Magnificent Obsession: The Outrageous History of Film Buffs, Collectors, Scholars, and Fanatics

INTRODUCTION

FILM—THE MOTION PICTURE, THE MOVIES, CALL IT WHAT YOU WILL—HAS been for more than a century the licit visual, and later vocal, drug of choice for the masses. It is the siren song for those seeking not simply entertainment or an escape from reality, but rather something to experience which does not cost too much and which gets one out of the house for a few hours. Simply put, the movies are there to entertain, and that they do very well, even if at times the purveyors of the medium do not fully understand what it is their audiences expect.

New movies attract the average man and woman, often in the twenty-first century much younger than they were a half-century earlier. To this group, an older film is one made a decade or so ago, and an older movie star is not Humphrey Bogart or James Cagney, but more likely Liam Neeson, Kevin Costner, or Russell Crowe. But there is a second, smaller, yet quite vocal group, and they are the ones to whom an old movie can have been made in the 1910s or the 1950s, though seldom little later, and they are the ones for whom most of the stars on whom they dote are no longer at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which once boasted more stars than are in Heaven, but in a literal Heaven or its cinematic equivalent. They are the film buffs, to whom, as one writer put it, moviegoing in America is a blood sport,¹ and for whom the local multiplex shows nothing of interest. If they actually attend a film screening, it will be at an art house or the local museum with attendant movie auditorium. More likely, they will be found on a Saturday night, or any other night of the week for that matter, at home with the television tuned to Turner Classic Movies. They get their advice on what to watch not from Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times or Anthony Lane in the New Yorker, but from Robert Osborne, hosting Turner Classic Movies and offering informative facts with which many a film buff will take issue or contradict.²

Film buff may be an informal noun, suggesting nothing more than someone who knows a lot about film, but a true film buff is anything but informal in his or her chosen semi-profession. And, yes, it is a profession in that it has generally taken over the film buff’s life to the detriment of relationships and paying work. A film buff works to pay for his fixation, as much as a drug addict needs money for his fix, and a film buff’s relationships are governed by similar obsessive feelings towards film. A film buff may be able to identify the presence of a microphone shadow down to the sprocket hole, but he is not someone who knows a lot about current motion pictures. Recent films are not part of a genuine film buff’s world. The cinema for which he or she has a nostalgia is one from a bygone age, and the nostalgia is in no way based on the film buff’s having lived through that era. A film buff may host an Academy Awards party, but the winners are of no particular interest. What is of more appeal is who from the past will be present at the ceremony; in 2014, it was Kim Novak and Sidney Poitier whom the film buff turned on the television to watch, not Bradley Cooper or Angelina Jolie. A film buff works for the honor that the title implies. He or she keeps careful records of films seen, even the locations at which they were seen, and is scrupulous in documenting any discrepancies in the running times between those on television or at the theatre and those reported in the Film Daily Yearbook.

Back in 1964, the legendary film buff, film collector, and film historian William K. Everson described the members of the Theodore Huff Memorial Film Society, a definition that would apply to all film buffs at least up through the birth of the twenty-first century:

Film Society members are a dedicated bunch, but not always too easy to get along with. There are always the handful of self-appointed authorities, and a few neurotics drawn to films of the past because they find the present untenable, and thus are able to retreat into memories of happier days. Fortunately, these are at a minimum, but the rest of us are a little opinionated and hard-to-take at times, and few of us are completely normal.³

The film buffs of whom Everson writes lived in a kinder, gentler time when film buffs were similarly kind and gentle, caring of other and anxious to share their knowledge. Yes, some might be eccentric, and some might be decidedly odd. But you could enjoy, be amused by their company. They were part of a noble breed of people who loved movies—even film professors back then, once upon a time, actually had an affection for their subject. How times have changed.

Compared to William K. Everson, Richard Lamparski, of Whatever Became Of . . . ? fame, never liked talking to fans or film buffs. They made him uncomfortable. And as he points out, They don’t really like the stars. They want to be these people. Envy. The ultimate deadly sin.⁴ And might that be why today’s film buffs use blog sites to criticize published writers and professionals? Nothing more than envy?

