[piano intro] [soft piano music] [soft piano music continues] [soft piano music continues] - [Roy] Hollywood would call it their junk pile and their scrap, but if these cameras could talk, or we could hear the whispers of the people that were behind or around these cameras, we would be watching our greatest memories of all time.

- [Mark] You will not go to the Smithsonian, you'll not go to the American Society of Cinematographers Museum, you'll not go anywhere else and find such examples of American cinematic craft work, and the tools that made the most famous, iconographic films that you can think of in your imagination.

When you think of the word Hollywood, it's here.

- There's nothing like it anywhere.

I've seen probably most of the major collections in the world.

What we're looking at here is literally the history of America in the 20th century, and that's amazing.

There's nothing quite like Martin Hill's collection.

- Martin Hill?

I did a movie called "Challenge", which was my first picture.

And at the movie, I met Martin then, and I bought lights from him, and purchased cameras from him.

And then if we had an action series, like blowing up an automobile, and you need to shoot it with more cameras than one, that's where Martin came in.

Then we'd put him in a movie when we can.

- [Interviewer] How is he as an actor?

- [Earl] We put him in the movie when we can.

[both chuckling] - You know what to do.

- Think your man will make it today?

- You just keep them men coming out 'til I tell you different - It's your money, warden.

- That's right, it's my money.

- Hide the truck.

- [Martin] I enjoy the business.

I realize now my limitations, whereas when I was young, I thought I could be a great cinematographer, I could be a great writer.

Found out I wasn't, and did the next best thing, and that is sell equipment to people who are.

[gravel crunching] I've been able to enjoy the industry, and I have met some fascinating people.

I've had talent and skilled cameramen, and photographers, and DPS, directors, all over the years have come by, to see the stuff or to buy something.

So I've had my fun, and I haven't had to work nearly as hard as the people who really do it, but I still get to tell the stories, and to talk about them.

This is actually secondary storage, and then there is third-ary storage in the middle building behind us.

- [Guest] It seems like you collect everything.

Posters, pictures.

- [Martin] I've got something for everybody.

[chuckling] - Look at this.

- Wow.

- Wow.

- During film school, you read all these books, and you're seeing pictures of how John Ford shot, and how "Lawrence of Arabia" was shot, and all of a sudden, today I walk in, and there's those cameras.

- This is a camera that was the main stage camera for "Star Trek", the TV series.

This is the camera that shot "Planet of the Apes".

Here is the 3D camera.

First movie it ever shot was a Howard Hughes film with Robert Mitchum called "Second Chance".

That's the big 65 millimeter Panavision.

That one was used on "Lawrence of Arabia", and that was used on "2001".

[soft piano music] I first and foremost love to get and find the equipment and save it from being destroyed.

That, I've been fortunate enough to do with a ton of cameras.

I love the gear, I love to show the gear off to people who love the gear.

It's a small crowd actually, but it's enough to keep me busy, and I've had people come from as far away as Tokyo and Germany just to see the collection, and sometimes to buy equipment to further their own interests.

That's BNC number 17.

It was Hitchcock's last camera and it also, it shot the Abbott and Costello movies.

- [Guest] Whoa.

- Oh, that camera right there that has 45 on the magazine?

That's a 65 millimeter.

It was used on "Air Force 1" and "Ghostbusters".

This camera shot "Rocky".

This one shot "How Green Was My Valley".

- Okay.

- Which was an Academy Award-winning.

This was used at 20th Century Fox, and it was actually used on the early Shirley Temple movies.

Here's a picture of Cecil B. DeMille directing "The Ten Commandments".

- Mm-hmm?

- And you just, real close, you can see the V5 right there?

Well, this is V5.

This is VV5.

This is the camera that he's sitting next to, and this was the primary camera that was used to shoot "The Ten Commandments".

- You're all right?

First week that I was here, I was absolutely overwhelmed.

You look around, and you can't see anything because there's so much stuff.

- Did the building cave in on you?

- Lights, cameras, camera parts, tubes, editing equipment.

There are millions of cases, and hundreds of projectors.

There's reels and reels and reels of film.

It's like a, just a gold.

You just, you know, you just have to find the people that appreciate it.

- Okay.

The Dunning camera.

The Dunning is relatively unknown.

Didn't really shoot anything that anybody knows anything about, and we can put the Dunning on another kind of head.

- What did it shoot?

- The atom bomb test in 1945?

- Nobody knows about that, do they?

[explosion booming] - Any kind of head at all will work for this to hold up the Dunning, which is historically nothing.

It's not important.

