![]() Such were the glory days of film collecting, but now, Bartok and Joseph say, “film collectors are an endangered species. And a tip led another obsessive to an antique shop in Everett, Washington, that held a trove of soft-core “nudie cuties” from the 1940s and 1950s, films “crude and rude, with the stench of the peepshow clinging to them,” and “so far off the radar screen that few people even knew they’d ever existed or were lost.” Similar scrounging led another collector to four minutes of missing footage from the original, 1933 King Kong, “including censored images of Kong the ape toying erotically with Fay Wray’s dress and stomping/munching on a handful of doomed natives,” Bartok and Joseph write. Another has the apparently only copy of legendary Russian director Sergei Eisenstein’s first film experiment, Glumov’s Diary, a 1923 short that he made for a stage production that hid inside a newsreel by compatriot Dziga Vertov until discovered in a dumpster in New York state. One clings to the sole surviving copy of an early 1960s Doctor Who episode entitled “The Lion.” Another has dozens of pre-1906 nitrate prints, including a number of exceedingly rare works by pioneer filmmaker Georges Méliès. Inside their “strange, wonderful, cluttered little film worlds,” America’s oddball film collectors hoard possessions apparently dearer to them than any human, write Dennis Bartok and Jeff Joseph in A Thousand Cuts: The Bizarre Underground World of Collectors and Dealers Who Saved the Movies.
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