9.

The House of Clocks

It’s a mid-June afternoon as I park my car in the Inglewood/Lennox area of Los Angeles near the airport. Jets roar by overhead. Down the block is one of those self-storage places you see all over the city, beside the Lone Palm Trailer Lodge with a faded 1940s sign out of a Raymond Chandler novel. At the corner of Lennox and Prairie is a bench with a torn and distressed billboard trumpeting “Save $ With Academy Insurance!” next to a large, fenced-in carniceria with a doubtful sign in front that reads “Northgate Market Coming Soon,” although it’s unclear if the market is about to come or has already vacated the premises. It’s a run-down neighborhood, lined with single-story homes with small fenced-in yards: some well kept with fruit trees, but many with dead grass blowing in the front. A sunny, half-forgotten neighborhood, the kind with teenagers cruising along on wide-handled bikes, riding the wrong way against traffic, or two kids in tandem on one bike steering another beside them.

A half dozen wind chimes make a cacophony as I walk up to the house I’m looking for, the home of former electrician and film collector Peter Dyck. For a moment it’s not certain that anyone still lives here. The front windows are obscured by thick curtains along with an old theater sign that says, “Preview Tonight 8:30.” The front porch is cluttered with Wisk detergent boxes. I bang on the metal screen door, and Peter’s odd sing-song voice soon answers. As I step through the door, I’m not quite ready for what I’ll find.

Inside is the House of Clocks.

The first thing you notice is that there are clocks everywhere: twenty-seven by the owner’s count. There’s one by the door with a gray rubber alien face looming over it, and rows of them on the wall overhead. There are clocks in every corner, in the hallway leading to the bathroom, in the bathroom itself next to an old 1950s-vintage pay phone mounted on the wall with a red placard that confidently says, “You Can Dial Any Number In The Los Angeles Area.” There’s even a clock in the front room whose face shows a crucified Jesus, overlooking dusty plastic figures of Darth Vader and C-3PO. The clocks all show different times. In fact, I’m not sure there’s one that shows the correct time. They simply hang there, tick-ticking away out of sync, with no apparent rhyme or reason.

The master of all these timepieces, Peter Dyck, is in his early seventies, with gray hair, rosy, slightly cherubic features, and a pot belly. He’d make a good Bilbo Baggins if he were a few feet shorter. When he speaks, he has the strangely mesmerizing cadence of a TV evangelist, with an unusually dramatic emphasis on words and syllables, and when he talks about his mad movie love, he does it with a religious fervor, repeatedly gushing, “What a ride it was!” as if he were on a roller coaster that he never wanted to get off of. Although he’s retired now from active collecting, Peter was for several decades one of the best-known figures in the secretive L.A. subculture of dealers and collectors, and particularly important as one of the first to specialize in buying 35mm prints in the 1970s at a time when 35mm was considered either a “rich man’s hobby” or the province of the studios and commercial theaters. (By the 1990s the trend had reversed: the larger-gauge 35mm, with its superior image and sound quality, had shot up in price and rarity.) He’s also, not coincidentally, one of the more controversial people on the L.A. scene. As if aware of his thorny reputation, before my visit Peter asks me on the phone, somewhat mysteriously: “Have you noticed that film collectors don’t speak well of other people? They only talk about the evil other people do…. They never shade in the evil that they do,” he says, emphasizing the weirdly appropriate verb shade in his evangelist’s voice.

After I get over my initial surprise at seeing the House of Clocks, the next thing that hits me is the overwhelming clutter inside his place. At first glance it looks more like an abandoned storage unit than a living room. How could someone actually live here? The greater part of the room is an impassable mound of ratty sofas, old blankets, extension cords, metal film cans, and dust-covered equipment. There’s a 35mm projector in the far corner, but it’s not clear that Peter could even get to it without serious excavation. He notices my eyes wandering around the room trying to take it all in, and he smiles enigmatically. “Do you know who the star of High Noon is?” he asks coyly, already knowing the answer. “People think it’s Gary Cooper or Grace Kelly. It’s not—it’s the regulators.” I look at him, confused, until I see him pointing to a row of his regulator-style clocks. “The true star of High Noon,” he beams. Maybe this is the point to all the clocks, as the punchline to an obscure movie reference.

