4/16/2023 0 Comments Rare movie collector![]() ![]() I staggered back up with as much film as I could carry. Now here I was, lifting up water-soaked cardboard boxes whose bottoms immediately fell out to send spools of film rolling into the muck. At some point, a film lab had gone out of business and tossed its goods - mainly pornographic - into a dumpster, and the old lady's sons had fished it all out. The basement was a garbage-strewn pit, partially flooded and reeking like a swamp. The joint was run by an obese old lady with a gammy leg and there were always lots of children running around. "There was a place over in the Mission, a thrift shop crammed floor-to-ceiling with junk and furniture, which was owned by a Mexican family. Stevenson wrote about his search technique in his book, Land of a Thousand Balconies. Maybe by that time people will no longer go to theatres but will be watching films on their mobile telephones." I don't care about the noble legacy of cinema I don't care if my films will survive after I'm dead. One thing I hate about proper archives is that they preserve the films, often putting them in a deep freeze, but never show them. I run the original prints at shows and I don't store the prints in a temperature-controlled vault. "There is nothing definitive or encyclopaedic about my collection," he says. Instead, as he explains, he used to trawl through "squalid little storefronts" in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, finding celluloid gems among the millions of feet of grainy pornography that washed up in the second-hand stores when the 1970s adult theatres finally closed down. Stevenson built his collection the hard way, before the internet made most films just a mouse-click away. ![]() But there is a small and noble band of people willing to figuratively don a balaclava, grab the bolt cutters and risk a prison sentence to bring an obscure print into their collection.Ī rare-film collector and exhibitor since the early 1980s, Jack Stevenson is the most famous of the breed. The truth is that most rare-film collectors chase their quarry by licking stamps, sending and copying DVDs. I t's tempting to imagine them as Indiana Jones types, venturing to foreign countries and poking about in cobwebbed cellars in their search of treasure, long-lost artefacts known only to a few and mentioned in hushed, reverent tones. ![]()
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