A Thousand Cuts: The Bizarre Underground World of Collectors and Dealers Who Saved the Movies

A Younger Generation of Collectors

If film collecting is quickly disappearing—and all the interviews and research that Jeff and I conducted indicate that it is—then one glaring question remains: Where are all the prints? The reality is that they’re still around, sitting silently in collectors’ garages and closets; in temperature-controlled film archive vaults; on metal shelves for the increasingly few distributors who still service them. Yes, there are still tens of thousands of 16mm and 35mm prints out there, along with 8mm, Super 8mm, 70mm, and all the gauges in between. They just aren’t moving around much anymore.

Every day that goes by means that more prints are, slowly, inevitably, lost to vinegar syndrome, to fading, to obsolescence, and to neglect. Ironically, while film itself has been phased out almost completely by the major studios for production and distribution, it is still by far the most stable means of preserving a movie for the future. Making 35mm black-and-white separation masters for a film, whether shot on digital or on celluloid, is still highly recommended by archivists and should ensure a film survives for at least 150 years if properly stored. A century and a half isn’t very long compared with, say, most oil paintings at the Metropolitan Museum or a papyrus scroll, but it’s a lot longer than the life expectancy for current digital film formats, which are changing every few years at an alarming rate.

So, if the prints are still out there, what are collectors doing with them? While some we spoke with, like Joe Dante and Jon Davison, have already looked ahead and put them on deposit with institutions like the Academy Film Archive and the UCLA Film & Television Archive, many are simply ignoring what will happen after they die and are passing the buck to their heirs. Film collecting doesn’t seem to be genetically inherited, though, and very few collectors we interviewed have children eager to take on their hundreds of smelly 16mm and 35mm prints of Bambi, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, and Thunderball. Likewise, many collectors don’t have children, and it’s easy to picture what will happen then: their prized collections sold in bulk to the lowest bidder or, just as likely, thrown in the dumpster. A strange kind of apathy has set in with many older collectors who’ve held on to their precious prints. They aren’t emotionally or physically able to deal with selling them off one at a time on eBay or one of the few online print forums, and yet they’re not willing to part with their film treasures just yet. The plummeting value of prints adds to the problem. While the prints are still aesthetically and culturally valuable, they’re not nearly as financially valuable as they once were, and many collectors balk at the thought of donating their collections without compensation to nonprofit film archives that simply don’t have the resources to pay for them. It is, in many ways, a perfect storm that’s leaving private collections increasingly imperiled and the collectors themselves, well, increasingly depressed and nostalgic for the good old days of the 1970s and 1980s, when a film was still a film.

Before you give up all hope, there is a younger generation of collectors out there, men and women who are actively buying and selling prints, and keeping the hobby alive despite the fact that technology and the film industry are passing them by. It’s not easy being a film collector these days, but it should be apparent from the previous chapters that it never was.

Phil was born in 1978 in Los Angeles but grew up in the lonely central California farm country of Salinas, most famous as the home of writer John Steinbeck. “I would say I lived your average 1980s middle-class life. Not super exciting,” he observes about his childhood. “My dad was largely just a workaholic. My mom was very dedicated to her children.” He describes his family growing up as “dedicated video fanatics” and happily admits to soaking up 1980s multiplex hits like Top Gun, Predator, Ghosbusters, and Gremlins. In his teens he was exposed to more offbeat art-house and midnight-movie fare at a reopened Salinas theater, the Fox (which still survives as a concert hall), and the beautifully named Dream Theater in nearby Monterey, which inspired the 1980s progressive metal band of the same name. “Movies to a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old are the most exciting badass thing you could ever imagine but now seem so average to see on the screen,” he recalls of his early love for genre cinema.

After graduating college, Phil went to work for the famed Amoeba Record store in the San Francisco area and moved back to L.A. in 2001 to open their branch in Hollywood, on Sunset Boulevard. He started religiously attending screenings at the American Cinematheque’s Egyptian Theatre and the New Beverly rep house but soon realized they weren’t showing the kind of exploitation and horror films he loved as often as he’d like. He proposed doing a midnight movies series to the New Beverly’s longtime owner Sherman Torgan (who died in 2007) and soon found himself becoming a film collector by default, buying prints he wanted to screen for other fans. “The first print I bought may have just been Night of the Comet,” he says of the gonzo, postapocalyptic 1984 sci-fi film (whose female hero ironically works at, yes, a movie theater in Southern California). “At the time the movie wasn’t available on DVD, but the VHS was collectible,” he recalls about the print, which he paid one hundred dollars for.