They only made two of 'em.

- They only made two, and it shot the atom bomb test?

- Well, that's what they, that's the only thing they know that it did.

You surround yourself with the stuff, and pretty soon you forget the chronology of it.

You forget how many you've got.

You just know there's a bunch, and that they're all over the place.

- This, I guarantee you, is the finest collection of sound motion picture equipment in the world.

This is stuff that revolutionized cinema with wide screen, when television came out, Cinemascope, Vista Vision, Super Panavision, Technicolor.

That's what's in this room.

They're hard to collect in a way, because they're massive, but these are the cameras that were the golden age of Hollywood.

- They're my treasures.

They represent all of my fantasies, which has become my primary business.

The way it really works is that you buy a big truckload of stuff, and you think you're gonna really get rich on this.

Loaded with more lenses.

Brand new.

These are all new ones.

And you sell about five or six items out of the truckload, and the rest becomes monuments to your folly, and it's scattered around the building, and that's happened again and again and again, and so my building is full of stuff, most of which is too good to throw away, but it's not really good enough to sell it.

All of the deals are exciting, but when it becomes unexciting is when the stuff has sat around in my warehouse for a year or two and is in the way.

Monuments to my folly, one of my favorite expressions, because it represents about 90% of everything that's up there.

Begin to wonder what I'm gonna do with 10,000 pairs of paper 3D glasses.

- Martin's been very clever in coming here.

I've been here before, and you can't believe that the whole history of Hollywood cameras is in Charlotte, you know, in the outskirts of Charlotte.

You could get lost in this place.

I mean, seriously.

- I'm lost in it right now.

- Regarding the collection, it's superb.

There's things here for everyone.

There's a history here that shouldn't be overlooked.

I believe it's, I believe it should be a museum itself.

[Martin playing organ] Unfortunately, sometimes you can't see the forest for the trees, 'cause you've got to clear Panavision cameras, and Mitchells and Orikans, before you can get to other things, and that's a bit of a shame.

That's probably really an important part for something, you know.

Wouldn't you think?

- Like these things here, synchronizers.

Those were very expensive pieces, and I used to sell 'em all the time.

Now they are not even used at all, except as paperweights to hold stuff down, and I've got 1,500 of them.

- I never knew what to expect when Martin would come home.

It was difficult at first, because we had that tiny house, and he had cameras everywhere in the house, and it was just not a lot of room.

That was daunting to live with him.

I encouraged him, I'll say, strongly that he needed to get a warehouse.

[laughing] To save our marriage, actually.

Well, not seriously, but it was getting to be quite a problem.

- It's an amazing story of, I mean this building that we're in was a bowling alley that was located, like, 20 miles from here.

Someone split it in half, and they toted it here because they needed a building.

I mean, that, in itself, is just amazing, and to sort of have come from nothing, and seen the vision of what this equipment means historically to this country.

- Well, one of the cameras in my collection, the first camera of the Bell and Howell series that Charlie Chaplin bought.

The camera's number 227.

It was purchased in February of 1918.

Chaplin used that camera on all of his movies, between 1918 all the way up through 1926, which will cover such classics as "The Gold Rush", which was one of his big hand cranked silent movies.

Gordon told Christie's Auction House about the camera and they contacted me, and want to list it in an auction in London, England.

The letter says, "We have scheduled a special motion picture camera auction for July, at which the Chaplin camera would be the key item."

- [Interviewer] What do you expect to get for it?

- Christie's has had hats and cane sets, you know, Chaplin's hat and cane, and he says, "Those bring, you know, $140,000."

This is camera that shot his stuff.

- [Interviewer] Are you gonna be sorry to see this go?

- Yeah, of course, but it could be enough money to allow me to just simply retire, and just enjoy my life.

I will always be buying junk.

Right off my deathbed, I will be buying something, and fully realizing there's no chance I'll ever live long enough to sell it all.

I'm already at that point.

These are the same people who could spend $71 million for a Rembrandt.

That's what I'm hoping for, is that my camera will be like a Rembrandt, and it will bring that kind of money.

If it doesn't, then a great adventure.

[bright upbeat music] - Well, the Chaplin camera is really the most important piece in the auction.

It's the highest value, but more important than that, it's really the most iconic camera within the wholesale in terms of what it represents within the history of the motion picture industry.

It's from the very earliest days of cinematography.

It's associated with Charles Chaplin, who is probably the most important film director in the 20th century, and to have a camera that we can trace directly back to him is so unusual within the collecting field that the camera really stands head and shoulders above everything else.

