16.

The Theory of Creative Destruction

Although most of the collectors and dealers that Jeff and I interviewed focused on film prints—meaning feature films, shorts, and trailers—in fact, there was and still is a vast quantity of 16mm and sometimes 35mm prints of vintage TV shows out there. One of the most remarkable and little-known collections in the United States has been assembled over several decades by a man in Orange County, California, named Ronnie James, whose specialty is vintage TV, including rare kinescopes of live TV broadcasts from the late 1940s and early 1950s, unsold pilots, paper research materials, and more. By his own estimate he has over ten thousand prints, making it arguably the largest private archive of rare TV materials anywhere in the world—and one of the largest private film collections, period.

Prior to the introduction of videotape, most of the television that America watched—including episodes of I Love Lucy, Gilligan’s Island, Big Valley, Gomer Pyle, and F Troop, as well as feature films and commercials—was broadcast off of prints at the local TV station. Anyone of a certain age will remember those “Please Wait: We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties” messages that sometimes popped up on-screen. That’s what happened when the print broke or tore a splice, and the underpaid operator running it slapped that sign up while he was frantically trying to fix the print and get it on-air again. When TV stations across the country converted to videotape in the 1980s and 1990s, a vast quantity of used 16mm prints of old TV episodes and features flooded the underground collectors market. Middlemen were actually paid by the stations to haul these prints away for salvage or destruction; many were sold instead to dealers, who in turn sold them to collectors.54

Ronnie’s enormous collection is all the more remarkable for being so imperiled: the prints are rarely rented or loaned out these days and sit, unused and unseen, in Ronnie’s home, to which he rarely allows visitors. It’s an invaluable and literally irreplaceable treasure trove of material that desperately needs to be preserved, but who will buy it? When I mention Ronnie’s collection to the head of a major film and TV archive, he shoots back, “Who’s going to pay us to store a collection of that size? Is he going to pay for the storage?” That attitude, of course, isn’t going to convince many collectors to part with their precious materials.

“I’d rather have some other poor fool have the expense and the anchor, the burden of a large collection,” Ronnie sighs early in our conversation. Of all the people Jeff and I interviewed, he is perhaps the most thoughtful about the grander implications of being a collector in the digital age, and also the most despondent. “I’ve found it to be depressing that what was once a viable, large, and important collection has been rendered obsolete. I do not feel any of the joy or excitement that used to come with the collection. It’s a dead collection,” he says flatly. Several times he repeats a kind of perverse fantasy, that he could travel back in time and warn his five-year-old self not to start collecting: “My advice to the five-year-old or six-year-old is, ‘Own as little as possible. Own just as much as you can pack into two suitcases.’ Much more liberating.” The adult Ronnie is now in his mid-sixties, with glasses, a floppy beach hat that hangs down low, and a striped short-sleeve shirt. When he speaks, his voice has a deliberate tone with more than a hint of melancholy. It is, of course, his experiences as a five-year-old that set him on this path. He was born in 1951 and has lived in the same house all his life. As a young boy he’d get home from school, turn on the TV, and sit there enthralled by series like The Adventures of Superman, The Adventures of Kit Carson, the still-controversial The Amos ’n Andy Show, and The Mickey Mouse Club.⁵⁵ I ask jokingly if he was in love as a boy with Annette Funicello, like the rest of America. “The prettiest Mouseketeer was probably Cheryl Holdridge,” he replies.

“That kind of planted the seed for me to become a film collector later on,” he observes about his early love for 1950s television. “Because I wanted to see things that I had heard about but could not see.” His funds for buying prints were limited, but after discovering magazines like The Big Reel and Movie Collector’s World, he soon realized there was a huge quantity of TV prints being offered for sale at relatively cheap prices, and also that there were few others specializing in this field. “I always tried to acquire things that I recognized as not easily viewable, and that meant old television shows: kinescopes of network TV shows, an odd cartoon or feature or short, but mostly television.” Among the rarities in his collection are a 1948 closed-circuit pilot of the Arthur Godfrey and His Friends show and the unsold pilot for The Dick Van Dyke Show, which was originally titled Head of the Family, starring comedian Carl Reiner. “Reiner wrote it and starred in it. It didn’t sell; then they reshot it later with Dick Van Dyke,” he says about the genesis of the famous sitcom.

