I don’t know that I’ve ever watched an entire episode of HOARDERS, the A&E reality TV series about people who obsessively collect things and wind up entrapped by their possessions, but I’ve seen enough and I get the point.  As such, I’ve been spending a little time lately wading through my collection of film magazines with a mind toward, you might say, thinning the herd.  I have a tendency to hold onto things but it’s not for reasons of security or the need to control my environment or any of the myriad whacko reasons people wind up with 137 kitty kat clocks, 52 eight track head cleaner cassettes and a gross of D’ag bags.  As a freelance writer, I never know what I’m going to be writing about from month to month, so I’ve been characteristically slow to part with old issues of Film Comment or Sight & Sound or Cineaste because, hey, it could happen that I’m asked to write about Joris Ivens or Maurice Pialat or Marco Bellocchio and if it does then I’ll really need that 13, 15 or even 3o-year issue of that august film journal.  But chances are I won’t.  So let’s take out the trash, shall we… or at least ask some hard questions about what stays and what goes.

I’ve decided to do this on a case by case basis.  First up, the March/April 2002 issue of Film Comment.  I bought this New York-based magazine pretty regularly in the B.C. (Before Children), when I was between marriages and had nothing better to do with my money.  Flipping through this almost 10-year-old issue I find a lot of head-scratchers.  In the “Opening Shots” column (news items from around the world of film), Nicole Kidman is announced as one of the stars of then upcoming HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS and also of something called COURT AND SPARK.  These things didn’t happen, of course, nor did Jamie Foxx replace Bill Murray as Bosley in CHARLIE’S ANGELS: HALO, which was released instead as CHARLIE’S ANGELS: FULL THROTTLE (2003) with Bernic Mac in the role.   I’m also not sad to report that, 9 years later, Christopher McQuarrie’s script for the American remake of Johnnie To’s THE MISSION (1999) has born fruit or that the Tobey Maguire-Jennifer Lopez remake of Sam Fuller’s THE NAKED KISS (1964) never progressed beyond the Really Bad Idea stage.  I don’t mean to make it sound like I’m picking on Film Comment for being chockablock with inside tips that turned out to be so many popcorn farts – that’s the nature of the beast, I guess, and one of the most fascinating things about Hollywood is the stuff that never got made, or perhaps just got made under entirely different circumstances than anyone attached early on could have imagined.  I can see now what drew me to this issue back in 2002: an article on photographer Gregory Crewdson, a piece by Jason Gross on the GHOST WORLD (2001) soundtrack, Richard Combs’ selection of Michael Haneke’s THE PIANO TEACHER (2001) as “Movie of the Moment” and a page dedicated to Francois Ozon’s 8 WOMEN (2002).  Other stuff – the cover story on Francis Ford Coppola, “Oscar Predix” and fiction — who’s precious idea was that? — didn’t interest me then and doesn’t now.  Decision:  toss.

Some years ago, a friend way up Vancouver way sent me a bunch of Canadian film magazines from the 1970s.  Mind you, these magazines were old when I got them — the issue at the right is from 1973 — and they have aged another decade in my care.  As a kid growing up in North East Connecticut, I loved seeing the odd Canadian movie that would trickle down to the New York stations we could receive at night if we rotated our roof ariel all the way to the west.  It was a treat to get these magazines and read about the Canadian film industry of the era in which I discovered it and they gave me some unique insights into how movies were made (and why they weren’t) in the Great White North.  In addition to boasting a haunting shot of Genevieve Bujold looking all ghostly on the cover, issue #7 of Canadian Cinema, there’s an interview with the actress, a ton of ads for then-state of the art camera equipment (“the Bolex EBM Electric: The Standard in 16mm!”) and, best of all for a geeks like me, an item in the “Canadian Film News” under the subheading of “More Canadian Features?” that notes that “another upcoming project called FEAST OF THE CANNIBAL GHOULS, a $50,00, full length super-16mm features (is) to be shot on location in Sudbury, Ontario… The horror story will use local talent, except for U.S. actor John Carradine in the lead.”  The movie this turned out to be was CORPSE EATERS (1974), the first Canadian zombie movie ever (and something to see if you haven’t had the pleasure), which went into the can without the services of John Carradine.  Given that CORPSE EATERS doesn’t seem to have been made — which is to say, budgeted, location-scouted, cast, blocked, shot, printed, processed and duplicated — so much as resulted from a chemical spill, it’s cool (in a purely Psychotronic way) to seed this little news item but it’s not really a justification for keeping the mag, I’m sorry to say.  Decision:  re-read the Bujold interview and toss.

I picked up this issue of the British film magazine Neon when I was in London in the fall of 1997, specifically (if I remember correctly) to read on the train when I made the trip by rail to Bath.  It’s an over-sized magazine and this cover had actual holes where the bloody bullet holes appear — which I thought was cool. (Still do!)  Devoted to violence in cinema, the subject of this particular issue was right up my alley.  “World of Pain: 100 Years of Gore” by Andrew Male is a well-argued defense of ultra-violence as a credible component of movie storytelling (“We should never believe that the movies have an obligation to teach us how to become better people…”) and makes interesting reading alongside “Shoot to Kill” by Gareth Grundy, an article about the specter of snuff films and the very real and tragic story of a Hollywood hopeful who imploded on his way to a studio deal, taking out his estranged wife and 13 year-old daughter before turning his gun on himself in the San Jacinto mountains.  (The movie did get made, by the way, by and starring Johnny Depp, with Marlon Brando — no, really.)  There’s also a tribute to the then-recently deceased Robert Mitchum by Jim Jarmush, an appreciative piece on Ken Russell’s THE DEVILS (1970) by Richard Falcon and a short interview with Mike Hodges regarding GET CARTER (1971) but at a distance of 14 years I don’t know if there’s much to hold my ongoing interest.  Decision:  toss.

