16mm Films
I still sell 16mm films!
The interests of childhood can span a lifetime. There wasn't much going on in the small Wisconsin town I grew up in. Most exciting were the free movies in the park every summer, but I reminisce about those days in the Cafe Roxy Blog. My father, like millions in the 1950s, took 8mm home movies and also had a collection of 8mm Castle shorts, from the Three Little Bruins to Mickey Mouse. Hence film and projectors thrilled a four-year-old.
I bought my first 16mm films in the late 1960s, showed them to whoever would watch and ran a film society from 1970-1974 on the University of Minnesota campus -- the Xanadu Film Festival -- whose name evolved into "Festival Films" in 1976. I ONLY sold 16mm films to schools and libraries until home video came along in the 1980s. Colleges needed certain films every year in their popular Film History courses -- The Birth of a Nation, Potemkin, Grand Illusion, A Trip to the Moon, Breathless and other pioneer, classic and foreign films that were in public domain at the time. I later sold 16mm prints from the Blackhawk Films Collection -- Laurel and Hardy, Our Gang, Hal Roach and silents preserved by David Shepard -- up until 2008.
Those days are long gone. Most film labs have closed. Those remaining with the capacity to print and develop new films charge way too much because the cost of raw film stock has skyrocketed.
Many long-time film collectors acquired, preserved and enjoyed their favortie films for decades. Now they want to find new homes for their treasure, so I send out occasional one-of-a-kind lists of these rare titles. Most of the films are excellent original prints made by the studios for TV, for airlines, for the armed forces and for 16mm rentals long ago. Most are in excellent physical condition. All sales are guaranteed. They are not cheap, though there are a few bargains. If you have read this far then...
Please request my latest email list of 16mm Films for sale!