“As far as I know, I have the only original 35mm answer print of the pilot for The Adventures of Superboy,” he says of another rarity, a 1961 prequel series to the famed The Adventures of Superman. “The pilot is awful. They commissioned and had thirteen complete shooting scripts for the Superboy series. This is the cheapness of DC Comics at the time: they selected the one that would be cheapest to produce.”

Although vintage TV isn’t normally thought of in terms of stunning cinematography, since many shows were produced on sound stages with limited budgets, I ask if there are any prints in his collection that really stand out in terms of their photography. He pauses for a moment. “I think by a wide margin the best-filmed show on a weekly basis in terms of the quality of the imagery was Four Star Playhouse,” he says, referring to the excellent and still-underrated anthology series that ran from 1952 through 1956 and featured a rotation of stars, including Dick Powell, David Niven, Ida Lupino, and Charles Boyer, and writers like the young Blake Edwards. “One need only look at the film noir titles, like the Dante’s Inferno titles starring Dick Powell,” Ronnie continues. “The number of set-ups, the lighting look just as good as any noir from the 1940s.” Of all the unseen treasures sitting on shelves in Ronnie’s garage, the one that arouses my curiosity the most is an unsold pilot from 1956 called The Ethan Allen Story, starring TV stalwart Rhodes Reason, based on the Revolutionary War hero. It’s not the subject or cast that interests me, though. It’s the fact that the score was written by the great Bernard Herrmann, who would soon compose the score to Hitchcock’s Vertigo. I ask what he plans to do with the pilot. “It just sits here. I ran it at a film party a few years ago. That’s pretty much it,” he shrugs.

As Ronnie’s TV collection grew and grew, it started providing a steady income stream for him, licensing footage for documentaries and specials on golden age Hollywood celebrities. (He also supplemented his income for years by making quasi-legal 16mm dupes of Beatles concert footage until the growth of VHS killed that market.) Up until the mid-2000s, he estimates, one 16mm print a day was arriving at his house. Do some simple math, and it’s easy to see how he wound up with ten thousand prints in his garage. “I relied on reputation and word of mouth, and I had more business than I could handle at one time,” he says. “At one time most of the people who wanted stuff knew that this was one of the best archival TV collections, and they always called.” Even when they called, though, it wasn’t easy to get Ronnie on the phone. I remember trying to reach him several times in the mid-1990s about renting vintage TV prints for Cinematheque shows, with little luck. Even when Ronnie answered, he could be, to put it mildly, a bit prickly. His reputation doesn’t seem to bother him: “One of the biggest dangers to film are film collectors. Film collectors destroy and damage a ton of film, because they’re unwilling to do the basics before they do something. Unwilling, lazy, stupid, cheap,” he says about his brothers-in-arms.

“In 1995 none of us would have foreseen that film would have been dead in ten years. But film essentially died in 2005. I mean, now we’re just going through the motions of burying it altogether,” he says about the cataclysmic changes that have nearly overwhelmed him and many other collectors. I ask why he picked the date of 2005. “It just seemed to me that that’s pretty much when DVDs and Blu-rays overtook VHS completely. Film collectors were really bailing on their collections,” he replies. “A lot of the people that I used to deal with vanished. The demand really started to fall off for film that I had at an accelerating rate.” Although almost all the collectors Jeff and I spoke with addressed these changes, Ronnie has what I would call a unique philosophical grasp of the death of film collecting.

