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This chapter is written by Ian Rough, another regular Derann customer and someone who worked in the film industry for many years before retiring to France.
I first starting collecting standard 8m/m films when I was 13 in 1962, 200ft & 50th digests, titles like ‘The Finishing Touch’ Abbott & Costello in ‘Midget Car Maniacs’, Keystone Cops, and many cartoons, I use to have film shows in my home cinema that I built in the spare bedroom of parent’s house for school friends and my elder sister’s friends, I also ran a small film hire library for my friends. I also had a GB 16m/m sound projector in the setup but only had around 6 films that my dad had acquired, mainly sponsored film like ‘The national tea board’.
In 1965 I started working as a runner for A.B. Pathe, 142, Wardour St. Warner Pathe had an extensive 16 m/m film library so I was able to rent big features at a ‘Staff discount’ so that is when my regular weekly film shows began.
I also got to know George in the basement of the ‘Corner cinema’ The Warner Bros preview theatre Soho Square, where my next job was as assistant projectionist. George ran the TV film library and also all prints that were rented out were returned to him by the Services and Boats etc, were destroyed by him with an axe, this used to break my heart!
George was off sick for a while and a young guy took over running the department form the dispatch dept. This guy knew that I loved film and let me borrow any title that I wanted for free before destroying them. After a while I was able to keep the prints, I will not go into the way that I was allowed to keep them, but needless to say I built up a large library of over 100 titles.
Also in those days the poster/publicity departments were actually in the distributor’s offices so I got to acquire many Posters, Campaign Books (I still have a fabulous campaign book for ‘Some like it hot’ and some Carry on titles) and front of house stills but sadly over the years I auctioned them off when I was short of cash, today all those posters (including many Bond film posters) would be worth many thousands of pounds and I was allowed to take what ever I wanted but no one thought of the value they would be worth in those days. I still have a few left but nothing of great value.
For a few years I stopped collecting as I spent some time in Morocco/ Gibraltar and then working in advertising industry running a video studio, I lost the Bug for a while, then in the 1970’s I discovered Keith Perry, owner of Perry’s movies and would spend Saturday mornings in his shop in Merton Park buying super 8m/m features, and 400ft digests of feature films. I also bought many projectors and cameras from Keith, he introduced me to Derek of Derann and then my colleting went to new hights, at Film collector fairs Derek would grab my credit card and wave it at Perry’s film stall (Now run by Ian O’Reilly as Keith had retired) and say “Hey Ian, Ha, Ha, I’ve got Ian’s credit card now!” At each collector’s fair I would spend in the region of £1,000 so my card was in great demand!
In the late 1990’s I stopped collecting film but had built up a library of around 700 films consisting of Super 8mm and 16m/m plus 100 Lazer discs, I then started collecting DVDs and I have over 3,500 DVDs to date and still have around 50 16m/m features.
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