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WORK TITLE: A Thousand Cuts
WORK NOTES: with Jeff Joseph
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 3/1/1965
WEBSITE:
CITY: Burbank
STATE: CA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1156853/ * http://screenanarchy.com/2016/08/roddy-mcdowall-gets-busted-an-exclusive-excerpt-from-a-thousand-cuts-by-dennis-bartok-jeff-joseph-gallery.html * http://www.upress.state.ms.us/books/1966
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Executive, filmmaker, and writer. American Cinematheque’s Egyptian Theatre, Hollywood, CA, former head of programming, then returned as general manager in 2016–; Cinelicious Pics, Hollywood, cofounder and executive vice president, then senior acquisitions executive as of 2016–.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Dennis Bartok is a filmmaker and screenwriter who also works in the distribution of art-house films. In addition, he serves as the manager of a nonprofit organization that runs a retro cinema with an Egyptian theme and which offers limited showings of cult classic films. Bartok is also coauthor, with Jeff Joseph, a movie archivist, of A Thousand Cuts: The Bizarre Underground World of Collectors and Dealers Who Saved the Movies.
A Thousand Cuts focuses on a vanishing subculture, namely the world of film collectors who are dedicated to collecting movies and projecting them. These collectors began long before the time of DVDs and the digital era, which has witnessed the ongoing demise of 16mm and 35mm physical film reels. “Dennis Bartok and Jeff Joseph immerse themselves in the quirky, devious and eternally fascinating world of the film fanatics who collected, stole, shared and sold reels of everything from cinematic masterpieces to cartoons, nudie cuties and television programs,” wrote a Classic Movie Blog contributor, who went on to note that the book is “full of people so devoted to film that they will lie, steal and screw each other over to get the prints they want.”
A Thousand Cuts features interviews with a wide range of film collectors who provide their own unique perspectives on film collecting and its demise. Interviewees include film critic and writer Leonard Maltin and the late Robert Osborne, who was an actor, film historian, author, and television presenter best known for serving as a host on the cable channel Turner Classic Movies. Osborne, who was a good friend of the actor Rock Hudson, discusses Hudson’s love of film and his secret film vault.
An interview with Kevin Brownlow, a noted film historian, reveals how Brownlow spent decades restoring the 1927 epic silent French film Napoleon, which has been highly praised for its groundbreaking camerawork and editing. Also interviewed is Jon Davison, who produced the movie RoboCop. Davison relates how he took the psychedelic substance LSD and screened the original King Kong film with the Jefferson Airplane rock group at the Fillmore East venue in New York City. “Each chapter tidily spans a different collector; their page-for-page testimonies make for a book that’s reflexively hard to put down, dense with lurid accounts of print deals gone wrong and corresponding back-alley-Hollywood lore—sometimes, both at once,” wrote Cineaste Web site contributor Steve Macfarlane.
Bartok, who served as principal writer for the book, includes a commentary for each chapter offering analysis of the people interviewed and descriptions of their environments. Bartok and Joseph also delve into a little-known episode in modern legal history that involved film collecting. In the early seventies, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the U.S. Department of Justice began a campaign to intimidate and even arrest film dealers and collectors.
Among the people raided by the FBI was actor Roddy McDowall, who had his entire movie collection seized, including rare prints. The FBI even took McDowall’s video copies of films, which soon everybody would be making by taping them off of television. Joseph himself was arrested in a sting operation in 1975 and spent two months in prison. Joseph writes that he believes the FBI’s hunt for film collectors was more of a public-relations move than any demonstration of real concern about copyright laws because the FBI had suffered a blow to their image in connection with the infamous Patty Hearst case. Joseph, who was twenty-two years old at the time, eventually had his movies returned to him but had to sell them to support himself.
A Thousand Cuts “presents a fascinating, sympathetic, and finally poignant look at a dying ‘underworld’ of film collecting,” wrote Stephen Rees in a review for Library Journal. A Kirkus Reviews contributor remarked: “With each eccentric collector interviewed, Bartok and Joseph have certainly done their part to preserve some strange and often overlooked imagery.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Library Journal, September 1, 2016, Stephen Rees, review of A Thousand Cuts: The Bizarre Underground World of Collectors and Dealers Who Saved the Movies, p. 106.
Publishers Weekly, July 25, 2016, review of A Thousand Cuts, p. 66.
ONLINE
Box Office Pro, http://pro.boxoffice.com/ (April 28, 2017), “Cinelicious Pics’ Exec VP Dennis Bartok Takes Over as General Manager at the American Cinematheque.”
