Choppers ...

[Osi Osgood]

I heard a new expression, well, it is new to me. A person is selling a 35mm print of, "Bladerunner" (coooool!), and, in the description, he stated, " I do not sell to Choppers!". Could he be referring to these ingrates that have popped up recently on eBay, and probably elsewhere, that will take a perfectly good 35mm print, whether trailer or feature, and sell these little snippets? I hope to heck that this trend ends really quick, as it it totally screwing up perfectly good prints of films for all time!

[Phil Moors]

Osi,

You may be right, it is criminal to chop up good trailers and reels of features. Why would anyone buy these frames anyway the internet is flooded with these and they don’t look great.

[Steve Klare]

I agree, it's terrible that people treat old film like a waste product to be recycled: it's just like that seller that took an 8mm projector, mounted half a finger guard from an electric fan on top of it and tried to sell it as a fruit basket!

You see this again and again, a lot of people believe film is extinct and can't imagine anyone really operating any of it. (I gave a show one time and a lady from my audience came up afterwards and asked when I was getting everything transferred!)

I wonder if the seller would really be able to keep somebody who IS a "chopper" from buying the film. For one thing: how would they know who is one in the first place? (They've already warned these people to maintain a low profile from the start.) Besides that, I have a feeling that E-bay would say a concluded auction is a contract to deliver the goods for the payment and the latitude to back out isn't very wide. If you find out the buyer is going to use it in the commission of a felony: sure, but...re-purpose?