Confessions of a Collector

On being a 1970s Movie Obsessive

Confessions of a Collector: On Being a 1970s Movie Obsessive

When our father took me and my brother to Paris in the 1978 Easter holidays - during which we saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind in the Version Originale in a cavernous cinema on the rue Voltaire - our obsession with the James Bond films quickly broadened to include all movies and related memorabilia. We were ten years old, and ready for anything.

At the time, a renaissance of American filmmaking was in full swing, the fruits of which were travelling over the Atlantic to the Stevenage ABC with increasing frequency. Most of these films we were too young to see, but they were a tantalising prospect. The very adult nature of movies such as The Deer Hunter, Looking for Mr Goodbar, Kramer vs. Kramer, Apocalypse Now and Alien, was compelling. They provided a window on a world of grown-up conflict, fear and pleasure we were just beginning to understand. Along with Film Review, we began collecting Photoplay with its more in-depth interviews with stars and directors. The nearest we got to seeing these movies was the poster art, which we obsessed over. The late 70s also heralded a renaissance in film artwork, with unforgettable designs and taglines. Alien’s cracked egg, with its glow of otherworldly light, and the slogan In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream, was only one example. Rather than cut up the film mags and paste these posters into scrap books, we used to copy them line by line, lovingly rendering the United Artists or the Warner Brothers logos, along with the full casts and crews. Some of these production designers and directors of photography were more familiar to us than our own school friends. We also rendered the lettering of the London cinemas where these films were shown. The Screen on the Hill. The Ritzy. The Warner West End. We had no idea where these places were, but we knew how to draw their logos.

Our collection of movie merch grew exponentially. There were film tie-ins, annuals and postermags (a lavish 70s innovation you could find in Surridge’s, the newsagent on Hitchin's Hermitage Road). There were the Palitoy figures from Star Wars, a film we were by then desperate to see. There were bubble gum cards, and Corgi toys and lunch boxes and board games. But the hard stuff – the actual cinema posters and official promotional material the exhibitor was meant to return or destroy – was rarer, and much more expensive. We’d been sending off postal orders to addresses from the classifieds at the back of Film Review for over a year, and then sitting back expectantly before a Bond poster would arrive via Royal Mail. Then one day we came across an ad for a place called the Vintage Magazine Shop in Seven Dials near Covent Garden. Apparently, this was where you could find all these posters and mags for sale without having to wait for the postman. The next time our mother took us down to London on the train to go shopping, we made sure to pester her for a visit.

There was a special atmosphere to London in the late 70s, best described as seedy dilapidation. Years of industrial unrest and galloping stagflation had rendered the country, and its once great capital, broken and poor. Two smells will eternally evoke it for me: black cab diesel fumes and chicken chow mein. The streets of Chinatown, which we traversed to get to Leicester Square or the Charring Cross Road, were impossibly evocative with their waft of frying onions and soy sauce. Soho at the time was at peak depravity, with ‘adult’ shops on every corner and sex workers staggering drunk down the middle of the road. There was a real sense of lawless dissipation. Everywhere you went there were tatty facades and dirty old men in raincoats, or punks with sky-high spiky hair and safety pins in their ears. It’s fair to say we loved it all. Compared to Hitchin, with its toytown streets and manicured lawns, Soho felt like real life. London was jammed with restaurants and cinemas and hustling nutters on the make. It was grown-up, scary and serious. Urban in every sense, rather than tediously provincial. London seemed to coalesce all our obsessions at once. Not only were the streets full of cars we coveted – the Lotus Elans and the Triumph TR7s and Jaguar XJSs like the one driven by the Saint – but the Tube was decorated with the very posters we’d spent hours copying laboriously at home. And there, at last, were the cinemas whose logos we’d drawn – the Empire Leicester Square, the Cannon Haymarket, the Lumiere Covent Garden. Often, we were treated to a quarter pounder with cheese at the MacDonalds near the bottom of Dean Street. This felt intensely glamorous, as the only restaurants Hitchin had at the time were the Wimpy Bar on Sun Street and a single Indian restaurant, the Rawalpindi, where our father had once taken us for tandoori chicken, the only dish our finicky English tastebuds could palate.

When we finally found the Vintage Magazine Shop, a boxy little dive with a dingy basement on Earlham Street, it was like discovering Tutankhamun’s tomb. It was stuffed from floor to ceiling with racks of all the treasure we’d dreamed of. Posters, stills, movie memorabilia and related kitsch galore. And, of course, magazines: thousands of copies of everything from kids' mags such as Eagle and the Beano, to film titles like Sight and Sound, to Marvel comics and soft porn. The very atmosphere of the place was thrilling – dusty, hushed, specialist. The first thing you encountered on going through the door was the framed quad-crown poster for James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause, their star item, which never seemed to get sold. I can’t remember its exact asking price, but it was probably something like seventy-five quid. To buy it now would set you back over two grand.

On our many future visits we would spend a good two hours going through tubs of 10”x8” stills, all in clear plastic wallets to protect them, searching for the familiar faces of Roger or Sean Barbara Bach. There were scores of rare exhibitor's campaign books , or pressbooks – brochures that were never intended for public consumption, but were for cinemas or the print media to browse iterations of the film poster and other promotional tie-in items. There were packs of FOH stills – Front of House colour photographs – which usually appeared in glass-boxed displays under the poster outside an Odeon. Lamentably, these are long gone now, but as kids we used to love the glimpse they afforded of the actual film as we queued for Nickelodeon or The Rescuers or The Waterbabies. Even rarer were lobby cards, the American equivalent of FOH stills, which were larger and more lavish. There was a full set for the Spy Who Loved Me, with thrilling pillar-box red borders, which we salivated over but couldn’t afford. We begged our mother to buy them for Christmas. And lastly there were the ‘quads’, which were the standard 30x40” posters that appeared outside British cinemas, and which were too pricey, but provided endless fascination. By this time, we realised that film memorabilia could be traded, so we often went away with a few cheap items in the hope we could swap it for Bond stuff via the trusty Film Review ads.

The Vintage Magazine Shop later moved to a roomier address on Brewer Street in the 1980s, with its familiar crimson exterior and big picture of Bogart smoking a fag over the door. While it remained a thrilling Aladdin’s cave, selling everything from Betty Blue fridge Magnets to entire collections of 1970s Mad magazine, it was becoming a tourist trap, and never reproduced the rarefied atmosphere of the original shop. It was at the new premises that my brother and I spent the exorbitant sum of £25 on a boxed, Goldfinger Aston Martin. Pristine as it was, with all its working features and original stickers, it wasn’t as thrilling as coming across the broken Bond DB5 on Hitchin’s Antique Market that we'd snapped up a few years before. The poster for Rebel Without a Cause was nowhere to be seen either. I like to think someone stole it and has it framed over their fireplace.