Jeff arrives shortly after I do and greets Peter like an old friend. He doesn’t seem to bat an eye at the chaos and clutter. Peter shifts some stacks of old newspapers, and Jeff and I manage to squeeze into one corner near a beautiful French poster for Gone With the Wind overlooking a huge, colorful Stardust Casino slot machine. As Peter plops down, he points to another old friend: “That’s a JAN projector,” he says fondly. “‘Joint Army Navy.’ It’s a military projector.” I look to where he’s gesturing: on the floor, covered with a thick layer of dust like white cake flour, are the exposed innards of what must be a 16mm projector, although it looks more like equipment from the deranged scientist’s lab in The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. Peter served in the U.S. Navy in the early 1960s, and it’s where he was first trained to care for film and do proper changeovers. It’s also, paradoxically, where he first learned to appreciate film as an art form: “The Music Man, Summer and Smoke,” he recalls, closing his eyes and rocking back and forth. “Ohhhh, I could never get tired of it: Flower Drum Song…. The ship got reissues of Les Miserables, All About Eve, but the crew just wasn’t interested in these old movies,” he says. “The movie locker was a room about six by four feet. I watched these films myself in the locker and got a movie education.” I can immediately identify with his experience of sitting in a tiny room with a rattling projector and being amazed by flickering images. For me it happened in a room barely bigger than a broom closet at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the late 1970s, watching 16mm prints of Jean Vigo’s luminous L’Atalante and Zéro de conduite and what survives of Erich von Stroheim’s masterpiece Greed. I know how Peter feels as he sighs and takes another look at his old friend, the JAN projector, the same kind that allowed him to fall in love with the movies. It looks like it hasn’t actually screened film in several decades, but he still keeps it close at hand.

Peter was born in 1942 and raised in southwest Los Angeles in a large five-bedroom house. Like a number of collectors we spoke with, he suffered the loss of a parent early on: his father died when he was six. His mother worked as a secretary to support the family, and he helped out “mowing lawns, pulling weeds, throwing newspapers to pay the bills,” along with his two brothers. After leaving the navy in 1964, he struggled to break in as an electrician in the union-dominated Hollywood shops, until he got a recommendation from neighbor Dan Borzage, brother of director Frank Borzage (7th Heaven), and a notable character in his own right, who used to play accordion on John Ford’s sets to lighten the mood. “Next thing I knew I was working on The Beverly Hillbillies, then The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Daktari,” he recalls. His electrical work soon put him in the homes of celebrities he’d only seen on-screen as shadows in the navy locker, actors like Raymond Massey, Groucho Marx, and Norma Shearer, and director Alfred Hitchcock. “I fixed his dryer outlet; he was amazed,” he says about Hitchcock, then shakes his head sadly. “When I went up in the attic, you know what I saw? His film collection! Rear Window, Vertigo. Sixteen-millimeter prints, cooking up there.” It’s a strange image indeed of Hitchcock’s own prints moldering away like the desiccated corpse of Norman Bates’s mother in Psycho.

In the early 1970s Peter became friends with one of the darkest and strangest figures in the Hollywood film underground, Tom Dunnahoo of Thunderbird Films. A self-styled “film pirate” who once posed for the Los Angeles Times wearing an eye-patch, and who routinely passed out on the floor of his film lab drunk on Drambuie, Dunnahoo was one of the first dealers nailed by the FBI in 1971 for illegally selling dupe prints of copyrighted films.39 Peter, who still regards Dunnahoo with fondness, did electrical work for him and brought him rare 35mm prints of titles like the W. C. Fields shorts The Dentist (1932) and The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933), which Dunnahoo would duplicate in 16mm for the collectors market. Peter got paid in prints of other films that he wanted. “But it’s hard to find good prints, without scratches and splices,” Peter recalls of his days tracking down these elusive titles. “It’s like a car: if it’s all beat up, people don’t want to drive it.” Possibly the rarest title that Peter uncovered was an original two-color Technicolor print of The Toll of the Sea (1922), a silent adaptation of Madame Butterfly, starring Anna May Wong in her first lead role, and written by pioneering female screenwriter Frances Marion. More than for the cast or script, it’s notable as only the second Technicolor feature ever made. Sadly, one of the reels started “becoming goo” on Peter, a pointed reminder that when film goes bad, it goes bad quickly and completely.

