1. Dionne Searcey and James R. Hagerty, “Lawyerese Goes Galactic as Contracts Try to Master the Universe,” Wall Street Journal, October 29, 2009.
2. One of the funnier sight gags in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997) has poor, thawed Austin trying to play a CD of the Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man” on his record player, with disastrous results.
3. Although cellulose acetate or “safety” film stock was developed in the 1930s, it didn’t become industry standard until 1948, when the studios stopped using potentially flammable nitrate stock. Since then, nitrate has gotten something of a bad rep: although there were several disastrous nitrate-related fires, many prints were destroyed by the studios simply because they were on nitrate.
4. “Discontinuation of Motion Picture Film Production,” FUJIFILM Corporation, April 2, 2013, http://www.fujifilm.com/news/n130402.html.
5. Although there were several magazines that catered to film collectors and advertised prints for sale, by far the most important was The Big Reel, which started publication in April 1974. Not only collectors read The Big Reel—FBI agents were apparently avid readers, too, and at one point interrogated publisher Key: “As a matter of fact I was contacted—they were asking questions about one of my advertisers,” he recalls. “I went to a deposition, and I refused to answer any questions. I was found guilty for not answering the deposition by the federal people, and I went to a federal court, and the judge fined me $1,800 for not revealing the information.” Key sold the magazine in 1993, and it struggled on for several more years before shutting down. Almost every collector I spoke with mourned the passing of The Big Reel.
6. In a highly publicized move, in July of 2014 Tarantino, Nolan, Apatow, and Abrams announced that they’d convinced the heads of the major studios to place enough advance orders with Kodak to ensure that motion picture film negative would still be manufactured and available to filmmakers who choose to shoot on film for the next several years. Ben Fritz, “Movie Film, at Death’s Door, Gets a Reprieve,” Wall Street Journal, July 29, 2014.
7. The heavy metal cans—named after the Goldberg Bros. of Denver, Colorado, manufacturers of motion picture equipment since 1897—are octagonally shaped and nearly indestructible. They, too, are quickly disappearing in the Digital Age.
8. Francis M. Nevins, Jr., “The Film Collector, the FBI, and the Copyright Act,” 26 Clev. St. L. Rev. 547–558 (1977).
9. The decision involved a publisher, Bobbs-Merrill Co., suing retailer R. H. Macy & Co. (later just Macy’s) for selling a now-forgotten book, The Castaways, at the retail price of eighty-nine cents. Bobbs-Merrill had insisted that selling it for less than a dollar was a violation of their copyright. The court disagreed, and first sale was born.
10. Making a “dupe” or copy involves creating a new 35mm or 16mm negative off of a release print, and then using this to strike more prints. This was perfectly legal with public domain films, but obviously less than legal with copyrighted movies. Because the source material—the release print—is already several generations away from the original camera negative, the subsequent dupes are usually fuzzier and grainer, depending on the care taken in making them. In general, original release prints were much more valuable and sought after than dupes, which were akin to making a bootleg copy of a VHS tape.
11. Robert Rawitch, “U.S. Indicts 16 in Movie, TV Film Pirating Case,” Los Angeles Times, May 30, 1975.
12. In a follow-up interview, Foreman points out that his book “can be copied by anybody—I renounce any copyright interest in it.”
13. In addition to 16mm Filmland, Foreman ran a small company that published business forms.
14. Nevins, “Film Collector, the FBI, and the Copyright Act.”
15. Nevins, “Film Collector, the FBI, and the Copyright Act.”
16. Atherton’s other credits include producing the documentaries Murderers, Mobsters & Madmen, Vols. 1 and 2, and cowriting the 1977 grindhouse flick Meatcleaver Massacre, which inadvertently features legendary horror actor Christopher Lee—who shot footage for another movie entirely, which was sold without his knowledge to the Meatcleaver Massacre producers.
17. Robert Rawitch, “FBI Seizes Films from Actor,” Los Angeles Times, January 17, 1975.
18. Although impossible to say for sure, this dealer from Chicago is in all likelihood Ray Atherton.
19. Jim Harwood, “Appeals Court, in Reversing Atherton Conviction, Lays Down Tough Evidence Guides,” Variety, October 9, 1977.
20. Sadly, the Guide ceased publication in 2014, after forty-five years—another victim of the Digital Revolution.
21. In a move the studio has long regretted, in 1958 Paramount sold its entire pre-1948 film library—including screwball comedy classics by Preston Sturges and Mitchell Leisen, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and The Lost Weekend, and much more—for the then-substantial sum of $50 million to Jules Stein’s Music Corporation of America (MCA) for TV broadcast. Eventually, the films wound up at rival studio Universal, which owns the Paramount treasure trove to this day.
