Vacation Break!

Quite simply, I will be away on vacation from July 2 thru July 10, so I won't have a new post here until I get back into the swing of things, at the latest on July 16.

Today is a hodge-podge of topics. First is my great lobby card auction experiment. I have 6 fairly rare and hopefully desirable lobby cards consigned to the emovieposter.com Mini/Major summer auction. Probably the least valuable one is pictured here -- a lobby card from Alfred Hitchcock's "Suspicion." I will show the others and make guesses for what they will bring as soon as I get the scan for the mystery, one-only lobby card hinted at a few weeks ago.

Go check out the emovieposter.com website. Bruce Hershenson and his staff of 22 run their own poster auctions (not on ebay), send a weekly poster email newsletter to over 6,000, and have the eyes of the major movie poster collectors in the world. They run 3 auctions each week with over 2,000 posters up for sale and no minimum bid. However, several times a year they hold special "Mini/Major" auctions with better, rarer posters and more publicity. The Summer Mini/Major starts on July 27 and will run online for a week.

One lesser poster has already been auctioned off. This window card for "From here to Eternity" sold for $53, before commissions, so I may net $30. The time is ripe for getting good deals on vintage movie posters and the place to shop is emovieposter.com.

Twice this past week I was talking to new customers who asked where they could see the films before buying. One had a special interest in black heritage films as he plans to make a documentary for TV on the subject. The other just wanted to run films or clips from PD films online for some reason not quite clear, and I don't need to know specifics. They are public domain, so use them however you want as long as you don't add a funny sound track, or similar changes, since that would be creating a new work that might infringe on the trademarked likenesses of stars like John Wayne or Boris Karloff.

Anyway, naturally I told them to go to FMO or www.freemooviesonline.com. The second party called me right back and said, "It looks good, but it doesn't work. When I tried to run a film, it sent me some notice about hacking in." So I tried it and he was right. An email to Franck Benedittini at franck.box@gmail.com and the glitch was fixed in a few minutes. So if you had trouble watching FMO after my last week post, please try again, and contact one of us if you have any problems. Oh, yeah, no charge!

I continue to update my Festival Films website by replacing some PDF links with actual web pages that fit into the general design. I find the new look immensely better and easier to navigate. As an example check out Adventure TV section. This Adventure home page identifies the TV shows in that genre and how many episodes we have of each. One click takes you to any TV show where the episodes are grouped together in bunches of four with episode titles and brief synopses. Once I finish this process I can add in shows that I have not listed online before, such in "Captain Z-RO" to Adventure TV, or add additional volumes to what I have sold in the past. All 143 episodes of Robin Hood are now listed. I may be missing one??? I liberally define "Adventure" as any non-western that includes fist fights or gun play, so that means space films, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, period sword fight shows, jungle pictures and foreign intrigue.

Happy Birthday, Baxter! Today is the two-year anniversary of Baxter the Cat coming into our lives. We visited the humane society and he crawled into my wife Chris' lap ... when she was standing up as I recall. When a cat picks you, who can say no? Ah, but he was sick with some virus and came from an abusive kittyhood. He didn't eat for over a week. We squirted medicine in his mouth, but no food. We took him to the vet to be hydrated and got a few tips. Finally back home we followed one advice to simply force some food in his mouth. Baxter re-discovered food and ate everything we spilled on the basement floor. After a long recovery in the summer of 2008, he's the sweetest, most loyal and most incredibly good-looking cat we have ever had. This shot of me holding Baxter was taken last summer.

And I just may wear that shirt to the Caribbean on Friday, where I should also be smiling a lot.


Visit my website at Festival Films