Tweet
During his college days, John McElwee fell in with an avid movie collector known as Moon Mullins. By then an elderly man, Moon had for most of his life been accumulating 16 mm film prints. A lover of classic movies and an aspiring film collector himself, John heard about Moon from the small subculture of cinema buffs living in the town where he went to college and latched onto him as a mentor. At a time when most old films were still protected by copyright and studios were urging the FBI to prosecute individuals owning copyrighted films, movie collecting was a largely underground and somewhat dangerous activity. Indifferent to the risk and keen for a pristine print of The Wolf Man, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, or Red River, John enthusiastically entered Moon’s obscure world of celluloid intrigue. Within weeks of their first meeting, John was cutting classes to take excursions to condemned movie houses and backwoods barns, dank basements and rusted warehouses. John was on a fevered quest to recover the lost Edens of the Saturday matinee—the silvery cowboys on the prairie, sci-fi creatures untroubled by time, the dream-tortured monsters of horror.
Credit: Eric G. Wilson
The quotation above is the first paragraph of a fascinating article written by Eric G. Wilson for VQR from the spring of 2009 issue. You can read the full article at:
http://www.vqronline.org/essay/most-...ng-digital-age
Comment