From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

Welcome to the Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. You may know me as a bit of a collector. I like comic books and albums and watches.

I am not a collector of film prints, but there are many people who are.

And my guests today, Dennis Bartok and Jeff Joseph are here, talk about these guys.

Their book is A Thousand Cut, The Bizarre Underground World of Collectors and Dealers who Save the Movies.

First of all, guys, thanks for being here.

I know Dennis from back in the days of the American Cinemathech. Yeah, we were just talking that

you knew me when my hair was long and brown and I used to wear leather jackets and do all the

introductions at the Egyptian theater back in the 90s. Yeah, and now what's fascinating is the kind of politic behind this.

One of my favorite chapters, maybe my favorite chapter,

is the way that gay men were stigmatized by the FBI

and basically how Roddy McDowell was turned into kind of a traitor to this movement.

Talk about that for a little bit, Guy.

I'll start with you, Dennis.

Well, Jeff, who is my writing partner on the project, was one of the best-known film dealers in the United States, really in the world, from the 1970s until the kind of underground film dealing and collecting world started to collapse, really probably

in the late 1990s, early 2000s. And Jeff was one of 16 dealers who was indicted by the Justice

Department in the mid-1970s. And of those 16 dealers, he was the youngest, and he was the only

one to actually do jail time.

But it's just a crazy situation. It's almost now thinking about the way people

used to be prosecuted for marijuana. It was very strange. Well, you know Alice's restaurant,

Arla Guthrie, you know, you're sitting on the group W bench and what are you in for? I'm in for

murder and rape and I'm in for, you know, littering. That's kind of how it was. What are you in for? You know, murder ab me for copyright infringement. And they all moved away from me on the bench. That's kind of what it felt like, though. It was a very odd thing to be in prison for. Even in that chapter in book, you can just sort of see how selective the prosecution was.

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