- [Martin] It's a mixed bag.

On one hand, I hate to see it go because it defines everything that I've wanted to do in this business, that is have something that was truly remarkably significant, and you can't get much more historical than the camera that Charlie Chaplin actually used.

On the other hand, you get to the point where you just can't sleep with this stuff forever.

At some point in time, you have to let it go.

[banging gavel] - Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

Welcome to today's sale of motion picture cameras.

We've got no withdrawn lots this afternoon, so we start this afternoon with lot one.

There we are, Shane.

Thank you, lot one.

- Well, we should have started.

If they got started on time.

Still scares me that they're gonna move so fast.

I feel like that on an item as important as the Chaplin camera, that people might want a few seconds to think about it before they up their bid to the next million - This time, against you all selling at 800 pounds.

[bangs gavel] 800, thank you 232.

And we continue now with lot number 40.

There we are on the screens for you, Charlie Chaplin's movie camera, iconic piece of motion picture history.

And start me here at 40,000 pounds.

At 40,000 pounds to start.

[phone ringing] - Hello?

Yes.

No bid.

[Patsy gasps] You mean at the whole total of the thing?

You're ... No kidding.

That's astonishing.

Yeah, does anyone have an explanation?

Okay.

Okay.

Uh, give me a call back, okay.

I, okay.

Bye-bye.

That is a mind boggler.

- I know.

- I mean, not only did it not go to reserve, no one entered a bid.

I don't understand that.

- [Patsy] I don't understand that either.

- As important an item as that was.

Hmm.

[soft music] They said this thing should bring a lot of money.

They were very excited about it.

They had conferences, they had articles in the New York Times.

It was known all over the world.

It was a shock to Christie's and to me - It just kind of interesting.

It represents him.

This is his thing that he does.

You know, it's like anybody who's passionate and does their work, like a cinematographer, it's part of their identity, and when you step away from that and stop doing that, who am I?

If I don't have this thing, if I don't do this business, if I don't have this collection that people come to see, and that I can show, and that I am a part of, who am I in the world?

You know, you're talking about Martin, who's someone who's 76 years old, who's kind of, in a way, you know, he is this savant in the woods with all this equipment and this knowledge of this esoteric, in one hand, because it's this tiny thing that does this other thing, that everybody has seen this "Star Wars" movie.

Everybody has seen something.

Everybody has seen something that has been shot with something that's in that place, you know?

And it's intoxicating, in a way.

And he knows that, you know?

And that's something that he, I think, wants to possess and hold onto, and who wouldn't?

- When we actually load the thing, that will probably be the first time the camera's been loaded in over 50 years, I would think.

We're gonna really be up the creek if for some reason the camera will not pass this film.

- Oh, I'm sure it will.

Let's put the camera on the tripod, and thread it.

Where's he at?

All right, well that's bad.

- Well, this is embarrassing.

It seems that we've lost the camera.

- We seem to have misplaced it.

Yeah.

Are you sure you took it outta the safe and carried it out?

- No, I left it in there for you to carry it.

- Oh, I didn't carry it out.

- [Martin] It's because of our intellect and great brilliance that we are as successful as we are.

[jaunty piano music] [camera reel clicking] - [Ben] Rolling!

[gunshots firing] [soft music] - My God.

Look at the history.

It's, uh, they had to do it that way, though.

There was no optical, I guess, no optical houses that did anything like this.

Good Lord.

So they actually invented it.

They're the ones that invented dissolves, and fade to blacks, doing a little dissolve in the camera.

You can't screw that up.

'Cause it's over.

It's done.

And you don't know what you got till you process it.

That's probably the first color film I ever run through it.

- You notice that characteristic, kind of the light and dark flickering?

- [Producer] Yeah.

- That's the way all the old movies look that were shot with those cameras.

That's as sharp, pretty much sharp as a tack.

- Yeah, that looks great.

- Incredible.

It kind of sends a chill up my spine to think that this is the very instrument that shot in all those famous Chaplin movies.

At the time, I was not thinking of the history of the equipment, or I would've paid it the proper respect and done something more dignified.

I am like the custodian of a really neat accumulation of equipment, but take that away, and I'm a relatively dull person, and I'm painfully aware of that.

[laughing] - A lot of collectors don't wanna let stuff go.

[chuckles] That's the problem.

You know, they don't wanna let things go.

- Well, I'm not very neat, but something comes in, you have to put it somewhere.

Well, you do that for 10 years, pretty soon you're just throwing it into the pile, and it's just total craziness.

