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In recent months the trade publication Variety has carried a surprisingly large number of ads appealing to private collectors to come forward with public domain material that can be transferred to video tape. One company, that carried several pages of ads for PRC product that it had acquired for world-wide distribution, including tv and videocassette use, subsequently found that pre-print material on many of the subjects they had bought was apparently non-existent. They too have been canvassing collectors, seeking print of what they casually term “classics”, and at the same time betraying their historical as well as critical shortcomings by asking for color prints of titles that have survive only in black and white. (Of the quite lengthy list of such titles circulated, only one was ever in color, the rest having beer in PRC’s rather grainly black-and-white from the very beginning!)

This preamble is not to suggest that there is suddenly commercial hay to be made out of film collections (although to degree it is true) but rather to point out that the once very-much-underground and technically illegal hobby of film collecting has suddenly become respectable and is even regarded by the industry as semi-legitimate – now that it can (a) benefit from it in a small way, and (b) no longer sees it as a threat, with most of the film piracy now transferred on a much bigger scale to videotaping. Film collections in any case quite transcend the possible monetary gains involved, and increasingly have been revealed to be a major factor in the preservation of much of American film history. If it wasn’t for archives – and in this country especially, private collectors there’d be virtually no viewable history of the silent periods of Universal and Paramount, since those companies made no attempt to preserve their own heritage, and indeed deliberately destroyed much of it.

Those of us who have been collecting film for many years all tend to have a few elusive items which may be the only prints extant; moreover, the older the print, the better the lab quality is likely to be. But it is getting to the stage where many collectors must be considering the possibility of leaving for the Master Screening Room in the Sky-and since presumably it will have outstanding archive of its own, the need to take one’s collection along (even if it ever becomes more feasible than it is at present) becomes unnecessary. What then, happens to these collections?

Film is heavy and space consuming. Grieving heirs, faced with room full of film, are often not film-oriented at all, and are not only confused by the sheer physical bulk of it all, but usually have no idea of either its academic or its monetary worth. They have no knowledge of the technical ramifications which makes it legal to sell one film and a crime to sell another, and they likewise have no knowledge of the channels through which films might be sold. Their confusion (and often resentment) is heightened by the flock of filmic vultures who usually descend on such occasions, sensing the opportunity to buy up a whole collection cheaply, extract the individual items they want, and sell the rest off at a profit.

Collectors can and should ward off this situation by stipulating what they want done with their collections. In many cases they may recognize that their collection is of more monetary than academic value, in which case they should indicate a fair value and the means of disposal. Collectors who have specialized in the work of certain stars might be surprised to find how few stars have collections of their own work, and how they would welcome such prints-surely one of the happiest of solutions.

But-assuming that such provision has not been made, and a family suddenly finds itself the recipient of a huge body of film about which it knows nothing – what is the solution? One of the most useful and fulfilling, I suggest, and certainly one which keeps the collection alive as an entity, quite often as a memorial collection in the name of the collector, is to donate it to a university or college. Ideally, of course, it should be an institution of which the collector/donor is an alumni, but this doesn’t always coincide with an active film study program. While the heirs usually don’t see any money from such an act, an evaluation of the collection usually results in a very substantial tax write-off for them, and they are spared the harassment of organizing and disposing of an unwieldy collection a bit at a time. (Universities can always provide a truck and husky young students to collect the material in one fell swoop).

The practical value to the university is considerable. Often the collector had very individual tastes and may have specialized in a very specific genre or a star or director. While this area may be narrow in terms of overall curriculum needs, its intensity and thoroughness may be such that it will be of extreme value to students doing work in that area, and sometimes the immediate availability of the film may even suggest a course on that particular subject which otherwise would not have been undertaken. Moreover, with film rentals rising so drastically these days, having a base collection means that a cinema studies department need not spend money on renting older, less commercial titles (many of which are no longer available today, as I found to my cost only a few weeks ago when I tried to re-book a film I have been using for years, THREE CORNERED MOON) but can divert all of its available funds to films that are both essential and expensive. (I could mount four genre courses on what it would cost in rentals to mount one Martin Scorsese course!)