22. For the home collectors market from the 1940s to 1960s, the two most important distributors were Castle Films and Blackhawk Films. Both specialized in 8mm, Super 8mm, and 16mm silent and sound shorts and cut-down versions of feature films. Castle, started by former newsreel cameraman Eugene W. Castle, began in 1924 but didn’t focus on the home market until the late 1930s. In 1947 United World, a nontheatrical division of Universal Studios, bought into Castle, making a number of classic horror titles available to the monster-hungry, post–WWII audience, films such as Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein. Castle changed its name to “Universal 8” in 1977, but by then its day was done. Just as important was Blackhawk, started in 1927 by Kent D. Eastin. The company specialized in the protean giants of the silent and early sound era, including Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, Hal Roach’s Our Gang comedies, and Buster Keaton. Blackhawk’s 16mm prints were especially prized by collectors. After several changes of ownership, Blackhawk was purchased by preservationist David Shepard, who now concentrates on restorations for the home video market.
23. The society was first started by Everson, Huff, film critic Seymour Stern, and Variety writer Herman G. Weinberg.
24. Although notorious serial killer and cannibal Ed Gein has often been cited as providing general inspiration to Robert Bloch, the author of Psycho, Calvin Beck and his mother apparently provided many of the physical and emotional details for the book. See Stacy Conradt, “A Boy’s Best Friend Is His Mother: Everything You Need to Know about Norman Bates,” mental_floss, March 18, 2013, http://mentalfloss.com/article/49524/boys-best-friend-his-mother-everything-you-need-know-about-norman-bates.
25. Home theater enthusiasts could argue convincingly about the increasing quality of large-screen HD TVs playing movies on Blu-ray and 4k (and soon 8k). Realistically, though, home theaters are limited by the size of, well, your home. Even watching a film on a giant 65-inch TV is a very different experience from seeing it projected on a mammoth 27-foot x 53-foot screen like the Egyptian Theatre’s in Hollywood, with a public audience. The scale of our cinema experience is one of the things that has changed, and generally gotten much smaller, in recent years.
26. Thirty-five millimeter four-track magnetic stereo sound (or simply “four-track mag”) was introduced along with CinemaScope by 20th Century Fox in 1953 with The Robe. The edge of the film was striped with magnetic sound and read by special heads on the projector, much as with reel-to-reel or cassette tapes. Four-track mag stereo and later six-track mag (in 70mm) were the THX and Dolby Digital of their era, but as with so much else, Star Wars changed everything in 1977 when prints were released with an optical soundtrack. Four-track mag quickly became obsolete, with six-track mag hanging on for another decade or so before being replaced by digital sound formats. Although prized for their superb sound, four-track mag prints are also highly susceptible to vinegar syndrome, due to oxidation of their tracks. See Susan King, “Hollywood History Lesson, in Four-Track Stereo,” Los Angeles Times, November 29, 2002.
27. Although it’s far from Preminger’s best film, Porgy & Bess is exceedingly rare. Because of rights issues, it’s never been released on DVD or Blu-ray in the United States, and getting permission to screen it is very difficult. Worse, all original 70mm prints of the film are badly faded—meaning Ken’s 35mm Technicolor print is one of the only screenable elements on the film, which was entered in 2011 into the Library of Congress National Film Registry.
28. The Cinecon Classic Film Festival, now approaching its fifty-second year, is one of the most popular gatherings for silent- and early-sound-cinema buffs.
29. The Tennessee Children’s Home Society in the 1940s and 1950s was a front for a black-market adoption ring that involved, among other crimes, the kidnapping of children from unwed mothers, who were told their newborn babies had died; taking babies from state mental-hospital patients; and destroying birth records.
30. The very last feature printed in IB Technicolor in the United States was reportedly a reissue of Disney’s Swiss Family Robinson. These prints were made in December 1974, but the dye-transfer Technicolor facility in Hollywood didn’t officially close for business until early 1975. The Godfather: Part II (1974) is often cited as the final U.S. film released in IB Tech, although technically it was the last new feature.
31. “Court Report: O.J.’s dealer had history of mental illness,” N.Y. Daily News, September 25, 2007, http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/court-report-o-s-dealer-history-mental-illness-article-1.243706.
32. Paul Grondahl, “O.J. Simpson Robbery Has Colonie Connection,” Times Union, March 25, 2010.
33. Thanks to collector Bob Leader for sharing copies of these documents with me.
34. Will Rogers, online column, September 21, 2007, http://home.earthlink.net/~willrogershome/id24.html.
35. “The Felon behind O.J.’s Bust,” TheSmokingGun.com, September 18, 2007, http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/crime/felon-behind-ojs-bust.
36. During my time in Hollywood, I’ve spoken to at least half a dozen people who claimed, with complete seriousness, that they were invited to the Tate house that same night.