Cineaste, https://www.cineaste.com/ (March 26, 2017), Steve Macfarlane, review of A Thousand Cuts.
Classic Movie Blog, http://www.aclassicmovieblog.com (August 19, 2016), review of A Thousand Cuts.
Kirkus Reviews Online, https://www.kirkusreviews.com/ (August 20, 2016), review of A Thousand Cuts.
Dennis Bartok, Burbank, California, is a filmmaker, a screenwriter, and the head of distribution for art-house distributor Cinelicious Pics. He was formerly head of programming for the American Cinematheque’s Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood.
Cinelicious Pics’ Exec VP Dennis Bartok Takes Over as General Manager at the American Cinematheque
Author Boxoffice Staff Published August 10, 2016 Comments 0
PRESS RELEASE
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA — Dennis Bartok, Executive Vice President of Cinelicious Pics, will return to The American Cinematheque as General Manager; before founding Cinelicious with CEO Paul Korver, Bartok served as the Head Programmer at the Cinematheque. Bartok will remain involved in Cinelicious’ Acquisitions department as Senior Acquisitions Executive, while the company’s David Marriott and Ei Toshinari will assume the roles of Vice President of Acquisitions & Distribution and Director of Acquisitions & Distribution, respectively.
During his tenure at Cinelicious, Bartok has spearheaded a number of the company’s restoration projects alongside Marriott including Agnes Varda’s JANE B. PAR AGNES V. and KUNG FU MASTER!, Eiichi Yamamoto’s lost animated masterpiece, BELLADONNA OF SADNESS, Leslie Stevens’ slow burn noir, PRIVATE PROPERTY, starring Warren Oates, and, with Toshinari, the forthcoming FUNERAL PARADE OF ROSES by Toshio Matsumoto. Bartok’s first run projects for the company include Josephine Decker’s THOU WAST MILD AND LOVELY and BUTTER ON THE LATCH, and Anurag Kashyap’s Indian epic, GANGS OF WASSEYPUR, among others.
“I’m hugely proud of the work that Cinelicious Pics has accomplished over the past two and a half years, from being named the LA Weekly’s ‘Best Indie Film Distributor’ in 2015 to releasing movies like GANGS OF WASSEYPUR and our recent restoration of BELLADONNA OF SADNESS. I know David and Ei will continue and build on that — they’re two of the smartest acquisitions and distribution people I know,” says Dennis Bartok. “The American Cinematheque is like a second family to me — it’s the first job I had in L.A. when I came here in the early 1990s, and it really feels like coming home to be there again. The art-house exhibition scene is constantly changing in Los Angeles, so this is a very exciting time to be back at the Cinematheque.”
“Dennis is truly one one of the premiere Los Angeles cineastes and I can’t wait to see where he helps guide the American Cinematheque next,” commented VP of Acquisitions and Distribution David Marriott on behalf of Cinelicious. “He showed real vision and passion in launching Cinelicious Pics with Paul Korver, and I look forward to continuing to work with him on the Acquisitions side. We’re excited for the future of Cinelicious as we continue to acquire and release the mix of boundary-pushing first run independent features and lovingly restored repertory titles that has become our signature.”