Let me give two specific examples: One collector who is happily still with us is Michael Weekes, a California-based former lawyer who entered the priesthood and decided that maintaining a large film collection would be both impractical and unnecessary. Mindful of the legal ramifications of selling the material, and in any case wanting to keep it intact as a study unit, he considered a number of possibilities. The American Film Institute is usually ruled out in such cases as, worthy body though they are, they don’t at present have the facilities or the staff to make collections in bulk freely available to students and researchers. Weekes’ decision was to donate the material to New York University’s film study center which has been utilizing it extensively over the past few years. As an illustration of the unique quality of many collections, Weekes had a particular and dedicated interest in the work of Warner Baxter. Due to a felicitous contact with a studio executive, he even donated funds to have preservation copies made of films that otherwise would not have survived. Indeed, several of them have deteriorated since his copies were made, and thus in some cases his are the only surviving copies. Quite apart from the value of individual films as films, the thoroughly documented career of one actor (especially an over-worked actor like Baxter, who must have made more films than any other major player while at his peak) is an invaluable record of the ebbs and flows of popularity, and of the ways a studio will build, mould and exploit a star, and then merely use him when his big money-making days are over-all of this reflected in the size, number and type of vehicle, and in the importance (and eventual lack of importance) of co-stars and directors.

Tragically, Chester Wiskowski – a major New York collector and an avid FIR reader – died about a year ago. He had retired about a year before that, and had anticipated spending the rest of his life pursuing his interest in film – and enjoying his own collection, much of which he had never had the time to screen. It was a well varied collection, fully representative of his own tastes and interests, which were myriad. He could appreciate and enjoy a great Fritz Lang or a Murnau – but he had an especial fondness for the cheap, independent science-fiction and horror quickies. Those of us who were his friends all have memories of sitting through appallingly inept films with him, commenting very tactfully on their shortcomings, and receiving the inevitable reply: “I love it!” His fascination for this kind of film (in which many fairly prominent directors got their start) resulted in a unique cross-section of a kind of underbelly of rural Hollywood: the cheap exploitation and horror films that were made wherever suckers could be found to put up the money – Florida, Philadelphia, New Jersey, wherever. There may not be an excess of art in these films – but they’re full of ingenious corner-cutting and making one dollar look like three on the screen. They show how Coppola started – and they show young potential film-makers what can be done with minimal money and equipment. But try to round up fifty of these films for a course (avoiding the pitfall of coming up with the same film under three different titles) and see how many you’ll find in regular rental outlets. NYU is at least spared that headache from this point on. Another special favorite of Wiskowski’s was the Mexican starlet Estelita Rodriguez, on whom he had an almost complete coverage. One would be hard-pressed to think of an educational outlet for them-yet oddly enough, the donation to NYU of his collection coincided with students working on a research project of Hollywood’s stereotyped images of Latin Americans-and Miss Rodriguez made an academic contribution she could hardly have envisioned while making such films as BELLE OF OLD MEXICO!

The Wiskowski collection was so large that it naturally overlapped into areas in which NYU was already fully covered, so with the acquiescence of his family, some of the material has been put to use in other archives. A number of titles were donated to the Pacific Film Archive, an extension of the University of California in Berkeley. And there were fortuitously some duplicated titles by directors so beloved by the Europeans: Allan Dwan, Nicholas Ray, Tay Garnett, Jerry Lewis (!) and Edgar Ulmer. These formed the nucleus of a small but useful Wiskowski Memorial Collection that has been donated to the Cinematheque in Luxembourg – which will doubtless keep it busy shuttling back and forth between neighboring Cinematheques in Zurich, Geneva and Paris. Other duplications involved films with stars Wiskowski particularly admired, Deanna Durbin and Vera Ralston. He’d have been happy to know that some of his films wound up in their collections. Far from least, between NYU’s own holdings and those of its individual professors, it already has a virtually all-encompassing coverage of film noir. But the Wiskowski collection enabled it to fill in some key gaps, including such films as the early Anthony Mann STRANGERS IN THE NIGHT.

Of course, when a collection is left to a relative who appreciates its value and can continue to use it in a way that others will benefit from, there is no problem. But many collectors tend to be “loners” who pour all their time and money into the collections. It would be sad indeed if such collections didn’t continue to serve others – and to be treated with the same kind of love and respect accorded them by their owners.

If you’re an unexpected heir, please consider placing the collection where it’ll do the most good. And if you’re a collector – even an apparently healthy one (though most collectors tend to spend their lives in the dark, eating only food that won’t drip over their clothes and distract attention from the screen) – do make disposal plans, and spell them out. And above all make sure that your cans are labeled and that reel one of a Lane Chandler western isn’t inadvertently in the same box as reel two of a Rex Bell western. Research students who may have mastered the intricacies of structuralism and semiotics haven’t necessarily mastered the higher art of recognizing the difference between a “B” western produced by Willis Kent and one made by Bernie B. Ray.

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