It has been suggested that the cultural identity of a fan is based on a commitment to something seemingly unimportant and ‘trivial’ as a film or TV series.⁵ Yet, no film buff would consider a film or TV series to which he was committed as trivial. Just as this same author advises that ‘cult’ and ‘fandom’ are contested terms both inside and outside the Academy,⁶ so is the definition of a film buff equally contested, confused, and basically impossible for anyone to agree upon.

A film buff reads the American Film Institute Catalog not for the wealth of carefully researched documentation it provides, but rather in the hope of finding an error. Better yet, has the Catalog neglected a title? The delight in such a discovery is not diminished by the reality that the running time of the film is under the four-reel minimum for inclusion or that, despite production data being published in the trade papers, the film was never actually made. The latter is a feeble excuse as far as most film buffs are concerned; they would rather believe a seventy-year-old entry in the Hollywood Reporter or Variety than that assembled by the Catalog staff.

The running time for a film as published in the American Film Institute Catalog is based on a contemporary published source. But a film buff will reject such running times, preferring to sit and watch a film while keeping one eye on a stopwatch. The suggestion that there might be a slight variance in the speed at which a projector can run is an irrelevancy. Is the average film buff aware that films can be compressed in terms of length when aired on television? Does he not realize that for many years in the United Kingdom films have been aired on television at twenty-five, as opposed to twenty-four, frames per second, and that VHS tapes and DVDs recorded in Britain will be running at a faster speed?

A genuine film buff also keeps lists of every film he or she has seen, often with information as to location of the screening and perhaps a brief, as short as one-word, critical summary. Film buffs will boast of the films they have seen and can even come to the attention of a periodical during a slow news period. As early as the summer of 1955, Look magazine devoted five pages to a thirty-two-year-old Waco, Texas, sportswriter, George Raborn, who had seen 5,592 films since 1928 and paid $6,258.48 for the privilege. Raborn nominated A Place in the Sun as the greatest movie of all time. Look magazine obviously got the story from gossip columnist James Bacon, who had written of Raborn in his March 15, 1955, column.

Obviously impressed with his self-created fame, George Raborn decided to advance himself further with the self-publication of a sixty-four-page book, How Hollywood Rates, in which he provides his personal statistics on All-Time Super Stars, All-Time Best Actors and Actresses, 100 Best Movie Kisses, Most Disappointing Movies, Worst Performances—Men and Women, and Worst Movies, among other categories. In an age when self-publication was less commonplace than it is today, his volume represented quite an achievement. For the record, Clark Gable and Lana Turner top the list of All-Time Super Stars, and White Pongo (1945) is named Worst Movie of All Time. Raborn, who appears to have been unmarried (no surprise), dedicates the book to his mother, who to me is more beautiful than Lana Turner and more talented than Bette Davis.

George Raborn may have published a book, but his fame as a film buff is as nothing compared to that of Preview Henry, aka Henry Bone, whose death was marked with full-page tributes in both the Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety on January 7, 1987, paid for by Columbia, M-G-M/UA, Paramount, Twentieth Century-Fox, Universal, Walt Disney, and Warner Bros. A victim of autism, an illness perhaps affecting more film buffs than might be diagnosed as sufferers, Henry was a familiar presence at film previews and film premiers, with his trademark baseball cap on top of his balding head, bony features, diminutive size, sports shirt, and string tie. As reported in the Los Angeles Times (January 7, 1987), He was a lonely figure who spent his days caring for his mother and the remainder of his time catching buses from his Hollywood home to the sites of his favored previews.

It all started in 1954, when Henry was given a free ticket to a sneak preview of the Lucille Ball–Desi Arnaz vehicle (no pun intended), The Long, Long Trailer. Discovering how previews worked, Henry went to just about every one of them, and he also gained some work as an extra. He would read the trade papers at a Hollywood newsstand, and soon became a regular and welcome presence at the screenings. Publicists discovered that what Henry liked would be a box-office success, and Henry became a good luck charm. In 1976, he was the guest of honor at the premiere of Train Ride to Hollywood, and presented with a lifetime theatre pass by comedian Jack Oakie. Despite the honor, Train Ride to Hollywood did not make it to his list of favorite films, which was topped by The Sound of Music.

