Daniel D. Teoli Jr.

Fake Associated Board of Censors Approval Seal on 16mm Stag Film.

Years ago, my film archive acquired a number of stag films from the Bruce Farrahday Collection. Bruce was in his 90’s back then and I was lucky enough to get a little information from him about the stag film era of the 1930s / 1940s.

Back then, it was illegal to own pornography and doubly illegal to own homosexual pornography due to the sodomy laws. We normally don’t give it much thought in this day and age. You can buy almost anything you want. But in that era you could not just go into a store and choose from a bevy of pornographic films in a display case.

Here is how Bruce acquired his stag films, when they were illegal, as told to me in relay by the agent disposing of Bruce’s film collection:

“I (Bruce) bought most of these films from a Camera Store in Tijuana, “Ramone Ramiez’s Camera Store” on the main drag and you had to ask for them. They would have a sheet of paper with the titles and you would choose from that list. Then they would go in the back room and put your package together with no titles on the can or sleeve in case the border police would check your bags. On average, I never paid more then 15.00 each in the late 1930 and 1940’s for a 400-foot reel.”

(Quote was condensed for brevity)

Another interesting thing that was relayed to me was the use of false leaders, so to speak. The producers of the stag films would sometimes splice on some boring home movie footage or a fake censors seal of approval leader at the beginning of the film. This is an example of a fake leader that was used to throw off customs when coming across the border with a sex film.

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Samsung T7 SSD 30 Month Archival Test. The SSD drive was stored without plugging in to any device for 30 months. All data on drive is fine and it has passed the 30 month test.

The next SSD test is scheduled for 3.1.2026 / 42 months.

1 hour ago, Mark Dunn said:

Can US employers really get away with giving 3 days' notice?

Don't know. Have not had a regular job in ages. I've just winged it with odd jobs mostly. Back in the day it was no notice.

A trend now is to hire for less than full time. No benefits are offered as 39 hours is considered part time. That was what the post office was doing a few years ago anyway.

One job I worked on lasted 2 months. I didn't know they hired me because of some extra work the company picked up that was temporary. When the extra business was over, they came to me one Friday after handing out paychecks and said you are laid off and can leave at 3PM. That is how it goes.

19 hours ago, dan kessler said:

Movies might do well at the box office, but vfx companies don't participate in that.

They bid on work up front, and it's cut-throat.

Didn't know that...Thanks!

There is no exact formula for microwaving moldy and mildewed paper. When I first started, I kept microwaving the paper over and over in short treatments trying to kill the mold on the spot.  I found out that if you rush the job and get the paper too hot it starts to scorch. So, it is not a one time, one day or even one week job. (Although it can be a one-week job in some cases.) The issue with moldy paper is...all the jobs are different. 

Here is the starting formula I've settled on...

I bag the paper in a plastic sleeve and microwave for 30 - 35 seconds on high on each side.

Don't forget what I said above about moisture in the bag and using blotter material on some jobs.

You take the paper out and air dry it for a few hours. Then put it in a new bag. The old bag stinks from mold spores, so don't keep using it. Although when I first started to develop this technique; I left the paper in the same bag throughout the treatment and left the paper in the plastic to reabsorb the moisture. 

You repeat the microwave job the next day after the paper has rested. The mold stink dissipates over time and not immediately, hence the rest period to evaluate. I do that 3 or 4 days in a row and let the paper sit a week. (In a bag) Then I open up the bag and give it a sniff. If it is not good enough to handle and scan, then I start the treatments over. Eventually the microwave wins!

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Technicolor-Owned VFX Firm MPC May Shutter Due to 'Severe' Challenges

Don't get it. Golden age of money making in Hollywood. A successful portfolio of films. 

Inkwells and cartoonists go hand in hand. Well, back in the day, anyway. 

Max Fleischner brought the inkwell into prominence in the early 1900s and with his Out of the Inkwell cartoon series. 16mm prints of his original rotoscope cartoons are near impossible to get. And if they do surface, they are $$. Fleischner eventually went on to other cartoons such as Betty Boop and Popeye.

Out of the Inkwell - Wikipedia

This cartoon below is based on the 'inkwell tipping over' theme. The ink gets spilled, the cartoonist has gone home for the day and cannibals pop up from the spilled ink and do a musical number. I was lucky enough to acquire a 16mm print of it.

Voodoo in Harlem (1938) 

eBay stills from auction description

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Wow! Isn't that something how Kodak turned out. Instead of mainstream, they went underground, so to speak.

Thanks for all the replies!

Thanks Brian!

Tropic Thunder has some great bonus material in it. Don't miss the section between Stiller and Downey Jr. I think it is called mag dump or magazine dump. Back then no one cared about Downey Jr. in blackface. They use a whole film magazine going back and forth with their lines. That is where the name mag dump comes from. It is not tech info, but shows the raw material the editor has to deal with and brings you behind the scenes into the actor's craft.

