A Thousand Cuts

July 25, 2016
This entertaining chronicle from filmmaker Bartok and film archivist Joseph highlights a clandestine, largely bygone world of film print collectors. Long before DVD and Blu-ray, when VHS was still in its infancy, these collectors would buy, sell, trade, and copy movies. This hobby could be legitimate, legally ambiguous, or flat-out illegal. Critic Leonard Maltin’s large collection of vintage short films is on the up-and-up, but Bartok and Joseph recount the great December 1974 film bust at the home of actor Roddy McDowall, of Planet of the Apes fame, from whom the FBI seized more 1,000 videos and 160 film prints. Their combined worth was comically overestimated at above $5 million. What this book does particularly well is capture the collectors’ passion—the “illness of collecting,” as it’s called a few times. There’s the collector who’s spent 30 years to protect one B-grade science fiction film, The Day of the Triffids, and another just as obsessed with a 1927 biopic of Napoleon by French director Abel Gance. These are warm histories of eccentrics, each story by itself a kind of minor-key Moby-Dick. Taken together, they amount to an elegiac portrait of a vanishing filmic subculture.

September 1, 2016

Filmmaker/screenwriter Bartok and motion picture archivist Joseph call this book a "mad Irish wake" for a film collecting subculture, which is part business, cult, and hobby, pursued by mostly aging white males who have made it their life's passion. Well-known figures (Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne; film historians Leonard Maltin and Kevin Brownlow; Gremlins director Joe Dante) are interviewed, plus colorful characters such as one man who has devoted decades to restoring an obscure 1960s sf "B" movie, The Day of the Triffids. Another man unearths old sexploitation gems. Some collectors have paid a high price for their interests, notably the late actor Roddy McDowall, who suffered public humiliation and reduced career opportunities in the 1970s, when the FBI confiscated his collection of allegedly illegal prints. Although many collectors perform a valuable preservation service, the authors feel that for many, film collecting represents a retreat into a safety zone of childhood security. VERDICT With humor and discrimination, this work presents a fascinating, sympathetic, and finally poignant look at a dying "underworld" of film collecting.--Stephen Rees, formerly with Levittown Lib., PA

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