IndieFlix is offering the American Collectors Film for $9.95 They are offering the best price on this award winning documentary. A film about people who collect things.
Here is the link to the site
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
American Collectors film at IndieFlix's
IndieFlix is offering the American Collectors Film for $9.95 They are offering the best price on this award winning documentary. A film about people who collect things.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Jeff Braimes PLAYING CARD COLLECTOR, on American Collectors
Jeff Braimes who is featured in the film American Collectors was showing off his collection on KING 5 NEW'S in Seattle Wa. Watch clip
Sunday, November 8, 2009
New film 'American Collectors' features a Portland man and his jail memorabilia
By Margie Boule, The Oregonian
November 08, 2009, 5:18AM
View full sizeChuck PalmerAn obsession. Pack rat fever. Collectomania. An uncontrollable addiction. It's funny how often collecting is described as some kind of illness.
Sometimes it's the collectors themselves who use pseudo medical terms. In the documentary "American Collectors," which has its Portland premiere at 6 p.m. Monday in the Portland Art Museum's Whitsell Auditorium, a man who admits he owns more than 100 tractors calls it "more-a-philia."
Portlander Chuck Palmer uses a more romantic term: "Collecting is my passion," he says. "It just gets your blood pumping."
People can be passionate collectors of the most unlikely items. Plastic bags. X-rays. Fish posters. (Clean) air sickness bags. Vintage calculators. Prosthetic eyeballs. Store mannequins.
Chuck, one of the collectors featured in "American Collectors," is passionate about "stuff from jails and prisons," he says.
Just about everything except the prisoners.
Chuck lost interest in the people behind bars when he worked as a jail guard for Multnomah County from 1977 to 1986. "I left with my sanity," he says.
He also left with no desire to have anything to remind him of the jails. "It's an intensely stressful job. Nobody wants to be in the jail. Not even the officers."
Perhaps to relieve some of that stress, Chuck began collecting Coca-Cola memorabilia in 1981. He'd go to estate sales and antique and junk shops. Then he became a dealer, setting up booths at collectibles shows.
"I'm an active collector," Chuck says. "If I have an interest in something, then I'm accumulating, I'm buying."
But he's buying only the real thing. "I don't buy phony things, fantasy items, reproduced items. I want original items that have value and will maintain that value, if not increase."
In the late 1980s, Chuck got divorced. In the settlement, he lost his Coca-Cola collection, which he calls "the largest collection of Coca-Cola memorabilia west of the Mississippi."
For a while he tried building a new collection. "I'd see a cool Coca-Cola piece, pick it up, and it would be a piece I used to own." Buying back things he'd once owned "was no thrill."
For a while he collected nothing. It gave him an empty feeling. "You gotta have something to collect," he says. "What else is there to do if you're shopping and hunting?"
View full sizePart of Chuck Palmer's collection.Then, at a show in 1989, Chuck spotted a pair of handcuffs just like he used to carry. "They were rare, because of the design. They discovered, after not too many months of use, that inmates could heat the barrel of a plastic pen and create a key." He bought the cuffs. Then he bought a different pair. "I'd always been fascinated with cuffs and how the locks worked," Chuck says.
Then he found himself buying an old "wanted" poster for James Earl Ray, the confessed assassin of Martin Luther King Jr. "These things just start catching your attention," Chuck says.
A new collection was born.
As he always had, Chuck began researching the items he was collecting. "When I collected Coca-Cola things, I knew as much about the company history as their archivist did," Chuck says. Now he began studying prison history.
"I have learned more history through collecting than I ever did in high school and college," he says. "Because it applies to what I do. It's not just Roman history when you've never seen Rome."
He loves the hunt, too. "It's fun, because you're out there looking for nuggets or specks of gold. And everyone is looking for that big nugget, something they get for 10 bucks and can get a thousand for."
He also enjoys selling items and dealing with people who collect other objects. He sees a lot of them; 19 years ago he married a woman who owned a company that produces antiques and collectibles shows. It's called Palmer Wirfs & Associates (www.palmerwirfs.com). Chuck and Chris Palmer have worked as "best friends and co-producers" ever since.
Sometimes Chuck makes finds at their own shows.
He rarely searches on eBay, although he recently found a rare pair of Romer leg restraints, he says. "I'd only seen one pair in my life." They were a real bargain, he says. "You add a special piece like that, and it raises the value of the entire collection."
The collection includes "an inmate I.D. photo of Charlie Manson," Chuck says. "And one of the best pieces is a striped chain-gang uniform from the 1920s in Alabama."
He has leather restraints from the 1870s, a cell door that he has in storage because it weighs 800 pounds and a barred window he thinks came from the old jail in The Dalles.
"The thing everyone gets the biggest laugh out of is a jail toilet," Chuck says. "It's a combination sink-and-toilet, all built with one piece of aluminum. It's from the 1960s from a little jail in Covina, California." He knows that because when he found it, he called the sheriff in California to verify its authenticity.