While we talk, Peter repeatedly interrupts by showing Jeff handwritten lists of features and trailers that he and a friend have for sale. It’s an irresistible distraction: “Lady and the Tramp, four-track mag. That’s rare, I’ve only seen one other of that …” “And Oliver, too. They haven’t gone vinegar yet.” “Mag Oliver, that’s a rare title.” “Man, what a movie! Sir Carol Reed directed. Excellent.” Try as I might, it’s hard to keep them on topic. It’s an ironic picture: Jeff, who gave up film dealing several years ago after he sold his massive collection of 50,000+ trailers to the Packard Humanities Institute, and Peter, who by his own admission has stopped buying and selling prints, and yet neither can resist going over the lists and discussing prices. Once a collector, always a collector. Like many I spoke with, Peter seems to have backed into selling prints as a way of feeding his habit, and it was this activity that, almost inevitably, put him on the radar for the FBI and the Justice Department in the early 1970s. It’s a wound that has never closed for him. When I broach the subject, he digs around in the stack of old newspapers that he shifted for us to sit and, in surprisingly short order, retrieves several yellowed copies of the Los Angeles Times from 1975. The headlines still fairly scream out, “L.A. Film Piracy: Thousands Copied, Distributed” and “U.S. Indicts 16 in Movie, TV Film Pirating Case.”40 I’m frankly amazed that Peter is able to locate these telltale articles so quickly in all this clutter, but maybe he likes to keep them, like the JAN projector, close at hand. Jeff takes one of the papers from him and scans it silently. “This is my bust, and yours,” he finally says, then proceeds to list the other dealers and collectors who were charged along with the two of them in the notorious 1975 film busts. I ask if I can take pictures of them holding the papers up, and both agree. It’s a strange moment, photographing these men linked by their shared love for a dying medium and by their legal troubles four decades ago.

“There was always a sense of, yes, the FBI was watching you, because we always carried movies in bags or boxes, so if there was any picture being taken, they didn’t have anything,” Peter recalls of those days. “Nothing was mentioned unnecessarily on the telephone except a meeting time or place.” His own troubles stemmed from his association with Roy H. Wagner, later a celebrated cinematographer, who was interviewed separately for this book. Both men confirm that Wagner put out mail order lists of prints for sale by Peter and other collectors, although they differ on the issue of permission: Peter says it was done without his knowledge; Wagner insists that Peter was aware but later reneged on the deal. According to Wagner, Peter’s house looked much the same four decades ago: “There was film stacked everywhere. Peter used to come to work and he’d have his trunk loaded with film,” he says. Much of the clandestine trade in prints was done from hand to hand, with no paper trail; putting out a list meant the risk of exposing yourself. “I was at Larry Edmunds Bookshop one day,” Wagner remembers. “And a guy I knew who was a film collector came up and said, ‘I think the FBI’s investigating you.’”

When the feds burst into Wagner’s home in September 1974, Peter’s name quickly came up. He was arrested and charged several months later, but unlike most of the other men indicted, he refused to cut a deal. His trial was a short one: “Roy Wagner decided to do me a favor and not show up at the trial,” Peter says. Charges against him were dismissed, but he openly admits that he was illegally copying at least one film at the time: “I did dupe Paper Moon, and they took these dupes to an expert on the stand during my trial. And they were so perfect he could not determine if they were dupes or originals,” he says with obvious, if possibly misplaced, pride.

Although the arrest was devastating for him—“Now I was like a leper, because my name was in print,” he says—he continued unabated in buying and selling prints. The late 1970s and 1980s were, if anything, his glory years. He talks about the prints that passed through his hands as if they were old lovers: “I tell you, when I got Thunderball back in the 1980s, I had a party at my house, and everybody was just laughing and jumping for joy. I said, ‘I don’t want to break anybody’s heart, but I’m not going to sell it.’” When I ask if collecting was primarily a social impulse for him, he nods enthusiastically: “You know what was wonderful? We could do film deals or poster deals and I didn’t have to run all over town. All the people came to my house. I had a big pitcher of punch, and popcorn … people could go outside and have a cigarette. The only time it was really rough was when I ran Gone With the Wind. They didn’t get home until three AM!” His eyes glow as he recounts the gatherings gone by, and I can almost see the friends streaming out of his house into the cool night air, drunk on Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable and Max Steiner’s score. Probably the rarest prints he owned during this period were two British IB Technicolor prints of Star Wars. Technicolor stopped its dye-transfer operations in the United States in 1974 but continued in the United Kingdom for several more years, with Star Wars being one of the last films struck in dye-transfer, in 1977. Technicolor copies of it have since become legendary, and to own a pair is almost unheard of.41 “I have two of ’em: my ‘everyday’ print and my ‘Sunday-going-to-meeting’ print,” Peter says, still referring to them in the present tense, even though he’s since sold both. “You just can’t imagine the camaraderie of those IB Star Wars.” It’s an odd choice of words, camaraderie, to refer to his relationship with an inanimate object like a film print, but it’s quite obvious that for Peter, film love is highly personal. “My IB of Bambi—you know in the forest fire scene they hadn’t finished coloring in the animals when they huddle on the island?—my IB of Bambi you could see the dust on the glass,” he says, using the possessive “my.” My Bambi, my Star Wars. For collectors like Peter, owning a particularly rare or beautiful print makes them partners in the creative process of filmmaking, at least in their minds.

