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

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.)