A Woman in Film
Pennsylvania-based collector Hillary Hess is one of the few women active in a field that was, and continues to be, almost entirely dominated by men. It’s not the only thing that makes her stand out: by her own admission she’s drawn to films that are bizarre, strange, and forgotten by most people, even diehard buffs. “I would never buy a print of A Christmas Story or Gone With the Wind or The Wizard of Oz. Everybody has seen those movies,” she shrugs. Instead, her taste runs to films like the indescribably weird A Visit to Santa (1963), which is something like Christmas as envisioned by David Lynch circa Twin Peaks. “It’s only ten minutes long and produced by Clem Williams Films in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,” she gushes. “I’ve never seen a film that violated every rule of filmmaking so quickly in such a short period of time. It’s gloriously bad … I was really excited to get two prints of it.” When I ask if she’s ever felt out of place as a female collector in an almost all-male subculture, she laughs: “I’ve always been odd, so this is just one facet of the gem that is me.” A moment later she grows serious. “In some ways I’m a fish out of water,” she admits. “But I’ve never felt out of place in the community. Everybody’s always been very welcoming.”
Together with her radio-buff husband, John, Hillary continues to run vintage 35mm and 16mm films in their basement screening room. It’s a unique American tradition that is sadly disappearing with the films themselves. Their home theater is no movie palace, but it’s wonderfully warm and inviting, with a black-and-white checkerboard linoleum floor, old-school wood paneling, comfy lounge chairs, and a ten-foot-wide screen. Best of all, the booth is equipped with two beautiful 35mm Simplex E7 projectors that were purchased at a benefit auction from the Fulton Opera House in nearby Lancaster, Pennsylvania. At the time she bought them, though, Hillary didn’t have adequate space, and they were temporarily put in storage. So she and John started shopping for a house that was big enough to fit them in. When I ask if she and John really bought their house to accommodate the projectors, she nods: “That was a very big part of it.” Now that’s a true film collector. Together, she and John put together themed programs, most recently a screening of Buster Keaton’s One Week (1920) and The General (1926), with old intermission slides from the nickelodeon era and Hillary accompanying the films on piano. “We were trying to get people to forget they ever knew what a sound movie is,” she says, then adds proudly, “One of my friends said, ‘The best time I ever had was seeing The General. I’d never seen a silent movie before, but that was the best experience.’ People don’t know what they like until we shove it down their throats!”
Her motivation for collecting is also quite unique and has more to do with a keen awareness of history and the prints as a physical bridge to a lost era. “Movies are like a time machine,” as she puts it. “You’re seeing the preservation of a time and people who no longer exist, or no longer exist in that way. That’s something that’s always drawn me to movies, that kind of preservation.” Most collectors buy prints because they love a specific movie, or the visual quality of IB Technicolor, but for Hillary, the print itself is a window into the distant past; she’s like an archaeologist standing in front of a Mayan glyph and trying to imagine the people who carved it long ago. “It’s important to have the closest thing to the real artifact. For me it’s not so much the story you’re watching, it’s about the format, the experience. It has to be as close to the original as possible. Even if it’s several generations away, you’re seeing the same shadows that were there on the set that day. A DVD’s great, but I know I’m watching reconstituted imagery, and it takes me a little further away, no matter how clear it is.”
Hillary was born in 1964 in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, part of the Pennsylvania Dutch Country, an area rich in antique stores, auctions, and estate sales. “There were a lot of antiques around the house,” she recalls of her childhood. “I was infused with this sense that the world didn’t begin when I was born.” Her first film purchase was by serendipity: “One time we were at an antique market in Adamstown, Pennsylvania. There was a small, small reel for a toy projector. It was 35mm, and it was for the little Keystone hand-cranked projector.” The tiny reel contained clips from a Krazy Kat cartoon, a Charlie Chaplin comedy, and footage of Charles Lindbergh, but unfortunately it had a bad splice. So she turned for help to a much older and somewhat eccentric local figure, the man who would spark her lifelong interest in collecting.
“In our neighborhood, about a block and a half away, there was a little movie theater,” she remembers. “Everybody in the neighborhood knew about this theater. They assumed it was built out of a garage, but I later found out the man built it purposely as a movie theater.” He was a local collector and exhibitor named John Stegmoyer. In surviving photos he looks something like my own steelworker grandfather: he’s wearing a thick red-and-black plaid shirt so typical of the Pennsylvania woods and has a deeply lined face and somewhat guarded eyes. At his makeshift neighborhood cinema, Stegmoyer would run Elvis Presley movies or the latest James Bond film with a Three Stooges short and a cartoon, all for half a buck. One screening stays with her to this day: “He showed I Shot Jesse James. I think it was Samuel Fuller’s first movie. Stegmoyer said, ‘The song you hear in it, “The Ballad of Jesse James,” it wasn’t made for the movie. It was actually quite old.’ That’s when ‘Steggie’ played his own vintage Edison cylinder recording of the song on the antique phonograph he had in the theater by the screen. That made such an impression on me. And again, he did it for ten-year-old and twelve-year-old kids. I don’t know how many remember that, but I can remember it as clear as day. The connection, it put everything in context. I thought, ‘Wow, he’s doing this for a bunch of kids just because he cares that much.’ You had to appreciate that.”
