The Score
In almost every field of obsessive collecting, whether it’s comic books or rare coins or baseball cards, there exists a powerful fantasy of an untouched treasure trove, an elephants’ graveyard that has somehow escaped the hungry claws of other collectors. There’s an almost irresistible pull to it, the thought that someday you’ll stumble onto an estate sale or thrift store or abandoned building filled with the forgotten objects of your dreams, whatever they may be. Movies themselves have eagerly fed this fantasy, from the literal elephants’ graveyard sought by poachers in the 1930s Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films to the vast government warehouse that swallows up the ark at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Occasionally the fantasy becomes reality, as it did in 1977 for twenty-one-year-old Boulder, Colorado–area comic book collector Chuck Rozanski when he stumbled on a cache of over sixteen thousand golden age comics in near-mint condition—the legendary Edgar Church/Mile High Collection. I had a brief taste of it myself in 2001 on the outskirts of Tokyo late one evening. I was led by my friend Yoshiki past the sleepy front-gate guard at Daiei Studios and into the studio’s movie print and poster archive, where for several hours I was allowed to purchase (illegally, of course) dozens of unused posters for 1960s Zatoichi and Gamera films, still in their original brown paper rolls. Even at the time, I knew this moment was something special, the glimpse of a poster collector’s nirvana that would never come again.
On November 7, 1997, the entertainment industry trade paper Variety ran an article by Rex Weiner with the headline “Discarded Prints Prompt Probe: Film Shipper’s Move Leaves Prints Behind.” It was about a film depot named Gilboy Inc., in the bleak, industrial Southern California neighborhood of Pico Rivera. Gilboy was for a number of collectors and dealers the ultimate score: a vast warehouse of film prints abandoned by their owners. Jeff describes it as “truly a treasure hunt in every way,” and dealer Al Beardsley says simply that it was “the best you’ve ever seen.” But like every dream of Shangri-La, there’s a price to be paid for a glimpse of heaven.
The Gilboy depot itself was—and still is—an enormous warehouse taking up an entire block in a nondescript neighborhood of indoor swap meets and welding supply places. Inside, enormous steel girders support the roof overhead, and UFO-shaped lights illuminate the cavernous interior, looking like something from a 1950s sci-fi flick hovering in mid-air. The best way to get around is probably by forklift or golf cart, given the warehouse’s huge size.
At the time of the Variety article in 1997, Gilboy Inc. was operating as a franchise of National Film Service (NFS), a fifty-year old company that handled transportation of tens of thousands of prints for over thirty major studios and independent distributors, including such big names as Sony/Columbia, Paramount, and New Line. But all was not well with parent company NFS. A private letter dated September 8, 1997, from Rodger Hunter of Gilboy Inc. to Irv Rosen of Samuel Rosen & Sons, landlords of the Pico Rivera warehouse, indicated that Gilboy and NFS were seriously behind in rent to Rosen & Sons, and that NFS appeared to be on the brink of bankruptcy. “At a recent stockholders’ meeting, the hat was passed in an attempt to improve the cash flow situation that is threatening a bank foreclosure,” Hunter admitted. He confirmed that Gilboy Inc. could no longer expect payments from its parent company to cover the more than $23,000 in rent and taxes still owed to Rosen & Sons, or any future rent. In essence, Gilboy was out of the film business. In a paragraph that would have serious repercussions in what was to come, Hunter stated: “As for the remaining film and fixtures in the Pico Rivera building, please feel free to dispose of them as you see fit. Unfortunately, Gilboy does not have the resources or the manpower to deal with it. NFS was supposed to assist in the cleanup, but won’t respond to my faxes or phone calls” (italics mine). In the November 7 Variety article, Don Trivette, general manager of NFS, defended his firm’s actions, claiming that it had “moved all of its customers’ films from Pico Rivera to its new depot in Glendale during one week in July.” Despite his assurances, a vast mountain of film was left behind at the Gilboy depot: over five thousand prints, according to a later accounting.59
With a building literally stuffed to the rafters with prints abandoned by its former tenant Gilboy and parent company NFS, landlord Samuel Rosen & Sons decided they were well within their legal rights to sell them off. There is no surviving inventory of everything that was left sitting at Gilboy in 1997, but among the five thousand prints were rare 35mm copies of classics like Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera, and the Basil Rathbone–starring The Hound of the Baskervilles, along with more recent titles, including Platoon (Hemdale), Predator (20th Century Fox), Dead Poets Society (Disney/Touchstone), Hook and Cliffhanger (Sony), A Few Good Men and The Princess Bride (Castle Rock), Black Beauty (Warner Bros.), Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (New Line), and many others. Nearly every major studio and independent distributor was represented there.
