. This includes:

 

• The Paramount Picture Negatives & Photograph Collection

• Clio Award Magazines and Advertising Journals

• The Sylvia Sydney Collection

 

• Rootie Kazootie Special Feature -- the remaining 16mm kinescopes of this lost live kid show from the 1950’s. All the copyrights and trademarks have lapsed. The original Rootie Kazootie puppets exist with a private collector. We can recreate an actual live kid’s show with the puppets and create a television special on kids programming from the Golden Age of TV.   

•  30 years of NY Toy Fair UnCut VideoFootage --There over 50-100 hours of  video I personally filmed as well as footage from the networks or supplied by toy companies that could be used to create a documentary about Toy Fair and how toys and the toy industry has grown and evolved over three decades.

 

• Astronauts, Science and Space Feature – Materials from my personal collection of autographs, letters, books, pamphlets, and photographs of astronauts along with related toys, commercials, Television shows and films from the era when Boomer children where obsessed with Sci-fi and Space and astronauts and scientists were regarded as true heroes. Feature includes “Boomer Astronauts and Space-Age TV Dreams” (see description below)

 

 

The D.W. Griffith & Early Film History Collection

 

This collection also features rare autographs, and private letters from D.W. Griffith (and his official biographer Seymour Stern -- see description below), Cristal Gang (see description below) Sergei Eisenstein (see description below), Fritz Lang, Joseph Von Sternberg, Preston Sturgis, Charles Chaplin, Orson Wells, Robert Flory, Billy Bitzer, Robert Florey and others.

 

Additionally, the acquisition would include transferring the re-publishing rights to Ira H. Gallen’s two self-published books on D.W. Griffith: Master of Cinema and The Birth of a Nation by Seymour Stern which would be updated and corrected with new materials and information gathered with the help of film students.

 

Seymour Sterns Wife, age 99, and two children in their 70’s, are living in poverty and need to be helped, and Seymour ‘s work could make getting them help possible.

 

 

 Seymour Stern: The Forgotten Genius of Hollywood

Stern’s unorthodox theories on film and his criticism of Hollywood movies in his writings that brought him to the attention of Carl Laemmle Senior, the president of Universal Pictures. Every major studio at the time in 1927 Hollywood was scrambling to figure out how to make successful sound films.

 

Laemmle -- on a whim -- invited Stern to come out to Hollywood at the age of 24 to teach directors some of Stern’s theories about camera movement. He would also be given the chance to become a director himself. Stern had never had any hands on experience making a movie other than he went to the movies. I learned all this when I came across some boxes and garbage bags filled with his old letters, diaries, and personal notes the family was about to throw out.

 

Untold Told Story of Universal Pictures

What I saved from being destroyed was all types of Stern correspondence about his adventures in Hollywood and his observations of the actors, writers and directors he would meet, work and challenge including: William Saroyan, Carl Laemmle, Charlie Chaplin, Erich Von Stroheim, Miriam C. Cooper, Conrad Veidt, Paul Fejos, George Cukor, Sidney Howard, David O Selznick, Sergei Eisenstein, Upton Sinclair and especially D.W. Griffith.

 

Sergei Eisenstein and Upton Sinclair

I found a remarkable detailed unfinished manuscript Stern was writing in 1932 called Sergei Eisenstein: The Rise of the Russian Cinema. Stern became friends with the Russian director Sergei Eisenstein during his controversial visit to Hollywood.   

 

It was Stern who attacked Upton Sinclair in the newspapers for taking creative control of Eisenstein’s Mexican film Que Viva Mexico. Stern’s attacks damaged Sinclair’s reputation.        

 

He, was portrayed as the betrayer of a great artist's vision, a phony socialist whose only real concern was making money. I have these personal letters, and quarrels between Upton Sinclair, Stern and Eisenstein. Many of my 1st edition books and magazines cover also cover Eisenstein and the Russian cinema.