Operating mostly off the radar, even among other collectors, he began voraciously snapping up 35mm prints of neglected straight-to-video and exploitation titles that had slipped through the cracks of film history. I ask what’s the most he’s ever paid for a single print. He grimaces slightly and draws a deep breath. “The most I ever paid was $2,500,” he finally admits. “It was for an uncut international print of Dario Argento’s Tenebrae.” A graphic and disturbing Italian giallo horror film from the director of Suspiria and Deep Red, Tenebrae was released in the United States in 1984 in a badly butchered version under the title Unsane. I can immediately sympathize with Phil’s love for the film. I once tracked down the only available U.K. copy of Tenebrae in 35mm to an obscure British distributor who was about to leave for a month’s vacation when I rang him up, desperate to find it for an Argento retrospective I was presenting in L.A. “That is the most expensive thing I’ve ever bought in my life,” Phil says about his prized print, which, like several of his rarest treasures, came from Australia. “All my cars previously have been less than $2,500, which is probably why I don’t currently have a car. I felt, ‘That’s so much damn money,’ but being able to see it on screen was worth any price basically. We screened it with Claudio Simonetti from Goblin last year at Cinefamily.”

Ironically, Phil doesn’t have a 35mm projection system at his apartment, which means that he’s able to watch his own prints only when he shows them at the nonprofit Cinefamily, where he programs an ongoing series. Among his other rare finds are the 1982 cult sci-fi film Liquid Sky and his self-professed all-time favorite, George Romero’s 1978 zombie classic Dawn of the Dead. I ask if his Dawn of the Dead print is an original, and he nods yes but then qualifies that statement: “It is an original U.K. copy. It’s printed in Agfa or whatever, so the color is still perfect, but it has some of the gore removed. So it’s kind of a sad story because it’s not complete, but the color and condition look fantastic.” He waits a beat, then shrugs. “The bad news is I can never screen it in public anyway,” he says, pointing out that the film’s producer has a reputation for seizing collector prints. Not every one of his prints is as rare or sought after as Dawn of the Dead. He admits to paying twenty dollars recently for a film that perhaps only he would know and love: “A couple weeks ago I screened The Face with Two Left Feet. Have you seen that movie? It is a late ’70s Italian Travolta-sploitation feature. The Italians found an impersonator who looks almost identical to Travolta and built a movie around him,” he gushes about the 1979 oddity.

“I feel definitely like the collector circle is shrinking rapidly, which is both good and bad,” he responds when I ask how many other younger film collectors he encounters these days. “Good because a lot of the people are selling off their collections, so I’ve been able to make a lot of acquisitions, and bad because there’s fewer people supporting something that I love.” He does most of his buying through the online 35mm Film Forum that was started by my writing partner Jeff and continued now by younger collector and programmer Jack Theakston. Phil’s recent purchases include prints of the obscure Spanish horror flick House of Psychotic Women (aka Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll, 1974) and the deranged 1971 gore comedy, The Mad Butcher, both from video exploitation label Sinister Cinema, which has been selling off its print collection. “I love seeing film projected. It looks perfect to me when it’s projected properly,” he says about his intertwined efforts as a collector and repertory film programmer, then adds, “If your son is ready for midnight movies, we actually have parents bring their kids to the movies, like ten-year-olds, presumably to pass on the idea of going to see late-night shows.”