The first collector that Rosen & Sons let walk through the vast loading dock was a man named Randy “Cochise” Miller, whose daytime job was producing on-air promo spots for CBS and NBC on shows like Magnum P.I. and The Equalizer. He explains his unusual nickname: “The smog was really bad in 1973 [when I came out to L.A.], and I wore contact lenses. So to keep the hair out of my eyes, I wore headbands, and people would say, ‘You look like an Indian.’ I came up with the nickname ‘Cochise,’ and it stuck.” Like many collectors, Randy sold prints on the side through The Big Reel to fund his hobby. He found out about Gilboy through a friend named David who collected movie projectors and who knew the building’s owners. “I had never even heard of Gilboy before I went there with my friend,” he confesses. “It was rundown. The skylights were leaking, so there were water puddles everywhere, and stacks of film everywhere.” In one room hundreds of cans were thrown in a pile, forming a literal mountain of film. Another was filled with hundreds of Warner Bros. and MGM cartoon shorts from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. “It was kind of sad to be a film collector and see the prints were abandoned here. It was a graveyard for film,” he says. Randy, ironically, collected mostly 16mm himself, and since Gilboy contained almost exclusively 35mm prints, he wound up selling almost everything he bought. I ask if he remembers any of the prints he purchased: “The jewel of the crown that we found was a 3-D print of the 1950s film The Maze. I also found two 35mm prints of We the Living, the 1940s Ayn Rand film,” he says. “That 3-D movie The Maze sold for about $3,500 to Germany to a 3-D archive there.”
Jeff was second in line to get a crack at the ultimate film score. When I ask him to describe his impressions of the Gilboy depot, he shakes his head. “Oh my goodness. It was huge, I don’t know how big—in my mind it was acres and acres,” he replies. “No air conditioning, the middle of summer, so it was hot as hell in there. The building was abandoned at that point, so there were no people. It was just me. No lights, no electricity. I had to use a flashlight.” Jeff spent several weeks digging in the darkness, grabbing whatever he could. By his count he purchased between three hundred and four hundred prints, still barely a scratch on the vast trove. “Originally the prices were something like fifty dollars a print, then it went down to ten dollars a print, then it was a few hundred dollars a palette by the end,” he says. “I kept going back—I wanted to make sure I got everything that was good.” When I ask if he had any fears that the studios might come after him for purchasing the prints, he shakes his head again: “The owner was selling abandoned material in his building. It’s hard to imagine how anything could be more legal than that.” Although he dismisses everything remaining as “junk” after he combed through it all, that still left over four thousand 35mm prints to dispose of. And, as we’ve seen, one man’s junk is often another man’s treasure. In retrospect, the first two dealers/collectors, Randy and Jeff, had it easy: they grabbed the cream of the crop and split.
The next man to walk in the door was dealer Alfred “Al” Beardsley, who had been busted seven years earlier in the MPAA-orchestrated L.A. County Sheriff’s Department sting operation for selling illegally obtained prints of Rocky V and Home Alone. If the MPAA thought he would take the warning and disappear from the underground film market, they apparently didn’t know Al. He swooped in on Gilboy and apparently made a deal with the landlord to clear out the remaining film. Soon he began making deals with other collectors and dealers to pick through the depot. “I got to the point where I got everything I wanted, my friends got everything they wanted,” Al recalls today from his hospital bed. “Then I said, ‘I want one hundred bucks a person for everything you can carry,’ and we still didn’t make a dent in it.” He pauses for a moment, remembering the huge haul of film that was slowly being whittled down, like ants picking away at summer picnic leftovers. “You couldn’t kill that frigging place,” he sighs. “I used to go home and my hands were black from the dirt. I didn’t know you could make dirt that black.”