37. Although Daddy-O is, admittedly, a turkey, it managed by some mysterious process of transubstantiation to inspire one of Ellroy’s finest short stories, “Dick Contino’s Blues” (1994).
38. Torme was one of the celebrity film collectors that Roddy McDowall identified in his 1975 confession to the FBI. See separate chapter on McDowall.
39. There’s no doubt that Tom Dunnahoo was an important figure in the film collector subculture of the early 1970s: a number of collectors Jeff and I spoke with bought prints of public domain (legal) or copyrighted movies (illegal) from Thunderbird, which was one of the best-known independent film labs in Hollywood. (Jeff even worked, for all of a week, for Dunnahoo in the early 1970s.) Even the name of the lab can be interpreted several ways: while “Thunderbird” can refer to a mythological Native American creature or a classic American sports car, it’s also the name for a brand of gutbucket wine—which is more appropriate in Dunnahoo’s case. “I was a pusher, selling fixes to film junkies,” Dunnahoo bragged in a 1977 Los Angeles Times piece, titled “Confessions of a Hollywood Film Pirate.” Maybe that’s the way he liked to see himself, as a pirate, rogue, outlaw spitting in the face of the major studios. In reality Dunnahoo was a deeply troubled and predatory individual who was convicted of sexually molesting two young girls in 1980 and sentenced to prison. After his release he seems to have more or less vanished. His former Thunderbird employee Kingsley Candler recalls, “I heard he went back to Texas to take care of his father, and died down there. Some people said he died in San Diego. I heard from somebody else he died in Mexico, and they brought his body across the border. The truth is a mystery to me.”
40. “L.A. Film Piracy, Thousands Copied, Distributed,” Los Angeles Times, January 11, 1975; and Robert Rawitch, “U.S. Indicts 16 in Movie, TV Film Pirating Case,” Los Angeles Times, May 30, 1975.
41. Although “IB Technicolor” brings up images of eye-popping, color-saturated MGM musicals like Singin’ in the Rain, IB Tech prints of Star Wars are in fact more muted and “realistic”-looking than current DVD and Blu-ray versions of the film. This is especially evident in the characters’ flesh tones and scenes on the desert planet of Tatooine. Having seen one of these rare prints myself, I can only say it brought back a startling nostalgic jolt: it looked like the Star Wars I first saw in 1977.
42. See the separate chapter on Lueras.
43. Louis “Louie” Federici was an important art-house theater owner in Los Angeles.
44. Kevin later wrote a magnificent eight-hundred-page study of the director and his films, David Lean: A Biography (1996). Like father, like son.
45. Gance’s project revisiting the film was eventually released as Bonaparte et la Révolution in 1971.
46. The Kinematograph Renters’ Society of Great Britain & Ireland (KRS) was founded as a trade organization in December 1915, during WWI. Its ten founding members were: Advance Film Service, Butcher’s Film Service, Gaumont Film Hire Service, Globe Film Co., Green & Co., Ideal Film Renting Co., International Cine, Jury’s Imperial Pictures, Pioneer Film Agency, and Ruffell’s Imperial Bioscope. It had a significant influence on the growth and structuring of the British film industry and continues to this day under the name of the Film Distributors’ Association (FDA).
47. Bob Monkhouse: The Million Joke Man. Dir. Mark Wells. UKTV, 2015.
48. His remarkable life and career are well documented elsewhere, most entertainingly in Jacques Richard’s delightful 2004 documentary Henri Langlois: The Phantom of the Cinémathèque, although—and here I digress into true film geekdom—the original 210-minute version screened at festivals is superior to the shortened, 128-minute version available on home video. In the true spirit of Langlois, the complete version of his own documentary is something of a lost film and in need of preservation.
49. In an almost inconceivable act of destruction, in 1923 Méliès burnt the negatives to over five hundred of his films, enraged at the loss of his longtime home, the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, and the forced sale of his studio in Montreuil. To date, approximately three hundred of his films remain lost.
50. DCP stands for Digital Cinema Package, essentially a portable hard drive that contains a film. It’s become the standard commercial format for presenting films digitally in recent years.
51. There have been two mini-series TV adaptations of The Day of the Triffids, in 1981 and 2009.
52. “Long Jeanne Silver,” the amputee actress, was later busted with noted sex educator/performance artist Annie Sprinkle in a sting operation set up by Rhode Island police. Obscenity charges against them were later dropped.
53. Friedman is featured in two excellent documentaries about the exploitation era, Ted Bonnitt’s and Eddie Muller’s Mau Mau Sex Sex (2001) and Ray Greene’s Schlock! The Secret History of American Movies (2001).
54. Years ago I spent a swelteringly hot L.A. morning helping my friend, dealer Bob DePietro, unload a large haul of used 16mm TV prints he’d purchased from a middleman. I remember seeing prints of several Hitchcock films and, for some reason, multiple copies of the 1940 wartime melodrama Waterloo Bridge, starring Vivien Leigh and Robert Taylor.