“It’s sort of a really stressful hobby, because practically every day you have to deal with some negotiation or transaction: someone isn’t happy with a print you sold them, or you got a lousy print and you have to try to get your money back,” says Chicago-based collector Julian Antos, echoing the sentiments of many collectors we spoke with. “Do you really think of it as a hobby?” his roommate and collecting partner Rebecca “Becca” Hall shoots back at him. Julian thinks for a moment, then responds: “No, it’s not a hobby; it’s a thing I do. I wake up in the morning, I eat, and I do my film stuff. I go to work and come back and do my film stuff, and I eat at night.” Among the youngest collectors I’ve spoken to—Becca was born in 1987, Julian in 1992—they’ve managed to assemble in a few short years an impressive collection of over 175 16mm and 35mm features in what Julian optimistically refers to as their “vault,” actually a former maid’s room in a large apartment they share with several other roommates. “Whatever, we can call it a vault if we want to,” Becca laughs. Among her recent purchases is a print of the 1970 religious drama The Cross and the Switchblade, based on the best-selling novel by pastor David Wilkerson and John and Elizabeth Sherrill. “My undergraduate thesis was about American evangelicals and their relationships to different kinds of media,” she replies when I ask why she picked that particular print. “I didn’t even check if it was available [on DVD]. I own, like, four DVDs—I don’t even care about video. Well, it’s not like I don’t care, but that wouldn’t have affected why I bought it. Part of why I really wanted to get it is it was a Technicolor print.”

Julian was born and raised in Chicago, his father a proofreader of medical journals, and his mother in charge of raising him and three siblings. “My parents both volunteered at Facets [cinematheque] in Chicago, and I got to spend a lot of time around the projectionist there, who had a habit of smoking in the booth,” he says about his early exposure to movies. “That was my first experience in a projection booth with clouds of smoke and art-house movies that I wasn’t exactly interested in at a young age.” Later on he discovered that his grandfather on his dad’s side was an engineer of farming equipment who assembled an astonishing private archive of over fifty thousand photographs as well as 16mm footage of the equipment he worked on. “These home movies are amazing, because it’s like he’s shooting movies of his children, except they’re tractors,” Becca observes about the amateur footage that she and Julian are hoping to preserve in the near future. She was born in New Haven, Connecticut, her mother a psychiatrist, and her father “at the time … sort of a non-tenure-track professor, so he moved around a bit at Wesleyan, Yale, and Harvard throughout my childhood,” she recalls. “At Wesleyan he was in the history department, at Yale in the divinity school, and business at Harvard. I like to say that it’s in between those three is how philanthropy works.”

By far their most ambitious project as collectors and preservationists has been rescuing an obscure 1956 musical comedy called Corn’s-a-Poppin’, shot in Kansas City, Missouri, and cofinanced by the heads of a local movie theater chain and the Popcorn Institute to promote, yes, that great American institution, popcorn. The film might be justifiably forgotten save for the presence of a then-unknown screenwriter named Robert Altman in the credits. As critic J. R. Jones points out in a recent review in the Chicago Reader, “For Altman aficionados, it’s essential viewing: his sarcasm and jaundiced view of the business world are already much in evidence, and the live country-western show at the center of the story makes the movie a fascinating precursor to two of his most beloved films, Nashville and A Prairie Home Companion.”60 “It’s just fantastic. The first time I saw it, it was running at Doc Films at the University of Chicago. There was a totally packed house, and I couldn’t wrap my head around it,” says Julian today. Together with their friend and former University of Chicago alumnus Kyle Westphal, the three became increasingly obsessed with preserving this early Altman rarity and in 2011 formed the nonprofit Northwest Chicago Film Society to save the movie. At the time, the only available print was a copy at the Wisconsin Film Center that suffered from a projector arc burn and wasn’t ideal for preservation. But in 2011 Julian spotted a 35mm print of the film for sale on eBay. “A few of us pitched in to get it. It went for around six hundred dollars,” he says about their find. “It’s probably the nicest print out there. It came from someone who was selling off the estate of a collector in Kansas. It’s 35mm, black-and-white. There’s a couple newspaper articles that say it was shot in Ansco Color or was going to be shot that way, and if you look at the print, it sort of has the look of a black-and-white TV print that was originally in color. My suspicion, at least, is that it was shot in color, and for whatever reason all the prints were printed black-and-white, either because it didn’t look great or for financial reasons.” Working with Westphal, Julian and Becca applied for and received a twelve-thousand-dollar grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation, which allowed them to make a preservation negative from their print and the Wisconsin Center copy and to strike two 35mm copies for repertory screenings. The restored film recently screened to enthusiastic audiences at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago and the Billy Wilder Theater at the UCLA Film & Television Archive in L.A. “Pretty much everyone that sees it loves it,” Julian says about this strange and forgotten slice of pure Americana filmmaking.