With thousands of prints still sitting in the sweltering, electricity-less warehouse, and the landlord increasingly anxious to empty it, Al turned to another contact of his, a collector named Brian LeGrady. Today, Brian is in his late fifties, with long, stringy gray-brown hair that hangs past his shoulders, and torn jeans; when he walks in the room he brings a distinct smell of incense with him. He carries himself with the laidback hippie air of a true film believer, with occasional startling bursts of excited temper. A former animation cameraman for Disney who worked on Tron and The Black Cauldron, he also helped build the motion-control cameras for the sci-fi epic The Black Hole. These days he works as a first assistant camera/focus puller for film shoots, and as a digital imaging technician, doing quality control and overseeing digital workflow. When I mention Al Beardsley’s name, he nearly jumps out of his seat: “Fucking great! That guy almost single-handedly destroyed my love for film collecting and my marriage,” he swears, face turning red. “I gave him four thousand dollars for all the prints in National Film Service. There were racks and racks and racks of prints in a football-sized warehouse, and a room of shorts and cartoons, Dave Clark Five, and all this stuff.” It takes a few seconds for him to calm down before he continues: “I got three 25-foot-long trucks, all my friends and family, palettes, forklifts, laborers, to transport the film to a warehouse in Woodland Hills that I’d acquired. Sight unseen, not knowing what the prints were. Just imagining walking into a dark and dusty warehouse not knowing what was there. But I figured four thousand dollars was a small price to pay.” He pauses for another moment. “But I paid for it in other ways. Because of Al.”
Unbeknownst to Brian, Al had made what seems like a very odd move: he reached out to a friend at Variety and leaked news of Gilboy. Why? Keeping in mind Al’s previous run-in with the MPAA in 1990, for which he was fined $300,000 and eventually lost his business, the Sunset Screening Room, why on earth would he want to alert them that he was buying a mountain of studio prints? When I mention this strange maneuver to Jeff, he rolls his eyes: “I’m sure Al had a big mouth about it like he normally does,” he says dismissively. I put it to Al directly, and he simply shrugs: “To shake up National Film,” he replies. Apparently, Al was hoping to light a fire under National Film Service to buy out the rest of the warehouse, or else Al would be in default with the building’s owner, Rosen & Sons, for not clearing it out. My guess, though, is that Al leaked the story to Variety as a kind of sweet public revenge on his former tormentors, the MPAA, by pointing out how lax their security measures were if they could allow thousands of studio prints to slip into collectors’ hands.
Whatever the reason, the press bit. The Variety article on November 7 caused a mini-firestorm in Hollywood, with worried studio execs alarmed at the safety of their films. Into this firestorm walked Brian LeGrady: “The next morning I show up with all these trucks, and the MPAA shows up. They’re flashing their badges and saying, ‘We’re taking control of this situation.’” Appalled and frightened, Brian stood by with several family members—including his nephew, brother-in-law, and father-in-law—waiting to see if they’d all be arrested as film pirates. “Al Beardsley, and this is to his credit, he jumps up and says, ‘This is all my contents. We bought this fair and square from the landlords. You do not own any of this material,’” he notes. After an uncertain hour or so, Brian and his family members started to tentatively pile up film prints while the MPAA agents looked on. What happened next is, well, truly bizarre: “They sent one of their guys out to get several cases of beer, and they gave it to us,” he recalls. I ask him why the MPAA agents would buy beer for the men they were ostensibly sent to arrest. “I think they felt bad, because basically what they walked away with was some odd reels from Top Gun and Men in Black,” he shrugs.
“Once they got in their cars and drove away, we felt empowered and proceeded to clear out the warehouse within a week’s time. During that time, Al Beardsley was selling films at night from the warehouse to other collectors, which was a complete violation of our agreement,” Brian says. Although he grudgingly admits that Al defused the situation with the MPAA agents, he still seems to blame Al personally for all the woes that followed. “I never knew whether to trust him or not. He also destroyed the deal by becoming shamelessly self-promoting through the Variety article,” Brian replies. “And Al couldn’t drive; I had to drive him everywhere. I became his chauffeur. I felt like I’d just partnered myself with the devil.” He pauses for another long moment. “At one point it got so crazy—it was three in the morning, as the rats were scurrying around in the warehouse. My nephew pulled a knife on Al and said, ‘I’m going to kill you.’
“Part of my love for film died in that week,” Brian says now. “It took so long to get the material out of Pico Rivera and over to Woodland Hills. Unloading them, palette after palette, shrink wrap not being properly tied, film reels falling out—just the dynamics of trying to deal with moving truckload after truckload of film to Woodland Hills.” All in all, Brian estimates that he hauled over three thousand prints out of the Gilboy depot. “You can lose a leg from the weight of this. It’s not a beautiful, glorified image when you’re dealing with five hundred pounds of steel with celluloid that can crush you if it falls over.” I know what he means. During the course of writing this book, I helped move several tons of film from a collector’s house in Inglewood with two screenwriter friends, Steven Peros and Dan Madigan. After a back-breaking day of hauling heavy Goldberg film cans, literally caked head-to-toe with filth, I turned to Dan and flashed an exhausted smile. “Film is dead,” he said, looking around at the pile of rusted cans. “And good riddance.”