He has invitations to executions. Yes, they used to print invitations.
And he bought a collection of items from the descendants of a man who used to be the official timer of executions for the state of Oregon. "He'd type on a sheet of paper, 'Joe Blow entered the chamber, 9:01. Joe Blow fastened in, 9:02.' ... He kept every invitation, newspaper articles on the guys, the timing sheet, even the mask that went over their eyes."
Chuck also has a pair of McKenzie mitts, metal "mittens" that open with a hinge.
An inmate in the mitts "couldn't pick up a gun or anything to use against you. Only 180 of those were ever made. But they were so effective, they caused their own problem."
Prisoners were transported back then by train. Railroad companies would not allow prisoners to be released from restraints. "So the prisoner couldn't take care of personal business." Guards were not prepared to provide assistance in restrooms, so the mitts were discontinued.
Ever the researcher, when Chuck bought crime-scene photos of the investigation of an old jail break, he interviewed a man who'd been a guard at the jail, who was at first suspected of aiding the break. "That adds to the history of it for me," he says. "That's the fun of it."
Most of Chuck's collection is in storage. "It's not proper decor for a home, really," he says, laughing. He does have a few posters of prison movies in his home. "Those are on the walls because my wife likes them."
And you'd better believe that if Chuck ever acquires what he wants most -- an electric chair -- it will not rest in the living room. He does have a line on one. "But I'll just have to be patient," he says.
Chuck is looking forward to the Oregon premiere of "American Collectors" (americancollectorsmovie.com).
"I'm going to go," he says. "I'll have on one of my shirts that says something about a prison. I'm looking forward to it."
-- Margie Boulé
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Axes to Action Figures, Northwest collecting fanatics are featured in American Collectors Film
Portland, Oregon (MMD Newswire) October 30, 2009 -- Most of us
know someone who collects-at least 30% of Americans do-and we
love them anyway. But what drives obsessions such as this? That is
the beating heart and prime directive of American Collectors, a
verité documentary film that examines the relationship between
people and their objet du désir.
One of the featured collectors is Portland's own ?Chuck Palmer, a
co owner of Palmer Wirfs Inc. Chuck not only runs "America's
?Largest Antique and Collectible Show", he is an avid collector of
prison ?items. His collection runs the full gamut, from books and
historical ?documents to nuts and bolts prison items, uniforms,
restraints and even a ?prison toilet!
Find out what drives Chuck to accumulate these types of things at
the film's Oregon debut, happening as part of the Northwest Film
Center's 36th Northwest Film & Video Festival.
More information at
www.nwfilm.org.
When: Monday, November 9, 2009 at 7PM
Location: Northwest Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium at the
Portland Art Museum, 1219 SW Park Avenue, Portland, Oregon.
www.nwfilm.org.
When: Monday, November 9, 2009 at 7PM
Location: Northwest Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium at the
Portland Art Museum, 1219 SW Park Avenue, Portland, Oregon.
Monday, October 19, 2009
American Collectors film Screening in Portland OR. Film Festivial
NEXT SCREENING
AMERICAN COLLECTORS.
PORTLAND OR. NW VIDEO AND FILM FESTIVAL
http://www.nwfilm.org/festivals/nwfvf/
Nov 9th Monday night 6:pm
NW Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium, inside the Portland Art Museum at 1219 SW Park Avenue, Portland, OR.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Seattle Post Globe reviews American Collectors Film, by Bill White
Documentaries about eccentrics are often exploitive things that play on the viewers’ sense of superiority to the on-screen subjects, Not so “American Collectors," (Oct. 5 at 7 pm) which respects the obsessions of those afflicted with “More-itis" without denying the entertainment value of entering the private worlds of borderline maniacs.
From a relatively tasteful collection of handcrafted purses to the near-catastrophic proliferation of AOL promotional discs, directors Bob Ridgley and Terri Krantz offer a fast-paced romp through the bedrooms and garages of our most single-minded citizens. We meet a young woman who feeds all her quarters into gumball machines as if they were slot machines and an old woman who still delights in playing with her Barbie dolls. One of the most articulate subjects explains that by collecting the toys he owned as a child he can trigger lost memories, while a guy who boasts the world’s most complete collection of Duran Duran posters is on the edge of tears as he tries to communicate just how far this band has gone to defining his own life.
In addition to the excellent interviews, the film is a wealth of visual delight. Hundreds of bobble-headed dolls shimmy and shake to generic metal music. A theme-park for artifacts from science fiction movies of the fifties takes up residency in a donut shop. Finally, the sight of 100 idle tractors on a plot of unbroken land is a once-in-a-lifetime vision of displaced consumerism gone wild.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Paste Magazine Online about American Collectors Film
Source: digital.pastemagazine.com
McPhail is one of the subjects of American Collectors, a new documentary by independent filmmakers Terri Krantz and Bob Ridgley, who spent months inter- viewing collectors of everything from tractors to axes to Gene Simmons nest- ing dolls. ...
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