In 1980, he and his mother were the victims of a home invasion, with thieves taking his memorabilia, and leaving the two tied up. The couple were not found for five days, and the ordeal led to the eighty-year-old mother dying, and Henry’s spending six weeks in hospital. As evidence of just how much of a good luck charm was Henry, during his hospitalization, Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate opened, and became arguably the most unappreciated film in Hollywood history. Henry Bone died on January 3, 1987, with his age estimated to be in the late fifties.

In 1923, a ten-year-old in Meade, Kansas, Madeleine Fayette, began collecting fan magazines. When storage became a problem, she decided to clip the photographs and captions from the fan magazines, discarding the remaining pages—a tragedy as any film buff or, for that matter, anyone interested in film history will agree. The clipped photographs, along with whatever film stills she might acquire, were pasted into scrapbooks, one volume per star. The accumulated pages were sold off in 1978 at $2.50 a page, with the exception of the 1,034 pages devoted to Joan Crawford (with which Fayette refused to part). Some were sold at discount, including Cybill Shepherd: I don’t know why I even wasted the glue on people like her or Zsa Zsa Gabor.⁷

Asked by Los Angeles Times staff writer Burt Prelutsky if she regretted the thousands of hours she had spent in compiling her scrapbooks, Madeleine Fayette responded, Honey, during the ’40s and early ’50s, I hardly spent any time on them. It was during that period that I had two disastrous marriages. Believe me, all things considered, I would have been a lot better off staying home and cutting out the pictures.⁸ At least Fayette enjoyed a couple of relationships, which is probably two more than most film buffs have ever achieved.

Among the most impressive of film buff-collected, scrapbook-pasted clippings are those of Constance McCormick, whose mother was fan magazine writer Constance Palmer and father was character actor Lucien Littlefield. She began clipping fan magazines in 1934, and later all manner of periodicals and newspapers, indexing and scrapbooking by subject. In 1966, she decided to donate the collection to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, but on arrival at its then-Melrose Avenue location was horrified as the boxes were taken away from her, loaded onto carts, and whisked into storage. Connie wanted her scrapbooks to be living entities, changed her mind, and donated the collection on November 2, 1966 (her fortieth birthday) to the Cinematic Arts Library at the University of Southern California. Up until her death in 2014, she visited on a regular basis and constantly added to the collection, by then identified by all as a search engine name Connie.

Madeleine Fayette and Constance McCormick are interesting examples of female film buffs, and not simply because they are female. Rather, like so many young girls, they compiled scrapbooks, a hobby that most grew out of while still teenagers. Young ladies moved on, rejected a childish hobby, and they were replaced by male film buffs, who found the joy of magazine and newspaper clippings and their content as adults, when they should have known better. Madeleine Fayette and Constance McCormick continued with their hobby as adult and female keepers, not of the flame, but of the scrapbook.

There is at least one entire family which might be designated film buffs. They are the Gents of Milford Haven in Wales, who promoted themselves as the Hollywood Musical Family, corresponded with similar enthusiasts throughout the world, and were the proud possessors of more than 2,000 photographs of Jane Powell, displayed in fifty albums.⁹

Of course, it should be acknowledged that one did not need to be either a film buff or young to be an obsessive moviegoer. In 1974, ninety-one-year-old Paul Morgan, who had emigrated from Yugoslavia in 1905 and had worked in the Detroit auto industry, was identified as having spent a total of 9,125 days at his local movie theatre in Miami, Florida, during the previous twenty-five years. Morgan would watch the same film as many as four times in two days and considered the time well spent, not to mention a worthwhile use of his income consisting of Social Security and earnings from the cleaning of rooms at the apartment house in which he lived.¹⁰

Similarly, film buffs can come from a variety of backgrounds. One very active autograph seeker of the 1970s and 1980s was a police officer, Lieutenant Luther Hathcock, living in Hickory, North Carolina. Elderly female former stars were impressed by his title—the thrill of having a police lieutenant write to them. Through correspondence and occasional telephone calls, he was able to amass eighteen albums of signed photographs and letters, which he shared not with fellow film buffs—somewhat unknown in his hometown—but with the residents of local senior citizen clubs. In return for his presence and the presence of his albums, Hathcock would ask that the audience send a card to African American character actor Stepin Fetchit, at that time living alone and relatively forgotten in the Motion Picture Country House.

