Movie Poster Collector Alan J. Adler Interview

At age 9, Alan J. Adler fell in love with the movies – 20 years later publishing the first book printed in the U.S. on movie posters as an art form. Writing and working production for some of the first movies made in the South, Adler also wrote, produced, and starred in his own regional CBS comedy show--a live, late-night hit that beat Johnny Carson in local ratings. Alan has written five independent features, including Parasite 3-D, featuring the first starring role of a 20-year-old Demi Moore. Adler has also written for Star Trek: The Next Generation, HBO Specials and Comedy, non-fiction, theatrical advertising, TV pilots, and children's animation. A twice-certified Yoga instructor, Alan also collaborated with author M. Scott Peck to develop Peck's best-selling The Different Drum as a world peace mini-series at NBC. A film and pop culture historian, Adler founded the Fox Archives, the Fox Still Archives and rededicated Fox Research. For the next 10 years, Adler traveled the world as Fox's emissary, supported silent and classic film festivals, and curated Fox's first museum, "The Hall of Cool Stuff", in Sydney, Australia. Alan has returned to full-time writing with an adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' second novel, The Outlaw Of Torn, for the big screen, and Fighters' Row for low-budget action set in Amsterdam. Adler's first novel, Night And The Cat, a noir thriller set in 1945 Los Angeles, came to Adler in a black and white dream starring Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson. Night And The Cat appeared on bookshelves in January of 2008. In the following interview, we focus on Alan's first love—movie posters, which he sell through his eBay store

ephemera: Talk about how you became interested in collecting movie posters?

Adler: I started collecting movie posters in 1957; the first poster I begged the theater manager for was I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF. I am now just about the only person I know who collects 1950's sci-fi and monster movie posters who started in the 1950's! Since posters were trash back then, people gave me whole buildings full. I never had to buy any posters--and nobody was selling them back then. Anyway...so, I built my art collection out of the trash and have more or less lived off of it for much of my life. I am a screen writer by trade. Selling posters since the 1960's makes me an old time dealer, I suppose, and I have seen just about every permutation of poster madness and happiness there is. In 1977, Dover published my book SCIENCE-FICTION AND HORROR MOVIE POSTERS IN FULL COLOR; it took me years to put together, pictured large images from my collection, and was more or less the first book devoted to the art of the fantasy poster ever published. I also went on to found the Archives at Fox in 1991--they never saved anything--I stayed there for 10 years as head of the department and built the first Fox Museum--the Hall of Cool Stuff--in Sydney, Australia, with about $5 million worth of stuff I pulled out of Fox's trash. So, all my life I have been giving value to ephemera, turning trash into gold!

ephemera: You're my kind of guy, Alan. Did you begin consciously, knowing what you would collect, or did you just one day discover what you were doing?

Adler: I was obsessed with monsters as a child--with literally no formal religious training, I found religion--good vs. evil--in the movies. The images I kept were my icons... they taught wonders... and long before I even knew the word eye-candy, I was an eye-candy-aholic. I had no idea anyone else ever collected posters until one day, when I was 19, I passed a movie poster store in Washington, DC. I nearly fainted. In one flash of a moment, I realized I was not alone all those years in my collecting, but actually had a kinship... shared a religion, even with all those other disenfranchised youths with too much time on their hands and a love of dark theaters in their veins.

I am back to full-time writing once again and started THE MUSUEM OF MOM AND POP CULTURE

T on eBay (and the Web) to buy and sell a truly bizarre mix of posters and weird stuff. I love the net; you can find anything you didn't know existed!

ephemera: What challenges or obstacles do you encounter as a collector? How do you overcome these challenges?

Adler: I am thankful to the movie poster gods that I never really had any challenges. Even as a small child, my father supported my habit and took me to outlying theaters so I could ask theater managers for posters. I loved the stuff and magnetized in such a way, the stuff flowed to me, boxes full... buildings full... studios full. I have had a lifetime of good luck and have saved so much wonderful and important art from the trash that when I worked at Fox my wife used to call me an executive Dumpster diver! And when a particular kind of item gets well-known and the value gets high. I start collecting something else no one cares about. That's how I got into toys, which I consider the sculpture equivalent of movie posters as art.

ephemera: What are your favorite items in the collection?

Adler: Posters from the early Corman films are among my favorite. The colors and dynamics are masterpieces of exploitation... how good something that is not very good can be made to look. I now love Western imagery and am sorting through those materials on hand. I realized it was not the owning of the material, although at times it did define who I was, but it was the organization of things that I really loved. Give me a box of worthless trash and I stay up all night arranging it into art. I love that process... it includes study and it includes inspiration and both are key to presenting ones collection. Ever since I was a little kid, I was always a show and tell guy, so I like to present what I have found and win new converts to what my eye sees in this over-colored paper.

ephemera: What resources and advice do you have for movie poster collectors?

Adler: Don't trust guide books. Write your own. Pack safely and in archival boxes. Keep goodies in a dry, temp controlled space. I think display on the Web is the future. I love the private and obsessive sites of collectors who show their inner selves to all through the genius of their collecting. Tap your own genius and see how the stuff flows to you and out of you. The best collectors are conduits of info and imagery. The sharing of information is what it's all about.

ephemera: Thank you, Alan.