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The Collector
Paul Balbirnie takes us down memorabilia lane.
Wikipedia defines collecting as seeking, locating, acquiring, organizing, cataloguing, displaying, storing, and maintaining whatever items are of interest to the individual collector. I have never really felt the need to truly define, for my collection, what an ‘Irish’ film is but I do enjoy seeing films that are shot in Ireland and that is as close to a definition as I get.
For me, my collecting odyssey started in the late ’90s in Los Angeles. I was working for the American Cinematheque, a not-for-profit arts organisation dedicated to the preservation and presentation of film. I was hired to track down film prints for screenings and it was in this realm I first came in contact with film memorabilia collectors.
In the pre home-video sales days, the studios and distributors had very little use for the release prints of their films after the first run had ended and as a result would only keep a few prints for revival screenings. The rest would end up in landfills and skips and one way or another in the hands of collectors. In the days before the big summer blockbuster a first run of a film might, at most, be a few hundred prints compared to a few thousand for the bigger current release films. As distributors and studios have folded over the years, prints held in storage have suffered the same fate and have in some cases been sold in public auctions to recoup the losses incurred by the storage facilities.
There are a number of high-profile film collectors including Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Joe Dante to name a few. In 1974, the FBI raided the home of Roddy McDowall and seized the actor’s collection of films and television series in the course of an investigation of copyright infringement although he was never charged. There is now an uneasy relationship between the studios and the collectors, as many studios have had to turn to film collectors to find elements for the now lucrative DVD market.
The full article is printed in Film Ireland 122.
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