Film buffs usually pursue their hobby alone, rather than in packs, and seldom with family members. There is an exception in the twin brothers Austin and Howard Mutti-Mewse, who began corresponding with stars of the past at the age of twelve from their home in New Malden, Surrey, England. Their first letter was to Lillian Gish, an actress always willing to respond to correspondence from just about anybody, and her acknowledgment of them resulted in the Mutti-Mewse brothers writing up to thirty letters a week to former stars. The pair made their first trip to the United States in 1992; they met Ginger Rogers, James Stewart (who asked if their English schooling meant an ignorance of the American poets), and Frank Sinatra, who told them, You’re making me feel so young telling me about all those old people. After giving their parents’ telephone number to Marlene Dietrich, she called them at 3 a.m., and as the telephone was in the parents’ bedroom, they talked with her while they slept on.¹¹ In 2014, at the age of forty-one, and married, the brothers published a collection of their autographed photographs and correspondence under the title of I Used to Be in Pictures: An Untold Story of Hollywood.¹²

An obsession can be a dangerous thing, and so it most certainly is with some film buffs. To such film buffs, theft is not a crime. When a film buff sees a particularly desirable item in a library, his first thought is whether this is the best repository for such material. Would it not be better housed, and, more importantly, better loved in the film buff’s home? If the answer is a resounding yes, then the film buff will have no hesitation in purloining the treasure.

Perhaps the oddest, most obsessive film buff that Mike Hawks encountered at Larry Edmunds Bookstore was a fan of the 1935 film The Black Room, in which Boris Karloff plays two brothers, one good and one bad. The good brother has a paralyzed arm, which, defying any physical possibility, appears to be attached across his chest.¹³ One day, Hawks and colleague Pete Bateman were standing at the stills counter at the old store, approached by a central corridor, hemmed in by books:

I look down the corridor and slowly coming towards us is this guy who looks about twenty, with an older woman, and he’s like this [puts arm across chest]. Fuck. I’m thinking there’s only one possibility. He wants The Black Room. He is standing at the counter, and, sure enough, he wants to see the file on The Black Room. And, of course, he’s only using one arm, and I’m thinking, When is he going to drop the illusion, the game he’s playing here. He’s found a couple of stills and he’s using only one arm. When is he going to put the arm down? He goes up to the front desk, and finally when he has to pay, the arm comes down.¹⁴

Unnatural death is not unknown in the film buff community. At least one prominent film buff, Brooklyn-based John Cocchi, who according to the Internet Movie Database "was reputed [sic] for his encyclopedic knowledge of old Hollywood films, was well-known in the community, in particular for his ability to identify obscure cast members in equally obscure B" movies.¹⁵ Seventy-four years old, and depressed at what he had perhaps realized was a meaningless life, Cocchi was last seen outside his home on April 16, 2014. His body was found in the waters off Sandy Hook, New Jersey, on June 16, an apparent suicide.

F. Froggy Gwynplaine MacIntyre was not as highly regarded as a film buff as Cocchi, but he did have some reputation as an eccentric writer of science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories and novels. Much of MacIntyre’s life appears to have been a fantasy of his own making, including the claim that he was a Scottish orphan brought up in Australia, and had three wives and two children. He adopted the name Gwynplaine after the character in Victor Hugo’s novel The Man Who Laughs and the 1928 film of the same name, whose mouth has been carved into a permanent, horrific smile. MacIntyre was notorious for claiming to have found and viewed lost films, antagonizing fellow film buffs with his statements and critical commentary published on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).

He has been described by the New York Times as a huge gentle fellow . . . an enigmatic, eccentric loner,¹⁶ more precisely a visual and mental mess. One individual who might question the Times description is neighbor Helene Lapointe, whom MacIntyre allegedly stripped naked, duct-taped to a chair, and sprayed with black paint. On June 25, 2010, MacIntyre set afire the Bensonhurst, New York, apartment, where he had lived for twenty-five years, destroying himself and all his belongings. His body remained unclaimed.