Can you see somebody living in this quagmire here and not having a sense of humor about it?

It would be fatal, because who's gonna clean it up, and how, and when, if ever?

We have so much junk here.

- Not junk, Martin.

Do you know how many great movies were shot with this stuff?

Artists put their eyes to those lenses, and they pointed those cameras at famous people, and they made great movies with every one of these cameras.

This isn't junk.

This is people's memories.

I'm a member of the Motion Picture Academy.

We vote, not just for Academy Awards for stars and directors and producers.

We vote for Academy awards for technology.

Within this room are a number of Academy Awards for technology, and for many generations, I have tried to convince people to create a museum for motion pictures in Hollywood.

In fact, today the reason I'm here is because Debbie Reynolds and her son have purchased a number of cameras from Martin.

- They had just finished having huge success on Debbie Reynolds: The Auction Part One, where they grossed right at $20 million for their Hollywood stuff, mainly costumes.

They approached me and said would I be interested in putting the Chaplin camera in their new auction, Debbie Reynolds: The Auction Part Two.

There are some what I would call heavy money that have called the Debbie Reynolds people, and mentioned that they were interested in the "Star Wars" camera and the Charlie Chaplin camera.

Mark Mervis is now in a situation where I gave him the camera that shot "Star Wars", not knowing, of course, that it did.

But Mark is a great researcher, and he found out that it shot "Star Wars", and we offered it to the Debbie Reynolds people.

And Mervis might end up becoming quite wealthy over this, I'm hoping.

A couple of Long Island iced teas and I'll totally forget that I gave him the camera for free.

[interviewer laughing] - Good.

- Your account is now activated.

Oh boy.

What did I do?

[bright music] I may start thinning the collection down with some of the better stuff, if this one works.

If this doesn't go anywhere, then I'm probably just gonna live out my life just sitting on a pile of old cameras.

That should be it, and it should be on.

[audience applauding] [computer chiming] Settle down, oh.

It froze again.

[audience applauding] - [Auctioneer] Well welcome, everybody.

This is our Debbie Reynolds Auction Part Two.

And without any further ado, let's get started with item number one, showing- [computer beeps] on the screen behind me.

This is the Bell and Howell.

[computer beeps] - Damn it.

- [Auctioneer] Hand crank 35 millimeter camera, once owned by Charlie Chaplin.

Opening bid of 150,000, I have.

At 155,000 at- [computer beeps] 155,000, the bid.

And advance, at 155,000, all done.

[Patsy gasps] [computer beeps] - It did not make reserve.

- Oh my God.

- [Auctioneer] 654 for 155,000, number two.

- The camera was the first thing.

They apparently had $150,000 bid, but that's not even reserve.

It did not make reserve.

He gave it a chance.

He said, "Do I hear 155?"

There was not a response.

So the camera did not make reserve.

I was expecting phone calls in about it and stuff.

I'm really surprised at that.

- I know.

And so we'll get the camera back?

- Yep.

I'm just still kind of numb that all this preparation and all this work and everything that we've done, and it just bang.

It was over in just a flash.

Yeah.

I mean, it's the lead item in the catalog, but there was, obviously I'm more interested in that piece as a historical, iconic thing than the rest of the world, it seems.

["Moonlight Sonata"] - I think Martin has done the right thing by collecting these things.

Nobody else has done it.

There's people in this country with an enormous amount of money that are in the film business that could have done it that didn't.

Martin, on limited funds, did it.

And I have utmost admiration for that.

- [Martin] Somebody has to love the old stuff, and you have to take it in, and shelter it, and nourish it by not letting it get destroyed.

- Unfortunately, Hollywood is run by accountants, and for them, they see this is scrap metal, and they see their only asset as that piece of plastic that ran through these cameras.

Martin Hill did a remarkable thing.

I think it's tragically sad that Hollywood didn't see the potential in protecting itself with the cameras and with all the other things that created that magic that ran at 24 frames per second.

But Martin did, and Patsy did.

And so I guess we're very lucky that it's still here.

[Martin playing "Moonlight Sonata"] [no audio] [no audio] - You know, this looks all sort of gloomy, and it is, but pretty much all the really good stuff found a home, and I think that's a great legacy.

It's not lost.

This stuff at least was like collated by one person at one time, and it was all here, but he got such joy and pleasure out of this, and shared it with so many people.

So I think there's a glass half empty, half full thing, and I kind of think it's half full, 'cause it still goes on, you know?

It still goes on.

[jaunty piano music] [jaunty piano music continues] [jaunty piano music continues] [jaunty piano music fades]