Word: searcher
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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From the suburban housewife who pinches her household money to collect dolls of all nations to the squillionaire* searcher of continents, collectors are a race apart. What distinguishes them, for good or ill, is the fact that they are not only possessors, but possessed...
...smoke-hazed dining room of Las Vegas' Desert Inn last week, the supply of ready money would have staggered the earnest searcher for a low-rate bank loan. Free Scotch and fast talk was all it took to con a crew of well-heeled high rollers into coughing up $266,000 worth of bets. For his cash, each gambler was buying a crack golfer in the "Calcutta" auction before the Desert Inn's sixth annual Tournament of Champions. The man who owned the winner would get a whopping $95,760 share of the pot; even a lowly seventh...
Mussolini, the latest example of a notably successful TV specialty, is in great part a monument to a new kind of sleuth: the film searcher. Before Twentieth Century could fit together the show's dramatic jigsaw pattern in celluloid, searchers had to hunt out the bits and pieces of aging film in 25 different hoards in four countries; to give editors a choice, they brought in ten times as much footage as editors could...
Truffle Hound. The hunting ground of the celluloid sleuths is vast-Government agencies in the U.S. and abroad, old newsreel vaults and a network of private collectors, mostly eccentrics whom one NBC searcher describes as "a basketful of live eels who frequently don't own the film legally." Archives are widely scattered, often poorly indexed, studded with tantalizing gaps left by oversight, fire and disintegration. Nitrate-base film, widely used until 1948, has a lifetime of only 25 years. "It is not unusual," says an expert, "to open a can of film and find nothing but dust." Almost...
...touch with 260 collectors around the world (184 in the U.S.), says: "A collector will never divulge the names of other collectors." Many are specialists, collecting only railroad shots, Ernst Lubitsch film or Tom Mix reels. Among themselves, they swap film, rarely sell it. "When we need something," says Searcher McDonough, "we send out word to a couple of key people in this underground." The networks pay $2.50 a foot for collectors' film, though to get a sequence of a debutante describing her dance with the Prince of Wales, Stuart had to put up nothing less than some...