I attended my first Hollywood memorabilia show in 1990. Despite the name, it was actually in Skokie, Illinois– the Holiday Inn at 5300 W. Touhy Ave., to be exact. At the time, I was with a classmate from high school. I had no idea what to expect, and I came unprepared. In other words, I had no money. After that first introduction to the world of conventions, I was able to go about fifteen years without missing a show. They’d have them maybe four times a year. Of course, movie nostalgia was nothing new to me. I remember visiting Chuck Schaden’s “Metro Golden Memories” on Addison in Chicago, but the hotel event was something a little different.
The show was held in the hotel’s ballroom, but there were always dealers in the outer lobby too. Inside the brightly-lit ballroom, there were four wide aisles with dealer tables on either side– at least 30 vendors, if not more. Most of these gentlemen had their wares on the tables while others had their overflow stock underneath the table cover. You might find a box of old fantasy paperbacks down there or novelizations of classic Universal monster movies. At these shows, you’d always find VHS tapes, film books, autographs, posters, lobby cards, magazines, and film prints.
There was always at least one collector who had a stack of 16mm film cans containing forgotten B-Westerns or B-movies. He’d be projecting these up on the wall for all to see and hear. I bought my first film print there: a 16mm print of King Kong (1933) with the “censored” scenes. One of the dealers was a man named Vito, who actually organized the show. Over the years, he’d be helped by other avid collectors like Frank, who I’d see at every show with his boxes of classic movies– all on VHS and still factory-sealed. In its heyday, I remember the old-timer Jerry, who came up from Texas with hundreds of VHS tapes. From him, I might’ve picked up an old RKO feature starring Robert Armstrong or some other rarity.
There were no special guests at these shows as you would’ve found at the bigger ones like Jack Mulqueen’s; the latter also played in the Chicagoland area and peaked about 30 years ago. But even Mulqueen’s pales in comparison to the size of the modern-day C2E2 in Chicago or Fan Expo in Rosemont. These newer shows are all about celebrity guests and cosplay. Tables are filled with comics, gaming items or anime. They offer very little of the types of things I’m interested in. “Vito’s show,” on the other hand, had the stuff that dreams are made of– the stuff that I loved collecting. I usually left with at least two plastic Jewel bags of goodies that I’d carry back to the car. My dad would pick me up in the adjacent parking lot at a specified time, usually 3 hours after the show opened its doors at 8:30 am. But I could’ve always stayed an extra hour– or two. If nothing else, there was always something to watch up on the wall– if not a feature, perhaps a reel of old trailers. And you’d always double-back, re-visiting tables you initially went past when you first walked in.
The joy was in the search and in the discovery. In 2025, everything is handed to you via streaming or you can just look on YouTube from your couch. For me, the real fun was in tracking this stuff down and collecting physical media. These were the days when dealers lugged around old film cans, and wads of cash exchanged hands over these rusty reels. It was the same with the video pirates who had bootleg copies of hard-to-find movies. Some of the finds that I remember the most include a VHS copy of The Old Dark House (1932)– years before it was ever commercially available. It was in its own over-sized, custom-designed plastic case. The quality was decent and you could always preview these films on the little TV screen they had set up on the seller’s table. Finding this particular James Whale horror film was a special moment for me. Whale was one of my favorite directors, and at least for a while, I had something most others didn’t have. It gave me a special insight that I could share with others.
I remember picking up a Moonlight Cinema copy of Lon Chaney’s West of Zanzibar (1928), which was another film that was not yet available anywhere else. I especially recall the haunting musical accompaniment that played over this version of the silent film. In addition, I picked up all four of the Dick Tracy serials, which were available in feature-length versions as well as in double-cassettes containing the complete 5-hour versions that VCI released. I didn’t discover the Tracy serials until Channel 50 started playing the feature-length edits of them to coincide with the 1990 film Dick Tracy, which starred Warren Beatty.
Another serial that made me quite happy was Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars (1938), which I was able to preview when it got popped into the table VCR. The video quality seemed satisfactory. The movie’s scratches and aural ambiance– before the days of HD restorations– made this particular chapter, “Tree-men of Mars,” or whichever one it was, seem even more exotic and mysterious. It was great to finally have the complete serial that I had always heard about but had never seen outside of books. At one of the tables, I bought a Buster Crabbe signed movie still. At another table, on a separate occasion, I picked up an autograph of actor David Manners. In the early 1990s, I occasionally added some contemporary items, like the Terminator 2 (1991) pressbook or the screenplay to Aliens (1986).
Over the years, the shows became more sporadic with fewer dealers attending. People weren’t collecting as much, and dealers had turned to places like Ebay. Once, I had the opportunity to be a dealer myself with a girl whose parents always frequented these shows. For them, these convention folk weren’t just vendors, they were family. Years before I became identified with the Pickwick Theatre Classic Film Series, I could attend these shows anonymously, but in the latter years, I’d always be asked about the theatre by people who never actually attended. A few wanted to set up shop in the theatre lobby to sell their stuff, but that wasn’t possible. There were just fewer people I wanted to meet at these shows. The last one I attended was about four or five years ago. In those last years, I would still pick up things like rare silent movies or serials on dvd or special collections like Tim McCoy Westerns or the Columbia Blondie movies on multiple discs. Maybe there was a rare, coffee table book on Louise Brooks to be found or an out-of-print book on the Mascot movie serials– or even an expensive, supplemental volume on the Republic serials. These were not exactly mainstream items, but to me, they were all treasures.
It’s these types of experiences younger film students are missing out on. I’ll always be grateful to having been there in its heyday when the rooms were packed with people and the tables were loaded with artifacts and my bags overflowed with memories. I learned a lot about film history at these Hollywood collectible shows, from the dealers who sat there and reminisced about the minutia related to the films they sold. These were the sort of details you don’t find in history books now. As these gentlemen moved on or passed on, this knowledge was sadly lost. But for a few years, I was fortunate enough to absorb some of it.
~MCH