I never watched this film when it first came out. It looked stupid to me. But it popped up on a recent search I did at the library. So, I decided to give it a go. It is free so what the heck. I'm on the border of 2 states and between the 2 library systems I can get pretty much whatever I want for free. And one library system lets you get things interlibrary loan.

Loads of tech commentary as well.

User was cranking wheel on right. At first, I thought film viewer, but don't know. It is from Rush Hour 3. (I think.)

Screen shot with camera from TV screen

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I started foraging as a kid, but got into it more seriously about '07. I was looking for sources of more natural foods as the store bought produce had declined a lot in quality. All the peaches were picked green, had the fuzz buffed off them and were coated with anti fungals. Get a store bought peach, soak it in water and see a rainbow 'oil slick' of color on the water. So, I guess I first started to know about the decline in food when the peach fuzz disappeared.

I never found any abandoned peach trees here. But I have found American persimmons, apples, paw-paws, pears, crab apple; mulberry, edible Kousa dogwood, chestnuts, black walnut and an abandoned apricot tree. Sadly, the apricot and some of the apples have died or been pulled out and people are not planting more trees to replace the abandoned ones. There are also lots of spring onions, dandelions and some wild blackberry. The deer seem to get the blackberry before they even ripen.

I don't fool with mushrooms, although we got plenty. That is for some anal person that knows what they are doing. There is an old saying with mushroom foragers...

There are old mushroom hunters and there are bold mushroom hunters...but there are no old, bold mushroom hunters. 

I cruise around in spring bloom to see what is what. Apples bloom in a certain time frame and I can drive around and see if anything blooming has potential, same with pears, etc. 

Store bought treated potato to stop sprouting vs. natural potato. Both stored in the dark for 6 months.

My goal is to get some flat land, put up a decent size greenhouse and plant some fig trees in it and a warm weather persimmon or two. They don't grow well here, too cold. But lotto is not cooperating as usual.

I grew up with fig trees, white and black figs. I remember picking apricots when walking home from school in an alley when I was in 3rd or 4th grade. Even the green apricots had flavor. Store bought apricots are like tasteless rubber...if you are lucky enough to even find them here.

Yes, we got farmer's markets, but they only sell what they grow. Unless it is a phony farmer that buys peaches from Chile to sell there. And no one grows apricots, figs, cherimoyas or peaches. (A few may grow apricots or peaches, but they won't sell many, they keep any for themselves. Late spring frost usually kills the flower buds on them before they can set fruit here.)

If you got some land...plant some fruit trees! You can get some nice tasting, healthy fruit.

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On 2/16/2025 at 3:31 PM, Steve Switaj said:

Oddly, I have an amateur radio license. 

I actually didn't care about any any of the radio stuff, but in the rural area where I grew up the local amateur radio club had free hands-on electronics  classes to prep for the exams.

It was kind of bizarre, because I was too young to drive and here I was sitting in class with all these retirees that had too much time on their hands, but the club was the only group within 50 miles doing any kind of technology, so I earned my license while I learned about transistors.

The transistor part was useful, but buch like "stop, drop and roll" or how to escape from quicksand, the ability to tap out 20WPM in morse code has not come in as handy as I was told it would be when I was a child.   

That is something! I had to look up stop, drop and roll. I thought it was the same as duck and cover that was taught in school. Except you use it on the street if a bomb went off. Why were they worried you would burst into flames in radio school?

In the old days we had to tone film / prints with chemicals and bleach. Kodak also made a line of pre-tinted cine' film and lightly toned printing papers. But...when digital came around it opened up the entire palette of colors to choose from to tone your images.

Here are some samples of digitally toned images. This 2-inch-long piece of film was broken off of some nudie cutie arcade reel and who knows which one it was from. So, before trashing it, I put this gal to work for one last time and did some tests with her. (You will be seeing more of her down the road as I did numerous tests with her beside toning.) 

Full collection of toning tests below; including raw scan, full BW monochrome scan and warm toned versions. 

Digital Toning Examples of Cine' Film D. D. Teoli Jr. A. C. : D. D. Teoli Jr. A. C. : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

(Download hi res files to view properly and for reference.)

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OP...

On 2/19/2025 at 1:41 AM, Robert Houllahan said:

Hopefully it will be ok if not put through the new CT scanner machine.

We have been seeing more travel film which has been put through the CT machines and it is mostly a very elevated base fog and not stripes or lines like some of the old Soviet X-Ray machines.

The CT machine damage is somewhat correctable in post but far less than ideal.

 

Is that you Robert? At least put on a white lab coat and get some nerdy glasses. You don't look professional at all. I'd never send you any films to scan with that avatar. I guess that is how things are done nowadays. 

This is how the dye transfer printers dressed for work back in the day. I used to work with him.

I guess the best thing to do with skates is give them a go and see how you like it! What do I always tell you...TEST! And if you are not good at skating...use a disposable camera. And even if good, accidents happen.