Barely in her teens, Hillary brought her 35mm reel with the bad splice to Stegmoyer. “He said later, ‘I couldn’t believe this little girl was bringing up a film for me to fix,’” she remembers. It was the beginning of an important friendship. “As time went on we talked. When I was in high school, he said, ‘You know, I have a bunch of friends.’” Through Stegmoyer, Hillary was introduced to an all-male circle of collectors in the area, men who were at least as old as her father, and many of whom had served in WWII and Korea. “A couple of them were projectionists during the war, in their unit, on their ship. That’s probably how they got interested in it. Those are the ones who hosted the movie parties, the gang accumulated the other members from co-workers and word-of-mouth,” she observes. From her descriptions of the gatherings, they sound like pretty masculine affairs. “There was a lot of drinking beer and smoking while watching the movies,” she admits with a laugh. When I ask if she was the only woman at these gatherings, she replies, “Sometimes the wives would come to watch something.” I try to picture a teenaged Hillary among these older WWII-generation film buffs with their Pabst beers and their unfiltered Lucky Strikes—and it’s a strange picture indeed. But she insists she always felt at home: “During the holidays, for instance, one person would show White Christmas, and the whole family would come in. It was always a family thing. There was never any competition or condescension among these people. They were really glad to have more people to watch their movies.” It’s obviously that very welcoming spirit of inclusion that she and her husband have continued with their own basement cinema.
She studied film history and production at Penn State but after college decided that a career in the movie business wasn’t for her. “I found that I actually enjoyed the exhibition of movies more than the making of them,” she readily admits now. Through her mentor Stegmoyer (who has since passed away), she was introduced to magazines like Movie Collector’s World and began modestly, buying 35mm trailers of films starring her idol Marilyn Monroe, like The Misfits and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. “I figured the movie itself was about the best collectible you could get of a movie star.” Once she met her future husband, John, and they found a home for their Simplex E7s, she began acquiring more and more film. I ask if she has any favorites among her collection of oddities. “John would vehemently disagree with me, but one of my favorite films is A*P*E in 3-D,” she responds without a moment’s hesitation. “It’s a Korean film that came out in 1976 to capitalize on the remake of King Kong by Dino De Laurentiis. In some places, A*P*E was called Nuevo King Kong; it’s Super King Kong in Asia. See the poster online, because it shows the ape holding a shark, and it says, ‘See Ape fight Deadly Jaws!’ It’s a rip-off of Jaws on top of everything else. The poster is part of the enjoyment of the movie. I tell people, ‘Look at this poster, and tell me if the movie delivers everything the poster promises.’ It’s in 3-D, that’s what got me. It’s the famous movie where the gorilla gives the helicopters the finger. It’s so horrible but it’s so funny.”
“Maybe I’m just like a contrarian,” she says about her fondness for outré and bizarre cinema. “When people think of old movies, they think of films like Casablanca. When I seek out stuff, I seek out the really oddball. Sometimes the worse, the better for me.” She pauses for a moment, then continues. “That came from my friend John Stegmoyer. He said, ‘Every movie is worth watching.’ To some point I can understand what he meant. I would give every movie at least one chance. Somebody worked hard on it somewhere.” She and her husband have slowed down their collecting somewhat, although she continues to buy 16mm prints off eBay, most recently Mr. Dynamite, a forgotten 1941 programmer starring Lloyd Nolan as a ballplayer who tangles with Nazi saboteurs, and ironically, the Dick Contino–starring juvenile delinquent picture Daddy-O that fellow collector Joe Dante succinctly calls “a turkey.” “May you unhinge your jaw laughing at that!” she says admiringly of Daddy-O. As the conversation wraps up, I ask again if she has any thoughts on being one of the few women in the collecting subculture. “I only know of one woman who’s my age who’s as obsessed with old movies,” she confirms, then adds: “I can’t give you an actual reason why the content itself should have such a gender bias. Maybe it’s the same reason why guys like old cars, because they want to revisit their youth. They go for the cars they couldn’t get when they were kids!”