I ask the pair how they feel about being younger collectors in a vanishing field. There’s a long pause. “I think we get depressed a lot,” Julian finally responds. “But not that depressed,” Becca quickly adds. He nods, then adds: “But, you know, it’s depressing. You sort of have to, you know, cheer yourself up. The thing that’s most rewarding for me is being able to show a print, whether it’s my print or the studio print, and to hear people say, ‘That looked really good.’ That sort of makes up for everything else.” His partner Becca chimes in: “I think one advantage to being a younger person in this world is that we don’t have to worry about the FBI, as far as we know. I don’t want to speak for Julian—I try really desperately hard to avoid collecting things. But for me one of the pleasures of film collecting for us is public exhibition, and this has been part of film collecting forever, I guess.”

“I’m afraid a little prank of mine has gotten a little out of control,” confesses collector and film programmer Jack Theakston when I ask him about a startling image he recently posted on his Facebook page: a single frame from Tod Browning’s London After Midnight. For those who aren’t familiar with it, London After Midnight is possibly the most famous and sought-after lost movie in film history, a 1927 horror/mystery from Browning, who later directed Dracula and Freaks. It is perhaps best known today for the ghastly, spectral images of star Lon Chaney Sr. in horrifically gruesome makeup with piranha-like teeth. Even today, ninety years after the movie was made, Chaney looks like he could peel the meat off your bones. The film was remade in 1935 by Browning himself as Mark of the Vampire, costarring Bela Lugosi. Then, in 1967, a disastrous fire at the MGM Studios vault destroyed the original London After Midnight negative and all surviving prints. While production stills survive from the movie, to date not a single frame of footage has been found, not even a trailer. Among missing films there is lost—and there is London After Midnight. So you can imagine the flash of excitement a film buff would experience when seeing what looks like an authentic 35mm frame showing the title card of the movie with sprocket holes and the word “Eastman” printed across the left side of the frame.

Except it’s not authentic. “No footage has been found from the film—it’s a joke I concocted for some friends,” Jack admits. “I was going to say something about it when people were starting to think it was legitimate. For a little image, I put a lot of work into it, to the point of anal-retentive detail. I threw some things into the frame that people who were truly experts would know it wasn’t real, but I was shocked how many people thought it was real.” Being one of those people who was fooled, at least for a few moments, I have to ask what clues would give it away. “I knew the fonts MGM used in the 1920s, things they were using on their title cards, like Cheltenham and Bodoni,” Jack replies. “I took a real piece of 1927 nitrate I had and did a scan of that. That’s what I used for the surrounding perforations. I had a lot of people saying it’s not for real because it says ‘Eastman’ on the side rather than ‘Kodak.’ They didn’t realize that Eastman really was printing that on the side of nitrate film. I left the copyright date on the title card that says 1928 instead of 1927…. I’ll leave it in my will that I made it all up. Of course the biggest thing is I used a tinted piece of film, and MGM stopped tinting their films in 1926.” Now that we’re deep into the subject of the movie, I can’t help asking if he thinks it will ever be found. “I think in all likelihood you may see some footage turn up from the film. It’s not the film if somebody asked me, ‘Which lost film would you most like to find?’ London After Midnight is probably the most famous but the most uninteresting at the same time. The mythos surrounding it is Chaney in his makeup, but there are plenty of other more tantalizing films,” he says, then continues: “If you find London After Midnight, the biggest part of the story would be the glory of finding it, rather than the fact it’s a good film, because it’s probably terrible by all accounts. I’ve never seen it. It’s the only film from 1927 I can see anyone giving a shit about anymore. It’s famously lost.”