55. Although it has, perhaps thankfully, disappeared as the public’s tastes changed, the early 1950s The Amos ’n Andy Show was mentioned by numerous collectors and dealers Jeff and I spoke with: at one point, it was one of the most heavily bootlegged shows in 16mm out there. Why? The series was controversial right from the start: based on the long-running radio series that had white actors playing the black main characters, the TV version did feature black actors in a number of lead roles but was the target of NAACP protests almost from the time it debuted in 1951; CBS-TV pulled the series in 1953 after seventy-eight episodes. For decades after, it was heavily copied by dealers for nostalgia-hungry fans. The show’s legal status has long been in question: many dealers claim the first two seasons are in the public domain, although CBS in the late 1990s sent cease-and-desist letters to several distributors selling the show. Conrad Sprout, one of the largest public domain dealers in the country, told us, “I sold 100,000 VHS pieces of Amos ’n Andy in the first year at $9.99 retail.” Needless to say, nearly one million dollars gross for a vintage TV show is good money. He later withdrew the title under threat from CBS. To date, The Amos ’n Andy Show has never been officially released on home video.
56. David Jenkins, TimeoutLondon, 2013, http://www.timeout.com/london/film/where-did-all-the-projectionists-go-1.
57. Before the introduction of xenon bulbs, movie projectors used two carbon rods—one positive, one negative—in the lamp-house that created a blinding arc of light between them. These rods had to be replaced every hour as they burned down. The switch from carbon arc to xenon bulbs was one of the small but very significant changes that reduced the number of projectionists needed at a cinema.
58. For years it was almost impossible to find a print of The Seven Year Itch that wasn’t missing Marilyn Monroe’s famous subway grate scene, and I once screened a print of Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair that had all of Marlene Dietrich’s musical numbers neatly snipped out.
59. Daily Variety, January 9, 1998.
60. J. R. Jones, “The Robert Altman Film Altman Never Wanted You to See,” Chicago Reader, June 17, 2014.
61. “16 Indictments in Piracy Crackdown by Justice Dept.,” Hollywood Reporter, May 30, 1975.
62. There are several earlier “accidental” 3-D shorts, such as the 1903 Georges Méliès films that French preservationist Serge Bromberg created over a century later when he discovered that Méliès had exposed two negatives side-by-side—thereby inadvertently creating a 3-D image.
63. “The great muted chromium studios wait …”—this marvelous passage was written in an essay by Graham Greene in 1937 and can be found in The Graham Greene Film Reader: Essays, Interviews & Film Stories (Hal Leonard Corp., 1994).
64. Blue boxing, aka phone phreaking, emerged as a subculture in the 1960s when pranksters discovered they could make free long-distance calls by reproducing the tone used by AT&T. Famous blue boxers included future Apple Computers founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.
65. Larry Goldberg of salvage/trucking service Film Transport Company (FTC) was mentioned several times as a well-known print source. On August 18, 1976, the trade paper Variety reported “Son of Trucker Nabbed for Theft of Major Films,” noting that Lawrence J. Goldberg, employed by Film Transport of California, owned by his father Earl, had been charged with stealing and selling prints of movies, including One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Exorcist, and Family Plot. With stiff upper lip, Goldberg Senior said that “his son remains in the employ of Film Transport and noted the firm is ‘completely insured for employee honesty.’” The company eventually went out of business because of son Larry’s illegal film activities.
66. In a sworn deposition from May 1975, FBI Special Agent William A. Mehrens testified that the Bureau had subpoenaed the records of Anglo African Shipping Company of New York, Inc., “a shipping agency utilized by several South African film importers including Peter Theologo, a known film pirate.” In April 1975 Theologo voluntarily sat down for an interview with the FBI in Los Angeles and confirmed that he’d operated in South Africa under the names Thebis Films, Crest Films, Acquarius, and Marathon Film. He confirmed that he’d “done business with Jeff Joseph for several years” and that a “conservative estimate of the sale price of the television feature and television series that he has purchased from Joseph would be approximately $75,000.” After being shown an export invoice from 1973, Theologo confirmed he’d received from Jeff prints of the TV series It Takes a Thief, Ironside, and Marcus Welby.
67. Although there are many different 3-D film formats, features from the so-called golden age of 3-D from the early 1950s, such as House of Wax (1953) and Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), were released in dual-system 35mm prints, with one being the “right eye” and the other the “left eye.” Projection was complicated: each print was built up on a six-thousand-foot reel (with an intermission to change reels); the projectors had to be synchronized with each other, and the prints shown through a polarized filter onto a special, highly reflective silver screen, with audience members wearing polarized glasses to experience the stereo image. It’s no wonder the “golden age” lasted less than two years!