If you are not a collector of something then you have no
idea what it means to find buried treasure, to discover something that you love
hidden in a thrift shop or to covet the glittery baubles that some other
collector owns. This holds true for collectors of any item. But movie
collectors and fans are a whole other creature.
A THOUSAND CUTS might seem like a non-fiction book written
about film fans but it’s more than that. It’s a story that involves pirates, it
involves fanatics, it involves con men, it involves the FBI, it involves movie
studios and more than anything it is about…movie lovers. It might be hard for
younger people to understand that there actually was a time when movies were
not easily accessible. We live in a time when you can press an app on your cell
phone and watch a movie there via services like Netflix. But go back further.
Go past blu-rays to DVDs to VHS tapes and stop at the medium that movies began
as: film.
For fans of movies the only way you could watch your
favorite movie was to see it in a theater or catch it on TV. With no VCR if you
missed it you were out of luck. But there were a number of die-hard movie fans that
went one step further, movie fans that bought copies of their favorite films ON
film. Some were 16mm copies and some 35mm but they were films that they could
own, hold and watch whenever they wanted at home.
The book talks too many of these fans from the past who love
the medium in its original form. They also own DVDs and tapes but the thing
that the truly love is film itself. Each chapter has the authors talking to
different people who have collected film over the years. Some found themselves
in trouble with the law when movie studios considered this an infraction of
their copyrighted films. Most didn’t face jail time but some did. Some dabbled
in black market sales of films during this time. Some retain their most prized
possessions to this day.
What you walk away with in reading this book is a feeling of
joy that so many people were actually a part of this underground movement to
save film. As studios work to bring out pristine versions of their films on
blu-ray and now 4k reproductions it is through some of these collectors that
they’ve been able to find missing reels, missing bits and pieces and in some
cases quality reproductions of their films, films that languished away in
vaults where they deteriorated over time. Thank goodness these prints still
exist. By the end of the book you may find yourself considering the purchase of
a projector and a few spools of film.
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