Bartok, Dennis & Jeff Joseph. A Thousand Cuts: The Bizarre Underground World of Collectors and Dealers Who Saved the Movies
Stephen Rees
141.14 (Sept. 1, 2016): p106.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Bartok, Dennis & Jeff Joseph. A Thousand Cuts: The Bizarre Underground World of Collectors and Dealers Who Saved the Movies. Univ. of Mississippi. Sept. 2016. 240p. photos, notes, bibliog. index. ISBN 9781496807731. $28. ebk. available. FILM
Filmmaker/screenwriter Bartok and motion picture archivist Joseph call this book a "mad Irish wake" for a film collecting subculture, which is part business, cult, and hobby, pursued by mostly aging white males who have made it their life's passion. Well-known figures (Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne; film historians Leonard Maltin and Kevin Brownlow; Gremlins director Joe Dante) are interviewed, plus colorful characters such as one man who has devoted decades to restoring an obscure 1960s sf "B" movie, The Day of the Triffids. Another man unearths old sexploitation gems. Some collectors have paid a high price for their interests, notably the late actor Roddy McDowall, who suffered public humiliation and reduced career opportunities in the 1970s, when the FBI confiscated his collection of allegedly illegal prints. Although many collectors perform a valuable preservation service, the authors feel that for many, film collecting represents a retreat into a safety zone of childhood security. VERDICT With humor and discrimination, this work presents a fascinating, sympathetic, and finally poignant look at a dying "underworld" of film collecting.--Stephen Rees, formerly with Levittown Lib., PA
Rees, Stephen
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Rees, Stephen. "Bartok, Dennis & Jeff Joseph. A Thousand Cuts: The Bizarre Underground World of Collectors and Dealers Who Saved the Movies." Library Journal, 1 Sept. 2016, p. 106+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA462044882&it=r&asid=3c11100b4fd05097955afe1005b03ecb. Accessed 26 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A462044882
A Thousand Cuts: The Bizarre Underground World of Collectors and Dealers Who Saved the Movies
263.30 (July 25, 2016): p66.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
A Thousand Cuts: The Bizarre Underground World of Collectors and Dealers Who Saved the Movies
Dennis Bartok and Jeff Joseph. Univ. Press of Mississippi, $28 (240p) ISBN 978-1-4968-0773-1
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.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"A Thousand Cuts: The Bizarre Underground World of Collectors and Dealers Who Saved the Movies." Publishers Weekly, 25 July 2016, p. 66. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460285550&it=r&asid=fba77d2f086f894e0f077524aa79e137. Accessed 26 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460285550
A THOUSAND CUTS
The Bizarre Underground World of Collectors and Dealers Who Saved the Movies
by Dennis Bartok, Jeff Joseph, Jeff Joseph
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KIRKUS REVIEW
A screenwriter and film buff plunges into the bizarre world of film collectors, finding people willing to sacrifice anything to preserve a dying art.
Even as former programmer for the American Cinematheque’s Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, Bartok’s love of film pales in comparison to that of his interviewees, including writing partner Joseph, a motion picture archivist later revealed to have “gone to jail for the movies.” Bartok often narrates in the first person, showcasing impeccable comedic timing, as he enters memorabilia-stuffed projection rooms, views prized reels, and listens to incredible stories from a time when access to film was severely restricted. The collectors see benefits of new technologies, but as Gremlins director Joe Dante points out, “it’s the B-pictures, the grindhouse and exploitation films…that are most in need of preservation.” Many of these collectors have dedicated their lives to those ephemeral pieces of film, sacrificing marriages and enduring legal battles to discover a lost Fred Astaire dance or save a nonsensical 1940s short. Each offers something to astonish hard-core film buffs, and many unearth the larger issues at stake: the changing consumption of film; the powerful forces regulating that consumption; and, most intriguingly, how film’s escapism can consume the viewer. Bartok and Joseph dutifully document anti-social behaviors and run-ins with studios, the FBI, or even the mob, but it isn’t until later chapters, structured more around theme than individuals, that they arrive at some truly fascinating reflections on the dynamic between collector and reel. Too many early chapters come off as short, disjointed biographies of individuals obsessed with film rather than one cohesive study of the community and its larger concerns. However, with each eccentric collector interviewed, Bartok and Joseph have certainly done their part to preserve some strange and often overlooked imagery.
A collection of singular encounters with a film subculture, some failing to develop the larger concerns but many offering unique insight into the darker fringes of a bygone Hollywood.
Pub Date: Sept. 1st, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4968-0773-1
Page count: 240pp
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20th, 2016
Book Review-- A Thousand Cuts: The Bizarre Underground World of Collectors and Dealers Who Saved the Movies
Posted by KC on Aug 19, 2016
Labels: Book Review
A Thousand Cuts: The Bizarre Underground World of Collectors and Dealers Who Saved the Movies
Dennis Bartok and Jeff Joseph
University Press of Mississippi, 2016
It's remarkable that film has lasted as a medium for more than one hundred years when you think of all the entertainment formats that have arisen and faded away in that time. That fact doesn't make the decline of cinematic celluloid much easier for many of the collectors who have devoted themselves to collecting 16mm and 35mm reels. In a new book, Dennis Bartok and Jeff Joseph immerse themselves in the quirky, devious and eternally fascinating world of the film fanatics who collected, stole, shared and sold reels of everything from cinematic masterpieces to cartoons, nudie cuties and television programs.
A Thousand Cuts is essentially a series of interviews with various collectors, each of them given a spotlight in which to tell their story. While many of the (mostly) men in this community know each other, and refer to one another in their talks with the authors, it is interesting that they are profiled separately, each providing their own unique take on the phenomena of collecting and its decline.
