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

by Dennis Bartok, Jeff Joseph

Overview

A Thousand Cuts is a candid exploration of one of America's strangest and most quickly vanishing subcultures. It is about the death of physical film in the digital era and about a paranoid, secretive, eccentric, and sometimes obsessive group of film-mad collectors who made movies and their projection a private religion in the time before DVDs and Blu-rays.

The book includes the stories of film historian/critic Leonard Maltin, TCM host Robert Osborne discussing Rock Hudson's secret 1970s film vault, RoboCop producer Jon Davison dropping acid and screening King Kong with Jefferson Airplane at the Fillmore East, and Academy Award-winning film historian Kevin Brownlow recounting his decades-long quest to restore the 1927 Napoleon. Other lesser-known but equally fascinating subjects include one-legged former Broadway dancer Tony Turano, who lives in a Norma Desmond-like world of decaying movie memories, and notorious film pirate Al Beardsley, one of the men responsible for putting O. J. Simpson behind bars.

Authors Dennis Bartok and Jeff Joseph examine one of the least-known episodes in modern legal history: the FBI's and Justice Department's campaign to harass, intimidate, and arrest film dealers and collectors in the early 1970s. Many of those persecuted were gay men. Victims included Planet of the Apes star Roddy McDowall, who was arrested in 1974 for film collecting and forced to name names of fellow collectors, including Rock Hudson and Mel Tormé.

A Thousand Cuts explores the obsessions of the colorful individuals who created their own screening rooms, spent vast sums, negotiated underground networks, and even risked legal jeopardy to pursue their passion for real, physical film.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781496808608
Publisher:	University Press of Mississippi
Publication date:	08/25/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	771,304
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Dennis Bartok is a filmmaker, a screenwriter, and the head of distribution for art-house distributor Cinelicious Pics. He was formerly head of programming for the American Cinematheque's Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. Jeff Joseph is a motion picture archivist and was formerly one of the best-known film dealers in the United States. Jeff and his wife Lauren were the owners of SabuCat Productions. He is currently working with the UCLA Film and TV Archive in restoring the Hal Roach/Laurel and Hardy library.

Table of Contents

Introduction vii

1 Hollywood vs. Evan H. Foreman 3

2 An Expensive Hobby 12

3 The Theodore Huff Memorial Film Society 24

4 The Tuesday Night Film Club 33

5 Rock Hudson's Hidden Film Vault 45

6 Lockdown 50

7 South of Sunset Boulevard 65

8 A Dying Art? 75

9 The House of Clocks 86

10 Child of Frankenstein 95

11 Have Some Onions, They'll Make You Fat 103

12 Restoring the Audience 115

13 A Woman in Film 121

14 Captain Ahab and the Triffids 126

15 Something Weird 135

16 The Theory of Creative Destruction 143

17 A Thousand Cuts 150

18 The Score 161

19 A Younger Generation of Collectors 170

20 The Man Who Went to Jail for the Movies 183

Epilogue 198

Special Thanks 199

Notes 201

Glossary 210

Bibliography 214

Index 216

Editorial Reviews

07/25/2016
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. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Best Film Books of 2016 - Huffington Post

"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."

—Publishers Weekly

"A real eye-opener . . . this book will provide a much-needed boost to the spirits of movie fans who fear that photographic film—the stuff that comes in rolls—is disappearing from our planet."

—David Pitt, Booklist Online, August 30, 2016

"A Thousand Cuts is a wild, surreal trip down the rabbit hole of obsessive movie love. The rogues' gallery of characters—from Planet of the Apes' Roddy McDowall, to the FBI, to the man who put O. J. Simpson behind bars—is one of the strangest and most fascinating I've come across."

—Adi Shankar, producer of Dredd, The Grey, Power/Rangers Unauthorized [Bootleg Universe], and A Walk Among the Tombstones

"A Thousand Cuts reads like a collection of lost Raymond Chandler or Jim Thompson stories, detailing the piracy, theft, and out-of-control passions that led film collectors to hoard these precious prints. Thank God they did—or many treasures would have disappeared."

—Monte Hellman, director of Two-Lane Blacktop, The Shooting, Road to Nowhere, and Cockfighter

"A haunting portrait of a soon-to-be-lost world of hidden film vaults, private movie palaces, and the collectors who fought over their precious film prints. A great read for anyone interested in the underbelly of Hollywood."

—Alison Martino, journalist for Los Angeles Magazine and Vintage Los Angeles

"A Thousand Cuts is a beautiful elegy for the death of film, that fragile creation of acetate, sprockets, gears, and shadows. Few books have ever captured the singular and mysterious purity of movie worship like this one."

—Adam Simon, executive producer and writer of Salem; writer of The Haunting in Connecticut; and director of The Typewriter, the Rifle, and the Movie Camera

"I've known Dennis Bartok for many years through his work showing rare films at the American Cinematheque. There's no one better to document this strange subculture literally vanishing before our eyes."

—Mike Hodges, director of Get Carter, Flash Gordon, and Croupier

From the Publisher

09/01/2016
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

Library Journal