a theater in Las Vegas. “Half the theaters running those pictures were running bootleg prints,” he says. “The bottom line is, they were being busted every day, so they’d come every two weeks and buy fourteen prints of each. They were making so much money, they could afford to buy them from me.” It was a lucrative business until he got a call from a distributor asking if he had more prints of Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones to sell, and he drove out to meet the man and his partners. “They ask me some general questions like, ‘Are the prints in good condition?’ And I say, ‘Yeah, they’re really good quality.’ ‘How much do you want for them?’ ‘Five hundred dollars apiece,’ I say. The guys look at me and say, ‘You realize these are our movies you’re selling.’ I try to crack a joke: ‘Well, I’m willing to go down on the price then.’” He shakes his head, remembering his brush with the mob. “Eventually I wind up giving them the prints for free, and they tell me, ‘If we ever find you selling our movies again, we’re going to kill you.’”

If his experience in the porn business was brief, his career as a film dealer was just kicking into high gear. Jeff, who was eighteen years old when he met Ken and Lauren, was fairly astonished at the older man’s access to prints: “At the time Ken had a great contact at C.F.I. [Consolidated Film Industries], and he was getting mint things straight out of the lab. Brand-new reels, brand-new prints. I’d come into his house, and right against the couch here are 2,000-foot reels of film: Here’s a row of season one of Star Trek, here’s season two of Star Trek, here’s season two of Mannix, Mission: Impossible, The Love Boat,” Jeff remembers. “Ken was selling this stuff all over the country. He was the Star Trek guy for months.” It was in fact the famed sci-fi series that first brought them together, when Jeff purchased a 16mm Star Trek print from Ken—and promptly bounced the check. “I remember that, too,” Ken says with raised eyebrows. “That’s because you cashed the check too early. I told you to hold onto it for another day!” Jeff protests. Given all that’s passed between these two men as friends, rivals, film dealers, and collectors, it’s ironic that the bounced Star Trek check has now become a running gag with them. It even creeps into their most painful shared memories. At one point Ken recalls downing an entire bottle of vodka in desperation at his crumbling marriage. I ask what prompted this alcohol binge. “Well, Lauren and I got caught having an affair for the second time, and she and I split up the coast to Oxnard,” Jeff responds. “You still owed me for the Star Trek episodes!” Ken adds in mock outrage; then he gives a long sigh. “But I knew things weren’t working with her.”

Although his personal life may have been messy, the 1970s were heady days for Ken professionally. He was getting a steady stream of prints from contacts at labs and film salvage companies, and turning them over for good profit. A regular client was Hugh Hefner: “One Christmas I wanted to get some extra money, so I called [Hefner] up and said, ‘I know you love Disney, and I’ve got a couple of Disney prints.’ Hefner said, ‘Well, I’m interested, but I won’t pay more than $1,000 each.’ At the time the top price for them was like $200, $225.” It turns out Hefner was willing to pay a flat rate of $500 per black-and-white feature and $1,000 per color film, so Ken and Jeff began rapidly scouring lists from other dealers, buying cheap prints for $25 to $50 and reselling them to Hefner at a huge markup. Their other big income stream came from an unusual source: South Africa. At the time there was a cultural embargo against the apartheid government, which prevented the major media companies from selling their film or TV series there. So an enormous black market developed, where South African buyers would purchase vast quantities of old prints here in the United States. Back in their country, hundreds of film rental shops sprang up, like precursors to video rental stores, where for a few dozen rand people could rent a 16mm projector and episodes of Mannix or Mission: Impossible. The trade was, of course, highly illegal, but a number of dealers I spoke with (including Jeff, who spent two months in jail for selling prints to South Africa) took the risk. I ask both Jeff and Ken if they had any qualms about selling to the apartheid-era pariah. “Only until I saw the check,” Jeff responds bluntly. “I just rationalized it and justified it because it was so much money.” Ken adds, “I was more scared than he was,” and his caution may have saved him. “I took a couple of bucks less and had them meet me here in L.A. and take the stuff. I didn’t want a record, and I was getting paid in cash. I was getting what, twenty-five bucks less than you?” Ken’s refusal to ship prints directly to South Africa may be the reason why, of all the major dealers active in Los Angeles at the time, he was one of the few not caught up in the infamous film-piracy arrests of 1975. “We’d take the money and say, ‘I want to go to New York’—and spend twenty thousand dollars on a trip. Because it was always coming in. It was like paper,” Ken says now of the river of South African cash. “We weren’t in the real world. Let’s put it that way.”

