Van Roberts remembers the first movie he ever watched. At only 4 years old, he wasn’t quite big enough to see over the movie theater seats in front of him, so he stood atop his own to watch David Lean’s “The Bridge on the River Kwai.”
Eyes wide and nerves tense, he watched a train plunge off a bridge into a fiery explosion, a scene he remembers vividly, in part because he never tired of watching it.
“I’ve seen that movie God knows how many times,” Roberts told The Dispatch. “I’ve had God knows how many copies of it, and every time it comes around for revivals, I’m usually the only one in the theater watching it.”
More than 60 years later, Roberts still feels the same excitement when he watches a movie, and he has the collection to prove it.
More than 5,000 DVDs and Blu-rays line the multiple floor-to-ceiling shelves in a dedicated room in his home, some movies shelved two-layers deep, others – impulse buys he never got around to watching – still wrapped in cellophane.
“A cinematic orphanage” he calls it.
In preparation of moving to a new house soon, Roberts said he’s looking to rehome his entire collection.
“I don’t want (the new house) to look like Blockbuster, and quite frankly, some of these movies I’ll never watch,” he said. “It’s kind of like the old saying, ‘It’s better to have a gun and not need it than need a gun and not have it.’”
Despite his lifelong love of film, Roberts didn’t start out collecting. He picked up the hobby in 1997, starting modestly with movies stored in a typing paper box, though he was a fan of the movies for all the years before, often spending Friday nights in high school hunkered down at the movie theater while his classmates watched football games.
“Most people get involved with sports. I was terrible at sports. I always struck out,” he said. “… I really never had that many friends, so the movie theater was my friend.”
That friendship eventually evolved into a career for Roberts, who has taught film courses at Mississippi University for Women for nearly 40 years, written reviews for multiple publications, including The Dispatch, and boasts an IMDb profile with more than 3,000 reviews.
Roberts’ collection spans from 1926 – with “The General” featuring Buster Keaton taking the title of oldest – to more recent titles.
American Westerns are his favorite genre, with the original “The Magnificent Seven” being his top pick. But he has movies of every type, from horror films to romances to Criterion Collection films. He’s quick to identify his least favorites, pointing to a shelf of Marvel superhero movies he “got sick of” after a while.
He still watches the movies he isn’t a big fan of though.
“I can watch a movie and absolutely hate it, and I’ll watch it several times just to understand what’s going on, to figure out what they’re trying to do,” he said.
Roberts can’t think of a film he wanted to add to the collection, often looking for finds on Amazon or eBay. He also takes advantage of Facebook to connect with fellow cinephiles across the country, like a man in Texas who sold him copies of “Johnny Hamlet” and “Vendetta at Dawn.”
“These are things you’re not going to find at the Walmart or any place like that,” he said. “… You can’t find these on streaming.”
Losing our history?
Both Columbus-Lowndes Public Library and Bryan Public Library in West Point have both shown interest in Roberts’ collection, he said, with CLPL staff planning to start cataloguing the movies next week.
While he’s not sure who might be interested in some of the movies, Roberts thinks there will be library patrons who prefer physical media. Plus, some of the movies, particularly the older ones, won’t ever be on streaming services, he said.
“And if they do get on streaming, you still have to pay $7.99 for it,” Roberts said.
Melissa Hering, local history assistant for CLPL, watched the pendulum swing, as she puts it, away from DVDs to streaming, welcoming in a shiny, new and more convenient way to watch movies. But unlike physical media, digital items can be changed, she said.
“There have been cases that streaming shows and movies were changed because they’re only digital,” Hering said. “Or in some cases, they can be completely taken away and use access to these media.”
Roberts said movies often reflect how society and culture shift over time, something that’s particularly noticeable in the different censorship standards filmmakers were held to across eras.
“Just the way people behaved back in those days opposed to how they behave now,” he said.
When that media is lost in the transition from physical to digital media, whether due to poor preservation or a lack of interest, Hering said it’s concerning.
“You could say we’re losing a bit of our history when that happens,” she said.
But Hering sees the tides turning again, particularly among audiences who want to consume unaltered media, prefer practical filmmaking over computer-generated imagery-heavy films and even among mothers who want to better regulate the advertisements their kids come across while streaming.
“A lot of people are looking toward older movies and thinking that they’re not only written better, but they’re produced better, made better,” she said.
As for Roberts’ collection, he hopes it lands with the audience it deserves, every last orphan.
“There’s some movies, I don’t know who’s going to watch this kind of stuff,” he said. “… If they want to watch movies and they don’t have streaming, they’re going to have a much broader variety.”
McRae is a general assignment and education reporter for The Dispatch.
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Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 28 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