Barry Brown was a good-looking, young actor, whose most successful role was opposite Cybill Shepherd in Daisy Miller (1974). He was also a film buff, obsessed with the collection of data on the births and deaths of actors, primarily obscure ones. Brown was a frequent visitor to the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, discussing his work and showing off a gun with which he seemed as fixated as with his research; as this writer can testify, the gun was not exactly a welcome guest in the library. It was with that gun that Barry Brown ended his life on June 25, 1978, at the age of twenty-seven.¹⁷

Marian Marsh with Boris Karloff as the bad brother pretending to be the good brother with the paralyzed arm in The Black Room (1935).

There have been quite a few highly eccentric film collectors, but none more so perhaps than Alois Al Detlaff (1921–2005), whose main claim to fame is that he owned the only surviving print of the 1910 one-reel version of Edison’s Frankenstein. Not only did he own the print in its original 35mm nitrate format, but he refused to allow anyone to view it outside of his presence and he would carry the print with him by plane, train, or car to a screening destination, including the Pordenone Film Festival in Italy in 2003. He was generally eccentrically attired, often referred to as Old Father Time, and his film collection was equally eccentrically housed, for the most part lying around his Cudahy, Wisconsin, home on the floor and with no protective covering.

In 1986, Robert Wise, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, invited Detlaff to Los Angeles in an abortive attempt to allow the Academy to preserve Frankenstein. Detlaff did permit Wise to see the film, unwinding it on a conference table, and he did persuade the famed editor-director to allow him to be photographed with Wise’s Oscar. Thenceforth, Detlaff would sign copies of the photograph, Academy Award winner Al Detlaff. His body was found by the police, perhaps a month after he had died, decomposing on the floor—along with his films.

Barry Brown.

Susan and Christopher Edwards were a middle-aged, lower-middle-class British couple, obsessed with the collection of movie memorabilia, for which they paid over-the-top prices. With limited personal funds, the obvious way to finance their favorite leisure-time occupation was to seek money from Susan’s elderly parents. In reality, the demand was somewhat less than a voluntary one, as in 1998 the couple murdered the parents, burying their bodies in the back garden of the home in Mansfield in the North of England. When police finally uncovered the crime in 2012, the pair escaped to the continent, trying any means to raise money except one; they held onto the movie memorabilia. More than $24,000 had been invested in the collection, including $5,000 for a signed photograph of Gary Cooper, worth, in reality, little more than a few hundred dollars. When that memorabilia was eventually sold in compliance with the Proceeds of Crime Act in 2014, it was valued at a mere $5,000.

The tale of Susan and Christopher Edwards is a cautionary one, a warning to film buffs that crime really does not pay.

Crime may not pay, but the devotion of film buffs can be beneficial to a star, as Charles Bronson discovered in February 1999, when a retired chemist in Kentucky, named Audrey Jean Knauer, died, at the age of fifty-five, and in a subsequently contested, handwritten will left her entire estate of around $300,000 to the actor, with the proviso that anything he did not want be given to the Louisville Public Library.

The death of a film buff might not evoke any interest, or for that matter sympathy, from the film industry. But the industry did at one time worry how the death of a star might affect the fans and the buffs. While there had been earlier deaths of film stars, the first such occurrence to cause concern came in 1920, when Robert Harron, a young man who had been discovered by D. W. Griffith and on screen since 1907, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on September 5. Harron had recently signed a contract with Metro and completed his first film there, Coincidence. The studio was nonplussed as to how to handle the situation; it waited almost a year before timidly releasing the production and without any fanfare or acknowledgment of its star. How different it was a few years later, when Rudolph Valentino died on August 23, 1926. There was mass mourning and what can only be described as mass celebration of his passing, with one of the song hits of the year being There’s a New Star in Heaven Tonight by J. Keirn Brennan, Jimmy McHugh, and Irving Mills. Dedicated to Valentino, it begins with the lyrics:

Stars may come and stars may go up there in that starry space.

There’s a new star in heaven tonight that will never fade from our sight.

With his film work in decline, it might be argued that the best career move Valentino could have made was to die. It has certainly paid off through the years, with lasting fame endorsed and encouraged by the film buffs.