[78-L] fwd: A Chance to Finally Forgive Mom for Throwing Out ThatCard

[Michael Biel]

martha wrote:
> Someday, you must tell us about the FBI !
>
>   
No secret, I've told about it before.  Before videocassettes made it 
easy, I was collecting TV shows on 16mm starting around 1969.  My two 
favorite dealers was Home Movie Wonderland in Golita Calif and Gains 16 
Films in Hywd.  I always felt that Gains was the most up-and-up dealer, 
they even had a place on their order blank to sign saying non-commercial 
collector use, etc.  The FBI called and my father answered, and I called 
back and said sure, come on over.  Two officers from the Hackensack NJ 
office arrived.  Hackensack New Jersey has an FBI Office??!!!  I showed 
them all I had were TV shows, Art Linkletter, Edward R Murrow, Ozzie & 
Harriett, Newlywed Game, etc.  I said I was paying maybe 3 to ten bucks 
for them, that they were old discarded prints.  They took notes but 
didn't understand. I showed them some catalogs.  They asked if these 
were being newly made.  I said of course not, the raw film would cost 
between 50 and 100 bucks.  They finally told me what set this off.  I 
was on Gains paid mailing list -- a few bucks to get the list first 
class mail.  They had been found making new prints of current feature 
films.  I showed thom a catalog of theirs where they had in numerical 
order over 100 episodes of Ozzie & Harriet for 5 or ten bucks.  I had 
gotten the two lowest numberd episodes, complete with ads.  They were 
the warehouse disposals.  They said that this was not what they were 
looking for and I never heard about this again.  But I have ever since 
told film collectors that they do check on pirates of new films.  And 
yes, we do look thru the discs when the little Chinese girl comes thru 
Leah's Brooklyn neighborhood restaurants saying  "DVD DVD Five Bucks 
DVD"-- the only English words she knows.  And every once we hear news 
stories about a raid on a NYC warehouse.  The This Is It pirate we got 
has Spanish titles, and the Pirate Radio disc is a dub off the British 
release which we already had sent over from England -- we hoped it would 
be an American theater version so we could document the difference we 
saw in the theater.  Always research, you understand.

Mike (not so crazy about the MPAA either) Biel  mbiel at mbiel.com
>
> ----- Original Message ----- > it!   There was one shelving unit with my 
> 16mm films in her living room,
>   
>> which was handy when the FBI came to check out my film collection. 
>> Really.
>>