 

Critical Reports

There was another loose leaf book filled with Stern’s secret “Critical Reports” or Inter-active memos that only went to Carl Laemmle Senior and Jr. They had Stern spying on the studio director’s dailies and commenting on how he felt about them.  Some of Stern’s reporting is on films or scenes in films that don’t exist anymore.

 

There are so many stories and private letters in the Stern files that included the back stabbing , intrigue, sexism and sexual assault in Hollywood during the start of  the Great Depression, and the birth of sound in movies that has never been told before.

 

The Christel Gang Collection

Among Stern’s affects about to be thrown out as well were the personal letters, diaries, postcards, books, photographs and newspaper clippings from the famed yet little known Edward Western nude model and secretary Christel Gang.  These rare and unique personal items in my collection of the Christel Gang letters and mementos have never been seen or published.

 

What I uncovered in the items left for Seymour from Christel Gang (1892-1966) that she was born in Germany and immigrated to the United States in 1906. She worked as stenographer, a notary public and a translator in Los Angeles. In 1925, she met American photographer Edward Weston who hired her to take dictation for his first daybooks.

 

Gang was one of the first nude models Weston would became famous for photographing and she eventually became one of his many lovers. Weston and Gang developed a close relationship that spanned 25 years.  I have intimate diaries and letters that include private hand written letters from Edward Weston when he had Parkinson’s disease.

 

She met and worked as Seymour Stern’s stenographer at Universal Pictures.  This includes time spent with both Stern and Eisenstein during the famed Russian director’s stay in Hollywood.  I found her notes, photographs and memorabilia during her friendship with the American art critic and writer of German-Japanese decent, Sadakichi Hartmann, American editor Ramiel McGehee, and a book of Edgar Allen Poe illustrated by Harry Clarke as well as a newspaper clipping of his art show. There are numerous newspaper clippings about actors, artists and Hollywood from the 1920s and 1930s and rare photographs of Japanese actors.

 

 Boomer Astronauts and Space-Age TV Documentary

              

The TVDAYS collection includes many of these TV shows, newsreels, training films and commercials as well as related toys which could program the exhibition.

 

Highlights of the Space & Science Collection include:

 

• Personal letters and autographs from Project Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronauts Alan Sheppard, Gordon Cooper, Scott Carpenter, John Young, and Thomas Stanford.

• An autograph and Apollo 11 flight patch from Apollo 11 Astronaut Michael Collins when he returned from the moon.

• A two page letter/article that astronaut John Glenn sent me in 1966 writing about developing your “Body, Mind and Spirit.”

• A letter from astronaut Donald K. Slayton responding to my suggestion that they put a plaque on the moon with the names of the deceased astronauts on it. In it he says, “I think your suggestion is a very good one and we will seriously consider it.” They did it.

• An autographed picture and autographed Time magazine cover 1965 (the one he was on) of Christopher Columbus "Chris" Kraft Jr., the leading NASA personnel who was instrumental in establishing NASA’s Mission Control operation.

• An autographed picture from the now legendary 2nd Administrator of NASA James Webb from 1965.In his honor the James Webb Telescope is a space telescope that will be the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope.

• An autographed photo of the personal doctor for the astronauts, Charles Berry, with the inscription: “To a future patient” and a NASA flight patch.

• Autographed Newsweek magazine cover of , the prominent engineer and executive in the aerospace industry. He worked as Chief Engineer/Executive at North American Aviation for over 35 years. He developed the P-51 Mustang during World War II, the F-100 jet fighter, the X-15 rocket plane, and oversaw the Apollo program.

• Two autographed photographs from Werner Von Braun. He was the leading figure in the development of rocket technology in Germany, creating the V2-Rocket in World War II and is considered the father of rocket technology and space science in the United States. Von Braun served as director of the newly formed Marshall Space Flight Center and as the chief architect of the Saturn V super heavy-lift launch vehicle that propelled the Apollo spacecraft to the Moon.

• An autographed photo of Dr. Kurt Heinrich Debus -- a former Nazi German V-2 rocket engineer, who in 1962 became the first director of the Kennedy Space Center.

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