It should be apparent by now that the man who could convincingly fake a frame of London After Midnight is not your average film collector, and yet Jack is barely thirty years old. He was born in New York City in 1986. “I only know of a handful of collectors who are about my age or younger,” he observes. “Part of the reason is good luck finding anyone interested in classic film in general. Part of it, too, is that both my parents were for all intents and purposes pretty hip, and were interested in turning me on to good art at a young age.” His father had been an on-again/off-again collector of 16mm prints for several decades, but the real turning point for Jack came when a friend of his father’s tipped them off to a dumpster outside his Manhattan window filled with discarded film prints from a distributor called Worldvision. “So my father and I spent the rest of the night dumpster diving through this dumpster of film,” he says. He admits that a lot of what they found was “crap,” but among the discarded prints were numerous episodes of television shows like One Step Beyond, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, Hanna-Barbera’s World of Super Adventure, and Bourbon Street Beat, plus oddities like a rare kinescope of a Nat King Cole performance from 1959. “That’s incidentally one of the first times I encountered vinegar syndrome,” he says about the find. “My father didn’t know about it either. Still photographers knew about vinegar syndrome before people in motion pictures did: it’s what happens when you don’t wash the fixer off the negative properly.”

Jack’s current job is assistant manager at the Rome Capitol Theatre in New York where he programs Capitolfest, their annual classic movie festival; he is also cohead of the 3-D Film Archive (with collector Bob Furmanek) and maintains the 35mm Film Forum online, the main marketplace for buying and selling 35mm prints since the demise of The Big Reel magazine in the early 2000s. Amazingly, well into the twenty-first century, he is still making serendipitous discoveries of nitrate prints from nearly a century earlier. “I was at a flea market in New York—this is probably about 2004 or 2005—right around the time I started collecting 35mm, and I bought some tin cans that had come from a toy projector. There was a print of probably about two hundred feet of a hand-colored Pathé short from the late aughts in there. I thought, ‘Hmm, that’s neat and I never knew about that,’” he recalls. “In the early days, I’d find a lot of that stuff. There was one short in particular I bought called An Elephant’s Nightmare, which was a French comedy short from around 1916, and I ended up trading it to [French preservationist] Serge Bromberg for some stuff, and Serge did well by it. He got the better end of the deal…. I don’t mind Serge getting the better end of the deal, because he’s actually going to do something with that.” Another rare find was a single reel from the camera negative of an early Zionist propaganda film called Springtime in Palestine (1928), directed by pioneering Jewish filmmaker and photographer Ya’acov Ben-Dov. I ask where he located the reel. “It was through a friend of mine whose father had been a serviceman for 16mm projectors. He had this vault, and my friend didn’t know what to do with it. He said, ‘Hey I’ve got these films, they’re in various states of decay.’”

Even for a younger collector like Jack, there are still the ones that got away. Several years ago he was visiting the derelict site of WRS Labs in Pittsburgh, perhaps most famous for its use in exterior shots in local filmmaker George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. “The place was amazing, I think it was something like ten acres,” he recalls. “One was an office complex, one was set up for video duplication, and the last was set up for film processing. You went into the video duplication, and all you saw were rows and rows of VCR dubbers. Totally useless even at that point. Think of an airplane hangar filled with VCRs.” The deal Jack and fellow collector Bob Furmanek had made with the owners of the site was that they could take away prints only from a list they’d submitted before the visit. “We went to the film section. The place was very eerie—the lights had been off, the electricity was only on one circuit at that time.” Sitting unnoticed on one of the metal racks was the original camera negative to a classic cartoon short called Rhapsody of Steel from 1959. Directed by animator Carl Urbano and produced by the Sutherland Studios, who were responsible for much-loved educational films like A Is for Atom (1953), which played for decades in American public schools, Rhapsody of Steel traced the origins of steel in gorgeous Technicolor animation. Wandering through this massive, barely lit Pittsburgh film lab, most collectors wouldn’t give Rhapsody of Steel a second thought, but Jack knew immediately what a rare find it was: “The score was by Dimitri Tiomkin, and they made an album of it, but they never printed the short in stereo. What was at WRS were the successive-exposure negatives and the full-coat of the final mix of the left-center-right.” I ask if he snatched it up, and there’s a long pause. Finally he answers with a heavy heart: “I wasn’t able to get it, because it wasn’t on the list of things I was allowed to take. There’s an Arabian nights tale of Aladdin and his lamp—and he’s only allowed to take one thing or he’ll die.”

“Anyone can buy a DVD and passively put it on a shelf, maybe never even open it. But to collect film, it’s an ordeal,” says editor, filmmaker, and collector Mike Williamson. “It’s an ordeal as a film lover you’re able to validate, because the reward is greater than the pain that collecting film also brings.” When he greets me at the door of his Burbank-area house, he’s clutching a huge kitchen knife—perhaps appropriate for a collector of vintage horror prints. But it turns out I’ve caught him in the middle of chopping salad during his lunch break from work.