“Are you familiar with the term creative destruction?” he asks. I shake my head no. “Creative destruction is a term that was coined in 1942 in a work entitled Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, by a man named Joseph Schumpeter,” he replies. “You can refer to creative destruction either as a paradox, or paradoxical term, an absurd term, a self-contradictory term, or an oxymoron. The theory of Schumpeter’s tale of creative destruction is that society creates new things that have an adverse and usually very destructive effect on older things. This is something that’s not new, but Schumpeter was the person who actually came up with this theory and coined it. Just as an example, do you know what the number-one primary industry was on the northeast coast of the United States during the 1800s?” Jeff hazards a guess that it was either whaling or clothing. “It was whaling,” Ronnie responds. “And the whales were processed—a euphemism for butchered—aboard the whaling ship, and all the different parts of the whale, from the oil to bone, were sold. This is a business that just does not exist anymore. The horse and carriage have been replaced by the automobile. What I didn’t realize is, the one part of creative destruction I was blind to—and this is very important—is that creative destruction continually works on at an accelerating basis. Technology keeps developing at a more and more accelerated pace. Look at cell phones: whatever cell phone comes out today is going to be obsolete in a year. But creative destruction has, in more recent years with the development of the computer, more or less destroyed the book industry, the newspaper industry, and changed the way people make phone calls. It has leveled almost all of the used book stores in the United States, brick-and-mortar book stores. You still have people selling books, but you no longer have the brick-and-mortar stores. The computer has by virtue of creative destruction also hurt true research, and the quality of research, and the quality of reporting. It leveled the playing field, so that people without qualification now can be seen on the same level as qualified reporters who have certain standards. It’s also hurt my research and my reference library, because now people just go online and find out things. It’s not a question of whether the information is correct or incorrect or supported by any kind of proof. The general public will support anything that is cheapest, fastest, and easiest.

“Creative destruction has destroyed film collecting. It’s hurt film preservation and hurt research,” he says with a profound sense of hopelessness. In many ways I understand and empathize with his despair. How can you argue with history? I ask if he continues to buy prints, and he responds with a bitter chuckle. “I don’t have any more room. The cost. And I’m burned out.” Jeff asks if he’d be willing to sell his collection, and Ronnie responds yes, if he could find the right buyer—or any buyer. “I don’t want necessarily a lot of money. I just want some money. What else am I going to do? I’m over sixty years old.”

The obsolescence of Ronnie’s 10,000+ print collection is one thing, but there’s also the loss of the knowledge that he’s built up during fifty years of studying and researching vintage television shows. There is what he calls an “archaeology” to handling old TV prints. “When you have a TV show, is it first-run, is it syndication, has it been reworked in some way? A print of a television show is much more likely to have different versions than a theatrical feature,” he points out, then launches into a dizzyingly complicated discussion of A-wind/B-wind TV prints from the 1950s, John D. Maurer soundtracks (“It’s kind of a weird cross between a variable-density and area track,” he explains), and other minutiae that soon has my head spinning. “It’s like a dead language,” he says quietly about the obscure facts swimming around his head. “Who can I talk to about the configuration of Ziv production numbers? Ziv was one of the most prominent producers of filmed television programming in the 1950s. It’s the last name of the man who founded the company. You’d see the Ziv logo in big letters at the end of Highway Patrol and Sea Hunt.” Ziv production numbers may not mean much to you and me—but it doesn’t make them any less important. “You cannot know the history of U.S. television without knowing Ziv,” Ronnie insists. “If you don’t know the most famous, most productive company from the late 1950s, then you just don’t know anything, really.”

I ask how Ronnie spends his time these days, and he responds that he does a little research to keep busy, more out of routine than anything else. He recently had his first film rental in many months, licensing a print of an early 1950s show called Rocket to the Stars that featured visits to celebrities’ houses, in this case the home of Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester. He earned seven hundred dollars from the rental. “I’m kind of resigned to the fact that it’s going to sit here until I die,” he says when I ask if he’s considered selling off his vast print and research collection piece by piece on eBay. “I’m just afraid that people would look at my collection and think it’s a hoarder’s. It’s really not a hoarder’s collection per se, but that is a fear of mine, that someone will take it for being someone who’s collected every soda bottle they could find. That is a sad possibility. I just don’t know what to do.”