Page 13 - RD Reel Deals

Oklahoma, Les Girls, etc. Titles I had long sought were now in my collection. There were other items
that looked interesting, but which I was yet to identify or check. There was in excess of 200,000 feet of
35mm nitrate, a quick look in each rusty tin revealed most to be in remarkably good condition – only a
very small number showed any signs of decomposition, and these were disposed of.
During all of this activity, it became obvious that I had numerous odd reels from features on both
35mm and 16mm, they were stored separately and occasionally the missing part or parts would turn
up, but in most case they didn’t.
A couple of months later, I received a phone call from another collector asking if I was the one who
had purchased M’s collection from up the bush. He then went on to say that I had only about half of it,
as the other half had been left to another family member and it was stored in a basement in Melbourne
What to do? I really had a task
ahead of me with what I had in
the garage, but as I had
numerous incomplete features,
the only sensible thing was to try
and get the rest of the collection.
Some phone calls and
discussions revealed that a well-
known collector / dealer had
recently purchased all of the
16mm material, so I was left with
the prospect of making an offer
for the remaining 35mm stuff.
After inspecting what was there,
my offer to take it was accepted.
The following Saturday morning,
Troy in one of the work Toyota
vans and Barb and I in the other
one headed off to Melbourne to
!
collect it all. A friend had offered
his help as well, so with the four of
use working solidly, we had Troy on his way back in a full van within an hour or so. The balance was
loaded into my van and although both vans were piled up to the roof, we only just managed to get it all
in.
The two vans were unloaded to add another heap of unsorted film to the chaos already in the garage.
More sorting and then complete features started to come together – there was even a bit of 16mm left
behind that helped complete some of the features.
I then spoke to the chap who had got in first with the 16mm material. After exchanging lists of odd
reels, it was obvious we held quite a number of complete features between us – so a number of boxes
of odd reels were swapped and then finally the number of incomplete features came down to an
acceptable number.
Sorting the large quantity of nitrate has been an interesting task; it is slow going and I am still working
on the task. There is quite a lot of it that I have earmarked to go to the National Film and Sound
Archive (NFSA).

Amongst the older stuff were a number of early silent newsreels, mostly incomplete, but all very
interesting. Probably the oldest item is a few feet of a C.1910 Australian Pathé Newsreel, it shows the
Hoyts Theatre in Bourke Street Melbourne. There was also about 200 feet of an “Australian Talkie
Newsreel” – this was a short-lived sound on disc newsreel from about 1929. Surprisingly, my material
seems to have the lead in titles to some material held by the NFSA.
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