Mike is tall and gregarious, with curly brown hair and a big grin usually plastered across his broad face. An enthusiastic and unrepentant fan of 1980s slasher films like the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street series, he talks about print collecting with a surprisingly sophisticated and subtle aesthetic perspective. “I think it’s an undebatable fact that film looks better than digital. Any digital medium—music, whatever—is like the Robot Boy—it’s trying to look human. It’s trying to seem analog while being acceptable to consumers,” he observes. “For me, it can get pretty deep, because storytelling is what makes humans unique. It’s part of our DNA, and it’s how we learn. For me, motion pictures are the most representative of humanity as far as storytelling goes, because movies represent the technology of the period and what people can do at the time. They acknowledge the atmosphere of the era; almost every era has defining tones to its movies. And as far as storytelling medium goes, it’s the most communal. It’s really an important human experience to watch a movie, and since movies are my favorite form of storytelling, it’s important to me to experience that as deeply as I can. Watching a movie that I love on a TV set with compressed picture and the phone is ringing—there’s so many distractions. It’s not like having a giant screen and a rich film print twelve feet wide, letting you get transported into the movie’s universe.”

Mike was born in Austin, Texas, in 1977. His mother was a schoolteacher who segued into real estate; his father was a wine salesman who passed away when Mike was ten. “None of them were movie lovers in particular. I would say they’re just sort of general enthusiasts of entertainment; they liked to listen to a Celine Dion record here and there,” he says of his parents. “I remember my biological father and movies that he loved from when I was around. I don’t know the movies he loved when he was a kid. I know he loved Stand by Me. I know he loved Top Gun, which he took me to, and I was too embarrassed to tell him I didn’t like it, because he loved it so much.” As a kid he started to discover the subversive gore-filled horror films that would become a lifelong fascination.

“I would go to my friend’s house who had a more lenient mother,” he recalls. “My mom was a very strict Catholic, very frightened of dark entertainment, rock music, horror movies. I don’t want to make it sound like she’s a nun, but she definitely thought there’s some Satanism going on in that kind of stuff. So I would go across the street to my friend Daniel’s house and secretly watch Nightmare on Elm Street movies that we’d rent from the video store up the street that I’d eventually work at in high school and college.”

As a collector he specializes in genre films and collects only 16mm. Among the prints he’s most proud of are his IB Technicolor copies of Blood and Black Lace, Rosemary’s Baby, The Birds, The Skull, and Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors. He’s quick to point out that original prints can preserve the artistic intention of the filmmaker better than new digital transfers, where a colorist can sometimes misinterpret a scene. “I can think of two films in my collection where someone turns a light off,” he says, citing his prints of Darkman and Friday the 13th Pt. 4. “On the DVDs of those movies, the colorist corrected for that, and so in the scenes on the DVD, the lights are never turned off. The colorist ‘corrected,’ and they stay on—and it’s just flat out a mistake.”

Perhaps the best thing about Mike’s collecting is that he continues the tradition of backyard screenings for friends and family, setting up a big screen and elaborate sound system, and then blasts away with prints of guilty pleasures like Wolfen, Child’s Play 2, Poltergeist III, and Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. He and his wife, Terry, now have two infant sons to take care of, which has put a bit of a damper on his hobby, at least until the boys are a little older. Since he’s a relative rarity as both a younger collector and a married collector, I ask if it’s difficult balancing his obsession with being a husband. He thinks for a moment, then replies: “With film collectors, the OCD nature of it is heightened, because there might be only three of [a certain print] in the world, and if you don’t get it, you’re fucked. It can create a lot of obsessive behavior that might be repulsive to a woman. I’ve had episodes where I’m trying to catch this collection, and you might ignore your wife for a day or two. When you sit back and look at it later, it’s shameful—that you care so much about chasing a print that you didn’t go to dinner with your wife.” There’s a pause and then he shrugs as if admitting he can’t help it. “But that’s part of the deal. If you want to have a collection that you’re proud of, there’s that element of aggressiveness that comes with it.”