“The deal was to take every single scrap of film out of there, good or bad, but there was no way in hell I could take everything out of there,” Brian recalls of the Gilboy deal, which was quickly threatening to overwhelm him. “Especially when I realized there were like fifty prints of Halloween 3 and 4, and all these romantic comedies. Multiple prints of the same awful title that I had to scrap because nobody wanted to buy them.” He confirms that he did get some real treasures out of the warehouse, including rare prints of grindhouse gems like Dario Argento’s Deep Red and Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs!—which he was forced to sell as quickly as possible to cover his mounting costs for storing the film. “I was creating tension with my family, because we broke it down as a business deal. We said, ‘If we sell each of these prints, we’re still gonna make out like a bandit. Even if you sold each print for ten dollars, we’d still do very well.’ But it just turned into a nightmare of inventorying,” he says. “To come up with the four thousand dollars to pay Al for the warehouse of film, I had to take some of that out of the college fund for the kids, and I promised my wife it would be paid back as quickly as possible. I told her, ‘Look at all these prints. Look at what a goldmine—it’s even in the paper!’ But if you amortize it over the years it took to sell them … I’m still paying storage costs on some of these things.” Listening to him now, describing how his dream of an endless warehouse of film treasures turned into a nightmare that ate into his children’s bank account and his marriage, it’s clear there can be too much of a good thing, even film prints. “You’re supposed to be home taking care of the kids, or getting a job, and you wind up playing with film,” observes the now-divorced Brian.
There were other repercussions from the Gilboy affair. On January 9, 1998, two months after the news about Gilboy broke, Variety announced that National Film Service was shutting down operations and preparing to liquidate its assets. Although it’s clear the fifty-year-old company was already on the brink of bankruptcy before Gilboy, the highly publicized scandal—which prompted several of its remaining clients, like Sony, to quickly terminate their contracts—pushed NFS over the brink. “A rival source claimed the company’s decline was due to the studios’ loss of faith in its security measures, following an incident at one of its locations last year. NFS denied the accusations,” Variety reported.
The Gilboy depot, site of the ultimate film score, still sits on an industrial stretch of buildings in Pico Rivera. When Jeff and I drive down there on a hot summer morning, it looks forlorn and uncared-for, with trash blowing around the stumps of dead palm trees. A sign outside reads “Ros Electric”—and then below it, “For Lease: Available.” We walk around to the rear of the building, and Jeff smiles in recognition. “We’d pull up right here to the loading dock,” he says, pointing. “The film was all stacked inside on big metal shelves.” Ironically, the building is being vacated once again on the day we visit, with workers busily emptying it of used electrical equipment. They ignore us as we wander inside, gazing up at the criss-cross metal beams and the eerily beautiful UFO-like light fixtures. I look around, trying to imagine this vast space filled with thousands and thousands of film prints. Being a collector and walking inside, trying to take it all in. We blink hard as we walk back out into the glaring L.A. sun. I glance to the right: there are two faded signs looming over the building, one that reads “Kodak Cameras—Film” and another for a camera store called Fox Photo, showing a giant leaping fox in mid-air. Kodak film is now almost gone, and Fox Photo and Gilboy have completely vanished, but the signs are still here, and the massive building itself, waiting for another tenant.
I ask Brian if he broke even on the Gilboy deal in the end. “What’s the end?” he responds with a bitter laugh. “The amount of time I had to spend on it took me away from my family. I had to go down to this warehouse in Woodland Hills and spend night after night after night there, piecing together all these incomplete pieces of the puzzle, trying to make complete prints out of them. I had to advertise it and try to sell it—and then come up with some disappointing figures at the end of the month.” He has held on to a print of Tony Gatlif’s 1993 documentary on the Romani people, Latcho Drom, which he calls “my little gift to me out of that collection.” When I mention that his onetime partner and nemesis Al Beardsley is now semiparalyzed in a hospital and may never leave under his own power, Brian breathes in sharply. “Everybody on this earth I have no ill feeling against,” he finally says. “Except one, and that’s Al Beardsley. What a crook. But if he’s dying, I’ll let go. I’ll let go as of now.”