Watched On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) for the umpteenth time over the holidays, and it reminded me of a story.
In the days before home video, watching movies at home meant catching a film on a network or local (or eventually cable) broadcast.
Or it meant actually running film in your home. At my house, we ran film. 
It was 8mm stuff at first — Blackhawk prints of Laurel & Hardy and the like or a Super 8 print of Stagecoach (1939). Then we made the leap to 16mm and the collecting got serious. From The Three Stooges to 2001, all sorts of things passed through our house. My favorites were monster movies and Westerns, and I was able to see everything from Dracula and Frankenstein to Roy and Gene and Hoppy and Randy on film, the way we’re supposed to see ’em.
Then, and I don’t really know why, we made the insane leap to 35mm, which is completely impractical in your typical suburban home. The storage alone makes no sense. But to see 35mm projected on a screen only 20 feet wide is really something. So sharp, so bright. I loved the feel of the film itself as you threaded it up, the click-y purr of it winding its way through a projector and the smell of Vitafilm. I even enjoyed the obsessive stuff like repainting the screen because you found a white paint that was whiter than the white paint you used last time.
Collecting film seemed to automatically drop you into an odd community with other collectors, trading movies and equipment back and forth and sharing information on things like mounting mag stereo heads on a Simplex (in our case, it required cutting a hole in the ceiling).
In the summer of 1973, I saw Live And Let Die in a theater in Birmingham, Alabama, and I went totally and completely nuts over James Bond. In no time, I had the 45 by Paul McCartney & Wings (my entry into the rabbit hole of Beatles fandom), a paperback copy of the Fleming novel and the Viewmaster reels — and it just killed me to know there were seven other Bond movies out there I hadn’t seen. (Back then, you had to hope and pray a local theater would book one of those double features UA would send out from time to time.)
Then, in the fall of 1975, my dad and another collector made a deal.
There was a man in Boston who had 35mm prints of all six Sean Connery Bond movies and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Not sure what the arrangements were, but they were going to be ours. We just had to go get them.
Getting out of school for a couple days (which I didn’t mind), my dad and I hopped in our Chevy van and drove from Cary, North Carolina, to Boston, Massachusetts. After a night in a motel and breakfast, we pulled up in front of the fellow collector’s brownstone near Bunker Hill.
He was a very nice man and his home was lovely. Like us, storing 35mm was a problem for him, and he had these prints under the floor of his home. Me being just 11 years old, I was given the task of getting under there and retrieving them. Seven James Bond movies means a lot of reels, and it was a long, hard, dirty job. But we got ’em out, loaded them up, and were ready to head home — the Chevy van sitting very, very low.
Now, Boston was in the middle of a busing issue about this time. It was a big news story. On the day we were there, there was some trouble at a high school near the Bunker Hill Monument. There were people, cops and news crews everywhere. It was pretty intense.
This was after Roddy McDowell had gotten in trouble with the FBI over his film collection, so there was a cloud of paranoia hanging over the film collecting community. (If they’d hassled Cornelius from Planet Of The Apes, what would they do to regular people?) Anyway, to get out of town, we had to drive right through the middle of Boston’s social unrest. We had no choice.
I was terrified as we approached this mob blocking the street, our sagging van full of movies we probably weren’t supposed to have. A cop noticed us as we approached, rolled his eyes, blew his whistle — and waved us through. He wanted nothing to do with these hicks from North Carolina stuck in a mess he was trying to unravel. We made our way through what WC Fields would call “a wall of human flesh” and hit the highway South as quick as we could. (I wonder if you poured through the news footage, if you’d see a droopy Chevy van making its way through the crowd with a worried 11-year-old in the passenger seat?)
All the way home, if a bump was big enough, our rear bumper would strike the pavement and send out sparks.
Seeing the Bond films at home, in 35mm Technicolor (and sometimes Panavision), was glorious, a young movie nut’s dream come true. My favorite of the bunch was, and still is, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service — with that bright snow hurting my eyes on that freshly-painted white screen. And almost 50 years later, I can still see those sparks on that bridge in Boston.
The Hannibal 8 