I remember where I got this: at a subterranean book shop on 12th Street in the Village, right across the street from the rep house Cinema Village.  Twelfth Street Books was one of my regular stops downtown back when I lived in Manhattan, and I usually made a beeline right from The Strand to there (that is, if I hadn’t already spent all my folding money at the Strand).  Never crowded, the joint had a juicy pulp fiction section in a corner that you had to squeeze to fit into (as I remember) but it was the film section that I loved the best.  I bought a lot of stuff there, from the taciturn clerk with indie pic good looks and a serious nicotine habit.  They often had a big old carboard box full of old film magazines and that’s where I picked up more than a few issues of the mighty Films in Review.  It’s a good issue — the letters section alone has correspondence from Dewitt Bodeen and William K. Everson (“Changing a hot bulb in the middle of a screening can be painful as well as time-consuming and annoying…”) — with pieces on Dorothy Gish and Franz Waxman and a funny reminiscence by Samuel A. Peeples about getting on Boris Karloff’s bad side but the real find for me here was Jack Edmund Nolan’s profile of Eddie Constantine, just one of my favorite actors ever! Constantine was an American who found fame abroad, principally in France but in international productions all over the Continent.  He made the occasional English language film (Guy Green’s SOS PACIFIC and John Mackenzie’s THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY, although he has considerable cult film clout for starring in Jean-Luc Godard’s ALPHAVILLE, too) but never made any real impact in America.  That’s what makes “The Eddie Constantine Vogue” (which would make a terrific band name) such a find, rounded out as it is with a then-comprehensive filmography and representing about the only thing I have read on Eddie Constantine in English.  I relied heavily on this when I wrote the supplemental materials for Anchor Bay’s LONG GOOD FRIDAY DVD a few years ago.  Decision: keep, possibly forever.

One of my favorite haunts in Times Square — a place I confess not to having spent a lot of time, apart from theatre-related business — was the big Virgin Megastore, which I’m sure replaced four peep shows and a tattoo parlor or maybe just a big old shuttered retail space, I don’t remember.  Pricing at Virgin was never better than SRP, which made me a Mondo Kim’s and Tower Records customer, but Virgin did have a great magazine rack and that’s where I picked up this 1999 issue of BadAzz MoFo.  My friend Chris Poggiali is a contributor to this issue but I don’t know if I knew that when I picked it up — I may have spent my hard-earned $4.95 on the strength of the cover alone and the peripheral promise of “Akira Kurosawa!  Midgets!  T-shirt Giveaway!”  BadAzz MoFo was a very funny ‘zine that followed Blaxploitation and some related subgenres (spaghetti westerns, chop sockey) and it was rich in both wit and the kind of slavish attention to detail that can come from only the most dedicated aficionado.  There’s a lot to love here — from Chris’ overview of the Donald Westlake “Richard Stark” novels (which inspired such films as POINT BLANK, THE SPLIT, THE OUTFIT and SLAYGROUND) to the big spaghetti western feature to sidebars on black westerns, real life black cowboys and “Injunsploitation.”  Plus, the mag had an unbeatable rating system — afros:  4 afros meant excellence, 1 afro meant fair and no afros/Jeri curls meant sucks.  Not surprisingly, irreverence is the coin of the BadAzz MoFo realm — check this review for John Frankenheimer’s RONIN (1998):  :Ever watch a James Bond flick, and wonder what the shit would be like if Robert DeNiro was starring in it?  Me neither.”  13 years later and I’m still laffin’.  Let’s remember that, BadAzz MoFo issue no. 4, as we go our separate ways.  We had a good run.  Decision:  toss, with regrets.

I bought Famous Monsters of Filmland pretty religiously between 1971 and 1977 or ’78 but I entered adulthood with just one issue left over from my childhood.  I really can’t account for that.  I must have given my Mom the go-ahead to trash my collection while I was in college (no, I wasn’t drunk) which meant that when my love of monsters and monster accessories kicked back in during the early 90s I had to re-purchase many back issues.  Luckily, FM has never been a rare item and I met some great guys at horror conventions who’d kept these then-twenty and thirty year-old issues in tip top condition.  I don’t really know why this particular issue from July 1970 is kicking around outside of the heavy duty cardboard box in which I store my FM back issues — I must have referred to it at some point in the past two years — but there it is, at my elbow.  What a cover!  No such scene appears in WITCHCRAFT (1964) but Vic Prezio’s illustration is a winner nonetheless — I love the look on the sacrificial victim’s face.  There’s a feature article on witchcraft in the movies, chockablock with illustrations, and a strange novelization-like condensation of Edgar Ulmer’s THE BLACK CAT (1934) … plus, those classic Warren Publishing back pages, full of wonderful items to buy with your allowance, like a Mole People mask or 8mm cut-downs of THE BLOB (1958), THE 4D MAN (1959) and IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE (1953).  I ordered a lot of stuff from Captain Company back in the day but I spent even more time just looking at all of this bounty and wondering what my life would be like with it in my house.  In a way, my consideration of the essential, lasting worth of this issue is a bit of a cheat because I would never and will never part with my Famous Monsters collection.  Decision: keep.  These back issues will go with me to the very lip of my grave… and perhaps beyond!