A Thousand Cuts

By Dennis Bartok, Jeff Joseph,

Book cover of A Thousand Cuts: The Bizarre Underground World of Collectors and Dealers Who Saved the Movies

Book description

A Thousand Cuts is a candid exploration of one of America's strangest and most quickly vanishing subcultures. It is about the death of physical film in the digital era and about a paranoid, secretive, eccentric, and sometimes obsessive group of film-mad collectors who made movies and their projection a private…


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Why read it?

1 author picked A Thousand Cuts as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

The filmic counterpart to Amanda Petrusich’s exposé on collectors of 78 RPM records, Do Not Sell at Any Price, this book uncovers the eccentric characters who have devoted their free time to collecting theatrical prints of movies, often risking harm (and jail time) in the process. One highlight is a profile of Mike Vraney, the man who founded Something Weird Video, a film distributor famous for re-releasing arcane Z-movies and shock films. The self-professed owner of the “largest sexploitation archive on Earth,” his stories, and those of a range of other specialized collectors, make this book a worthy compendium…

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