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Let me assure you that film collectors (on actual film) still exist! I have several friends who are still rabid celluloid heads, and who have some rare and wonderful things.

However, most of them that I know collect 16mm, while 8 and Super 8 have pretty much disappeared except among a few die hards such as yourself - I salute you!

I myself collected 16mm for years, and still have 100 cartoons or so - sold off the rest as I moved into video projection, which is so much more affordable and convienent, and now looks just about as good as all but the best 16mm prints. (Nothing, however, looks as great as a mint real IB Technicolor print!)

I do have Castle and other 8mm films I've picked up over the years, for the great boxes that I display in my theater. I too couldn't afford them when I was a kid, and used to look at them longingly in FM and at a local department store that had them on a rack in the camera department.

Ahh, the pre-video days!

I think the greatest thing about the old 8mm films was that they were the "seed" that a lot of film collectors grew from - certainly those born from say 1950 to 1970 or so.

I've observed that most on these boards fall into a couple of catagories -
people who have become professionals related to film in some way, say researchers, writers, and I assume a few who actually work in films in one capacity or another, and just plain fans, who love these movies and their related subjects.

In the fan catagory however, there is a subspecies I'd call the Serious Film Collector - I guess I'm one, although by my standards I'm a very insignificant one.

Some of the "elders" in this group were theater projectionists or TV station employees whose love of film led them to acquire mostly 16mm prints through various means, not always technically legal. It was in fact not really possible for the "average" person to have a copy of their favorite movies unless you "knew someone". So film collecting in the pre-video days was a semi-underground affair, and a rather expensive hobby.

The 8mm market became an important legal point of entry for budding film enthusiasts. It was still pretty expensive, especially if your primary source of income was a paper route, but none the less, it was within reach for a kid in the burbs or a small town. The frustrations of having to put up with silent digests were overcome by the thrill of being able to see the Wolfman actually grow hair and move whenever YOU wanted and not have to scour the TV Guide to hope he was on Chiller Theatre this week, and if not just go back and stare at the newsprint photo in Famous Monsters.

Today some of these kids are those who will only have and show real film, no video. Such people often become scholars and preservationists in their own right, and if you're lucky enough to have one of these folks as your friend, you can be treated to some wonderful evenings in private repertory cinemas I affectionately dub "Basement Bijous".

I'm part of such a group, and just last night was treated to the wonderful (and thematically bizarre) double feature of THE CLOUDED YELLOW and CREATURE WITH THE BLUE HAND! The only connection was, of course, the colors in the titles, but what a fun evening! And unless you live in a large city (I do), you'll just never get to see older films such as these projected (and in this case, I doubt if you could see these revived ANYWHERE - I'm pretty sure we were the only people in the WORLD watching these two on film back to back last night!).

My friend, who I would guess has one of the larger private collections in the country, started with 8mm films. While I too have gone over to video projection, and am quite happy with it, there's nothing like the clack of a projector and the heady smell of Vitafilm to get one's movie juices a-flowin'.

And we owe it all to Castle films...

SAM33