Not Rollerblade...

I saw some guys using a wheelchair to roll along for the shoot. Seemed to work good. I think it was the 2015 film Tangerine, shot with an iPhone. 

On 2/14/2025 at 2:46 PM, Simon Wyss said:

It does and you can do it the wrong way by either method.

Canister vertically gravity distorts the mass unless the film is wound tight on a core. That films need air is overlooked. For short term entreposage and sorting the better method, see an editing room.

Can horizontally the support must be well flat, else entire rolls are distorted and or may have kinked edges. It’s easy to ensure that the convolutions have air between them and the core doesn’t play a role. This is for long-time archiving.

A lot of the films I get are loose wound. The people project them and rewind via projector. Big rolls hardly make it when being rewound on some of the projectors. They need to be redone with rewinds on the bench. I'm pretty much all horizontal storage; with the exception of a few reels stored on edge down the hall waiting to be worked on or stored. 

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BH has a poor supply for bulk needs. I don't need it, I was just wondering after looking to see what they stocked.

Be careful while microwaving paper. Recently one magazine caught on fire. It looks like there was a metal theft prevention device taped in it. It was an adult type of mag dating from late 1980s to early '90s

I don't get back to the threads very often. I'm busy with other things. I like to let them marinate and see what develops. So, if I fail to answer any replies, that is why. 

I just scanned all the posts here and still see no comparisons of scan output. I just don't get it. One guy sends in tons of tables and numbers; everything but actual scanner output. Robert sends in a video of this Arriscan running. Great, but where is the output of said Arriscan Robert? Flashing color lights means shit Robert. It is the output that counts Robert. And same to Perry. 

When you are talking color evaluation you need the same regulated color balance on both ends of the phone. This was very important with graphic arts where it was costly to make mistakes.  That is why we have viewing standards.

Regulated light viewing equipment.

Same with light tables. Everything has to be regulated, or everyone in the conversation won't be on the same page.

From GTI:

When an item is viewed, the color we see is a result of the color quality of the light source and the reflective characteristics of the item. As a result, when attempting to achieve an accurate color match, colors can appear to match under one light source and then appear significantly different under another light source. Therefore, designers, brand owners, and production staff should all evaluate a color under a consistent light source. To help achieve this goal industries have developed international standards for the viewing of color.

The graphic arts and photographic industries have adopted ISO 3664:2009 entitled “Graphic technology and photography– Viewing conditions.” ISO 3664: 2009 specifies D50 daylight viewing conditions. Industrial color applications (plastics, paints, textiles, automotive, etc.) have adopted ASTM D1729-2009 as their standard, which specifies D65 daylight viewing conditions.

Now, just sending in raw scan samples is not the end all...but it is a start. It is really sad; you people will go out of your way to send in everything...except images.

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I'm not a HAM, nor interested in getting a license or being a HAM. But it would be interesting to listen in on HAMS. Do they make a HAM scanner? And if so, is it easy to use?

I've got a huge collection of HAM material as part of my Radio, Record, Recorder and TV Archive. So that is where my interest stems from.

If you're a HAM...you know what these are...have tons of them!

I've got a huge TV and radio archive. All fascinating stuff, all visuals more or less. (I don't like text much.)  But I have no interest in the technical end of things. I only like visuals and easy to listen to scanners. Problem with scanning nowadays is they encrypt the conversations in the big city. Luckily for me I don't live in the big city any longer, so I get pretty good scanning material.  Uniden needs to make an encryption breaker. But greedy Uniden would charge a fortune for it!

Weegee was into police scanning, but he did it for his job.

Back in the day we had cheap scanners that let you listen in on the cell phones and new cordless telephones. Crazy stuff you would hear. Guess scanner people are voyeurs of sorts.

If Perry had an interest in radios...

You've got to be of a certain nature to be a HAM. I like the photos only, not the gear and the education you need to run the gear. But the new scanners they have now can be more or less preprogrammed. All you do is enter your zip or GPS info. And if you want a little more, you send $50 to Uniden to 'unlock' certain features. For zip code programming, you just get the basics, but that is good enough for me.

"Trade curses everything it handles; and though you trade in messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the business." ~ Thoreau

Car makers tried to make wire insulation out of soybean oil to save on evil crude oil. Result...rats ate the insulation off the wires!

Back in the day you built your own radio or TV.

Amazing stuff...never bored with seeing history!

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Rush Hour 3  Blu-ray has a great 2nd disc that is one of the best behind the scenes glimpse into movie making I've seen. Muro, Jr. and Ratner lay it all out. Should be required viewing for up-and-coming film students. Pre-production, principal photography, practical's, CG, post...it has it all! Hours and hours of stuff.

That Ratner is a genius! Too bad he got caught up in the 'me too' crap. No telling what he would have done.

Moviola Film Editing Machine | eBay

This seller has all sizes! $350 a pop...16mm or 35mm.

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Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Archival Collection
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