In addition to their biographies, Bartok, who was principal writer on the project, offers a detailed analysis of his subjects, examining their surroundings, the way they look and how they speak. You sense him judging them on occasion: the piles of belongings in their homes, the sound of their voices, the choices they have made to devote themselves to film, but for the most part he seems to feel affection for these lovers of cinema.
The interviewees include some who are famous, or even notorious, but most of them are best known among other collectors and the members of the film industry. It was interesting to get a closer look at the collector side of Leonard Maltin, who is best known for his books and reviews, and the chapter in which Robert Osborne reminisces about the film collection of his friend Rock Hudson had some wry insights that made me miss his presence as a TCM host. It was also wonderful to learn more about the fastidious Kevin Brownlow and his quest to rescue Abel Gance's silent epic Napoleon (1927). These three are among the less eccentric characters in a book full of people so devoted to film that they will lie, steal and screw each other over to get the prints they want.
While Bartok establishes early on that most collectors are white, gay, unmarried men, he goes beyond that majority to profile some of the atypical members of the community. There's Rik Lueras, the only prominent Latino collector, and one of the rare happy family men, and Hillary Charles, one of the only women to have been active in the scene. He also features enthusiasts with a particular obsession within their film fanaticism, including Mike Hyatt, who spent decades restoring and protecting the legacy of Day of the Triffids (1962) and Mike Vraney of Something Weird video who admits he champions "beneath the barrel" sexploitation and horror flicks. There are also the young collectors who continue to preserve and honor 35mm, if not in as great numbers.
At times I felt disgusted reading about the devious acts of some of these collectors and occasionally I found myself also judging the way some of them discarded everything else in life to live for film, but in the end I felt I better understood the attraction of collecting. Bartok takes you inside that passion, giving you a feel for its sensory pleasures and the victory of preserving something that would otherwise be lost. You also begin to understand that often collectors collect because they can't help themselves and that pull will always to some degree remain mysterious to those on the outside of their obsession.
Many thanks to University Press of Mississippi for providing a copy of the book for review.
A Thousand Cuts: The Bizarre Underground World of Collectors and Dealers Who Saved The Movies (Preview)
by Dennis Bartok and Jeff Joseph. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2016. 241 pp., illus. Hardcover: $28.00.
Reviewed by Steve Macfarlane
Untethered to its plastic strips of origin, movie fandom finds itself in a new era of wild promise and material uncertainty. The last several years have borne witness to a plethora of new streaming services, online film publications, and gourmet DVD/Blu-Ray distributors, to the point that both neophytes and hardcore scholars can handily school themselves In their canons of choice: auteurist picks from Golden-Age Hollywood, European art-house standbys, long-unavailable titles from the heyday of the avant-garde, glistening remasters of seminal Hong Kong titles from the Eighties and Nineties, the Albert Pyun filmography reconsidered—you name it. At first blush, one might assume film history had been saved and scanned into future memory already, with more titles available to be seen more widely for cheaper than ever before…but the sentiment insists on its own grain of salt, given the broader uphill battle faced commercially by the Fandors, MUBIs, and Criterion Collections of the world, to say nothing of Netflix’s forever-dwindling interest in making available anything older than a decade or two.
Larry Cohen's Q: The Winged Serpent.
Larry Cohen's Q: The Winged Serpent.
And while a glimpse of a vintage 16mm or 35mm print is rightly prized as the Holy Grail in cities with vigorous (or, in New York’s case, downright berserk) repertory- cinema circuits, cheaper copies of the same images are proliferating elsewhere. The question of purism is under constant scrutiny; a few years back, I saw filmmaker Larry Cohen introduce a midnight screening of his classic Q: The Winged Serpent on what turned out to be a persistently pink-tinted 35mm print, and then half-jokingly beseech the audience to follow him back home to watch the film on a nice clean DVD instead. Is the connoisseurship of celluloid film a niche interest, impossible to maintain in a world ever changing? Who are the dreamers of this analog world, and who are its hardline realists?
Dennis Bartok and Jeff Joseph’s A Thousand Cuts: The Bizarre Underground World of Collectors and Dealers Who Saved The Movies describes itself as “a book about the death of Film” as opposed to the death of The Movies, but make no mistake: this sweeping, warts-and-all survey of the world of private print collecting is far more elegy than paean. (Bartok’s introduction designates it a kind of “mad Irish wake.”) Each chapter tidily spans a different collector; their page-for-page testimonies make for a book that’s reflexively hard to put down, dense with lurid accounts of print deals gone wrong and corresponding back-alley-Hollywood lore—sometimes, both at once. Across the book’s cast of nearly two-dozen interviewees-as-narrators, there’s enough annotation and kismet for a sprawling Paul Thomas Anderson picture (and more than enough bad blood).
