comment #1

Rich S. says ...

I'm kind of on the fence about preservation of "film artifacts." After all, anyone that's spent any time at all around movie production knows that most of the props and sets are cheaply made and only designed to be used once. The stuff that is more permanent, like the crop duster or various vehicles, is generally repurposed and repainted and used again and again.

Film artifacts aren't really historical artifacts in any real sense. Plus, there's no way to know while they're making a film whether it will become a cultural touchstone, thus rendering the props "worthy" of preservation. To top it all off, that worthiness is always subjective. One fan might want to preserve the vehicles they drove in Sleeper, and not give a crap about the gun Gene Hackman used in The French Connection. There aren't warehouses big enough to save everything.

Stanley Kubrick was famous for destroying sets and props after he finished with a film to prevent them from being reused (like poor Robbie the Robot). Is that "vandalism?" Is Kubrick a "hinterlander?"

Long story short, I get your point. But ultimately, unless you have the money to buy things that mean something to you personally, I'm not sure how much it matters. What's really important, after all, is the image captured on the film.

comment #2

dixiedugan says ...

I agree that this guy is an idiot. However, I really get sick of your portrayal of all 'hinterlanders' as idiots. You're playing the same scratchy 45 time and time again, and it's old baby, it's old.

comment #3

cgulli says ...

Reminds me of the guy who spent something like $1 million to buy a classic Ferrari owned by Steve McQueen, then spent more money to gut it and make it like new. Like you're shiny paint job and new seats are going to be better than the door dings and seat tears Steve McQueen put in it. The whole point is you are buying a living museum, it should be preserved like that.

comment #4

Wrecktem says ...

It's his plane, he can do what he wishes with it. It's just a paint job. You do realize that he can repaint it fairly easily, if he wishes.

comment #5

The Bandsaw Vigilante says ...

I live in Glen Ellyn, IL -- trust me, Lake Forest is not in the "hinterlands." It's practically on Lake Shore Drive.

That said... I agree with Jeff about "hinterlanders" in general, though this should be a case-by-case-basis type of thing, re: refurbishing classic artifacts.

comment #6

Travis Crabtree says ...

Jeeez.... maybe the guy was more interested in owning a working, vintage, Navy N3N Trainer than a prop from a movie.

They're movies. I love movies. But to a lot of people they're just movies.

Just because somebody isn't as big of a movie buff as you are I doesn't make him a dork.

I bum out when I see vintage cars get totaled in movies.

comment #7

Floyd Thursby says ...

Would love to have George Kaplan's suit. Probably fit me.

comment #8

Mgmax, le Corbeau says ...

Nice, Floyd.

Meanwhile, there are few things more reliably humorous here than Jeff generalizing about the stupidity of midwest hicks and assuming that a north shore suburb with a median household income of $150K and a noteworthy place in the history of frickin' POLO is hicksville.

To translate it for those of you in California (Rio Linda or otherwise), that's sort of like assuming that everyone in Orange County is a dope-smoking bisexual Obama supporter.

comment #9

Floyd Thursby says ...

Going back and forth about this matter with friend at TCM, who opines that Malcolm Atterbury's delivery of "dusting crops where there ain't no crops" may be the best delivered line in the movies. I concur.

comment #10

Krazy Eyes says ...

I live outside Chicago and just about everybody I know is from the East Coast.

comment #11

Jeffrey Wells says ...

I know all about Lake Forest, and that everyone has money there, but if you don't understand that you don't fuck with the appearance of a classic movie prop you're a hick -- and I don't care how well-heeled you are. I think there's something in Midwest culture (Chicago, Lake Forest) that doesn't seem to get this -- that has a blockage about it.

comment #12

Travis Crabtree says ...

It doesn't just happen in the midwest.

The city of San Francisco has inexplicably painted the Golden Gate Bridge a number of times, despite its prominence in "Vertigo". Bastards.

And New York City stuck a TV tower on top of the Empire State Building. Hello? "King Kong"?

comment #13

joncro says ...

Speaking if Kubrick, this is how someone apparently discovered one of his classic props dumped....

http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/faq/html/spacestation.html

comment #14

Mgmax, le Corbeau says ...

"I know all about Lake Forest, and that everyone has money there, but if you don't understand that you don't fuck with the appearance of a classic movie prop you're a hick -- and I don't care how well-heeled you are. I think there's something in Midwest culture (Chicago, Lake Forest) that doesn't seem to get this -- that has a blockage about it."

Please enlighten us as to how Los Angeles has preserved its movie culture in a thoughtful and classy way. Would that be modern stars replacing the gorgeous homes of the 20s with shitty McMansions, or Ted Mann having the concrete footprints of silent stars jackhammered to make room for Ali McGraw in the 70s, or perhaps that Arab sheik who had pubic hair painted on the statues on his Beverly Hills home? Really, I'd like to know just how Chicago suffers in comparison to LA as the land of genteel good taste, because I'm too big a hick to see it for myself, evidently.

comment #15

moviemaniac2002 says ...

So disappointed when I visited Bodga Bay and discovered the "Birds" diner had been completely rebuilt and modernized.....though I still wanted to sit at the end of the counter with a shot of whiskey, exclaiming "It's the end of the world..."

comment #16

raquelswell says ...

Jeff, I don't really get your rants most of the time, but you're absolutely right about this.

comment #17

Marty Melville says ...

I agree it's a ROTten thing to do to a swell piece of memorabilia, but if you think seven out of ten of the current Beverly Hillbillies wouldn't do the same thing, you got another think coming.

comment #18

Deathtongue_Groupie says ...

Jeff, Jeff, Jeff...

Had you read the article that MCN had linked to (not sure if it's the same as the link above) you would have discovered that it was not "originally" a cropduster, but a Navy trainer.

In other words, he has actually done what a responsible collector should do: restore the artifact to it's ORIGINAL configuration.

So, who's really the hick here?

Nice to see that 2 weeks later, you're still shooting your mouth off from the hip. It's comforting in a way.

comment #19

bfm says ...

Deathtongue, all that says is that he wanted an old navy plane and didn't care that it was used in a classic scene from a classic movie. Which, I'd say, proves Jeff's point.