In the end, it’s the loss not of the prints themselves, but of the other collectors and film lovers that Peter feels so keenly: “The hobby’s kind of reached its final resting place,” he says, echoing a sentiment I heard over and over. “All the keynote participants are deceased, and the hobby just isn’t what it used to be anymore. You got a real satisfaction out of getting together with other like-minded people. More and more I looked to getting old films because they have a lastingness about them that new films don’t.” One of the fellow L.A.-area collectors he no longer speaks with is former truck driver and graphic designer Rik Lueras, one of the few Latino collectors in the field.⁴² The break between the two men had nothing to do with collecting, though. “I had a falling out with Rik. He alleged that I molested his son, which wasn’t true,” Peter says flatly. No charges were filed in the incident, which both men discuss openly—although their opinions of it differ greatly. The topic almost immediately changes to Lueras’s habit of putting lemon oil on prints to try to extend their life span, which Peter seems much more comfortable discussing. Whether true or not, the incident—and how quickly he changed the subject—hints at a darker and more troubling undercurrent in the lives of many collectors: their inability to deal with or confront real emotional trauma in their lives, and how they retreat into the illusory safety of cinema fantasy.

Toward the end of the interview, Peter suddenly remarks, “One thing about the movie industry—you see, the studio people feel film collectors are not collectors. They’re pirates.” He uses the term that he and Jeff were publicly branded with forty years earlier. “The studios want to use just about the nastiest word, but one thing we all have in common is we love movies.” It’s a hopeful thought, that the former combatants could lay their arms aside and agree on one thing, their shared passion for film—but I’m not sure I believe it. Peter quickly moves on from such magnanimous musings: “You remember I had a beet-red print of Giant? Well, Louie Federici43 ran it and borrowed a beautiful IB print of Giant. Afterward he sent it back to Warners, and you know what they got? A beet-red print,” he says, face lighting up. “You swapped it out?” Jeff asks. “I did. And later I traded it to you for Singin’ in the Rain. How about that, huh?” he says, savoring his past triumph as if it were yesterday.

The shadows are starting to lengthen. I suddenly realize we’ve been sitting here talking for hours with the twenty-seven regulator clocks tick-ticking away all around us, and it’s nearly sundown. I get a little shiver up my spine, picturing Peter here surrounded by his decaying empire like Miss Havisham in Dickens’s Great Expectations with her petrified wedding cake. I stand quickly.

As we leave I ask for one final photo of Peter outside his house by the “Preview Tonight 8:30” sign in his window. He points to it. “Louie Federici gave me that. It’s from the Encore Theater,” he observes. Then I snap the picture. Sadly, the Encore, and almost all the other classic Los Angeles repertory cinemas, are just a memory. Everything about him and that place, from the clocks in every room to the chaos of film reels and movie posters and dirty blankets and pill bottles and stacks of bills, screams obsession. Like so many collectors we spoke with, Peter truly and deeply believes in the magic of movies. Movies were and still are his one great love and his religion. You can sense that, listening to his evangelist’s voice falling and rising as he talks about keeping all his friends out until the early hours screening Gone With the Wind. He’s invested so much time and devotion into the movies, and he became part of that magic in some strange way—and now it’s all slipped away, and the friends have all gone, and even the rivals have gone. He’s left by himself in the House of Clocks on Lennox Boulevard, with the shades drawn and the “Preview Tonight 8:30” sign in the window announcing a screening that never comes.