“I was a collector first. I just fell into it, really,” Ken observes about his transition to dealing. To this day he is a collector first and a dealer second—and it’s an important distinction. One of the discoveries he’s most proud of is a cache of nine lost cartoon shorts in a box of trailers he paid fifty dollars for in the mid-1990s. The shorts were part of a series called “Animaland” made by an overlooked animation pioneer named David Hand. “He was the director of Bambi and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; next to Walt he was the big honcho at Disney. In the mid-1940s he brought the union in and Walt went ballistic and they fought. He went to England on his own, and that’s where he did these nine cartoons on his own. They were never shown outside of England,” Ken says about the shorts, with titles like Ginger Nutt’s Forest Dragon and It’s a Lovely Day. Working with Hand’s son, Ken made film-to-tape transfers of his original IB Technicolor prints and rereleased the films in 1998, to wide acclaim. One of his other treasures, his 35mm four-track mag Technicolor print of Porgy and Bess, took several years and a good deal of luck to assemble. Ken purchased an incomplete print of six reels from Jeff, then managed to find a collector in Utah with four more reels. That still left one reel missing due to vinegar syndrome—which he thankfully found through the Widescreen Society in Long Beach. “I didn’t know how rare it was until I showed it at the American Cinematheque, and then I started getting calls from all over the world to borrow the print,” he says. Ken’s love for IB Technicolor is well known: when the dye-transfer processing plant shut down in Hollywood in 1975, he and several other collectors took out an obituary ad in Variety mourning the death of IB Technicolor.30 Of all the Technicolor prints in his archive, the crown jewel may be an original 35mm print of Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Although it recently topped the Sight & Sound critics’ poll of the 50 Greatest Films Ever Made, Vertigo wasn’t particularly successful on its first release, meaning there were no restrikes in Technicolor, and fewer than a half dozen original 35mm prints in good condition survive today. “If you saw the restoration, it was very good, but if you saw them compared, there’s so much lost on that film. The key thing is the first time he sees Kim Novak in a bar,” Ken says. “It’s almost three-dimensional.” But even an admitted IB Technicolor freak like Ken is philosophical about it. “Dye transfer doesn’t make a bad movie good,” he says—then Jeff chimes in, “It just makes it pretty.” Perhaps his sweetest moment with Vertigo came recently: “I got a call from someone at Universal. They’re doing a new Blu-ray edition of Vertigo, and they’re not happy with their colors, so they want to check it against my print,” Ken says with barely disguised emotion. “I always dreamed about getting a call like that.”

“That was my alternate life, was movies,” he observes about his love affair with cinema. “My happiest times were going to movies.” Almost inevitably, Ken is now actively trying to find a buyer for his film collection. “I can’t really imagine the day when I won’t have film prints to show,” he says, looking around his shop. But he also knows if he waits much longer, the value of his collection will continue to drop. “I used to enjoy running a 35mm print: ‘Oh, a changeover!’ But now, it’s an ordeal,” he admits. For his film screenings he asks one of his younger friends to come in and operate the projectors. These days he is mostly retired from his longtime business licensing stock footage at the Clip Joint and usually comes to the office to watch films at night with his buddies. I ask which of his hundreds of prints it will hurt most to part with. “Deep Throat,” he answers immediately—then cracks a grin. His dad’s sense of shtick is still with him. “Oh God. Well, the Disneys for one, because all the classics, all the DVDs don’t look anything like the prints,” he finally says.

Until then he’ll continue to do his regular Tuesday Night Film Club, where much of the fun involves a heated debate over which film to watch, and then even more activity as Ken tries to actually find the print in his crowded film vault. This particular night, Ken and his regulars finally arrive in a very roundabout way to the business of watching a movie. They settle on showing a 16mm Technicolor CinemaScope print of an obscure Robert Ryan/Virginia Mayo/Jeffrey Hunter western called The Proud Ones, which plays like Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo, only with its balls cut off. Beforehand they screen two chapters of a forgotten 1926 silent serial called Officer 444, directed by John Ford’s much-less-successful brother, Francis, and costarring his nephew Phil Ford. The good thing about silent serials is that you can ask questions while they’re playing and no one gets upset. Ken’s diabetic buddy in the rear explains during the film that Francis Ford had been a contract director at Universal a few years before: “But I think he had a drinking problem, because he wound up doing these cheapie states’ rights movies that were sold off territory by territory.” The crowd ventures to guess out loud that Officer 444 was shot in and around Los Angeles—someone observes that the rolling hills in one car chase looked like Chatsworth, or maybe Glendale predevelopment—and in fact, the outdoor locations, the views of a still relatively unspoiled L.A., give it more interest than it probably deserves. The most excitement it generates is when a getaway car zooms past a remote roadside diner with a sign reading, “El Camino Inn,” and Ken’s buddies debate where the hell that was, but in the end nobody can say for sure.