Rock Hudson, film collector.
Rock Hudson, film collector.
The collectors interviewed include late Something Weird impresario Mike Vraney, Joe Dante, and Leonard Maltin—who met his future wife Alice at a private cine-club screening— alongside Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne, Phil Blankenship, and filmmaker/archivist Kevin Brownlow, who spent half a century leading the continuing effort to restore Abel Gance’s Napoleon to its original three-panel, six-hour glory. Were it not for A Thousand Cuts, I would have no idea that Osborne personally catalogued Rock Hudson’s print collection (a great many of its acquisitions bargained by Hudson himself from his studios of employ), that Paramount permanently sold its entire pre-1948 film library to Music Corporation of America (MCA) for $50 million in 1958 (only for it to be acquired later by Universal), or that the last known screenable 35mm print of Otto Preminger’s long-suppressed 1959 Porgy and Bess, starring Sidney Poitier and Dorothy Dandridge, was sitting in a private collection —Ken Kramer’s Clip Joint—in Burbank.
Kramer—whose first exposure to the world of black-market print trafficking began as a teenager, when he formed an alliance with a family friend who had contacts at local film labs—is one of many interviewees who passed away between meeting with Bartok and Joseph and the publication of A Thousand Cuts. For these men (and all but one of them are men, middle-aged or older) the “why” of getting into collecting requires no asking. The collections are histories unto themselves: lifelong continuations of childhood nostalgias, faraway places where their keepers sought escape from the drudgery of life’s non-Hollywood endings, or logistical nightmares of space and money foisted upon their long-suffering wives and children. (Maltin quips that, “You hear about football widows, and there were film collector widows.”) Not a few of the places visited by Bartok and Joseph reek, sometimes literally, of obsession; worlds of the diehard movie-maniac interior, gilded with Hollywood victory trophies and/or flotsam salvaged from abandonment as the motion-picture business, inevitably, moved on.
Otto Preminger's Porgy and Bess.
Otto Preminger's Porgy and Bess.
Bartok notices the front window of collector Peter Dyck’s Inglewood home, espousing a “Preview Tonight 8:30” sign from LA’s long-shuttered Encore Theatre—one of many minimetaphors perhaps irresistibly seized upon by A Thousand Cuts’ authors as evidence. The book retains its fondness for homage even while probing how, for instance, someone could possibly think holding onto an IB Technicolor print they’ll probably never be able to screen again is more important than selling it to pay for a prosthetic leg. Many of these sons (or, if you like, holdouts) of the postwar era grew up in imperfect working-class homes back when Film was Film—and furthermore, an era when the widespread rebroadcasting of lower-quality copies on daytime television fed a strain of Hollywood completism and armchair scholarship.
It needs saying that A Thousand Cuts accommodates as many viewpoints on this (admittedly niche) schism as it does due entirely to its writers’ access: Bartok wrote it when he was head of Cinelicious Pics—a burgeoning theatrical/Blu-ray distributor of restored discoveries—but has since returned to the American Cinematheque Los Angeles, as general manager. Joseph, who both appears in the book and rode shotgun for every single one of its interviews, spent his professional life as a film dealer, even spending two months in prison after an FBI sting operation in 1975—when he was all of twenty-two years old. The wave of crackdowns that decade had arguably peaked six months earlier, when FBI agents raided the home of Roddy McDowall and seized his entire collection of movies—which comprised a number of rare prints, but more controversially, VHS copies of the same ilk everybody would soon be taping off of television. (In another of the book’s sad intra-Hollywood refractions, McDowall is quoted as explaining to the FBI that he bought his print of Escape From the Planet of the Apes, starring himself, to preserve a particularly testing sliver of his own performance as Cornelius, which had been edited out of the TV-broadcast cut.) McDowall named names (including Rock Hudson’s) and was cleared of the charges after handing over his movies, as were other collectors ensnared in similar dragnets; Joseph even got his movies back from the FBI in the end, which he promptly had to sell to support himself. He also maintains the hunt for print collectors was a sideshow designed to burnish the FBI's public profile after the Patty Hearst fiasco. And despite these innocuous-sounding codas, the book takes pains to describe the ways in which raids shook the already-precarious print market forever…
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Cineaste, Vol. XLII, No. 2