I've been trying, at the moment, to find classic grindhouse prints to screen and it seems in the UK they were pretty much dumped after they played. Even going into the production of films I've heard horror stories about props being dumped into tips after they wrapped on films like Star Wars.

KS: They just auctioned off that Obi-Wan Kenobi cloak and if you read the story behind it you're just blown away. Apparently they got it from a rental house and then when the movie was done it went back into rotation at the rental house and could be rented out for costume parties and sh*t like that, the very same one that Alec Guinness wore. Until, you know, a collector bought it and put it into their collection and kept it out of heavy rotation.

But that was at a period when movies weren't as celebrated and obsessed over as they are now. Every piece of a movie means something to somebody now but back in the day you'd wrap a movie and throw sh*t out. Because it wasn't any big deal. The primary source of revenue or the primary source of interest was the movie itself. Over the last twenty-five, thirty years, sh*t like the props becomes something. A stormtrooper helmet can fetch $50,000 if it was truly used in the movie.

Even the marketing materials, even lobby cards. They'd put them up and throw them out but now you can find an expensive set of lobby cards for movies when they used to do it. I'm sure had the guys running theatres known back in the day how much they'd be worth one day they never would have thrown that sh*t up.

They sometimes produce glossy promo material for press screenings. I don't think I've thrown a single one out; I have them in a box at home.

KS: Right on, I'm telling you man; you wait two, five years and throw that sh*t up on eBay, you'll walk away with a nice chunk of change for something that didn't cost you a dime.

I went to Elstree Studios a couple of years back and we met a guy who works for the town council as a film historian - it's probably the only town council in the country with a film historian on staff - but he was telling us all these stories about going drinking with Alfred Hitchcock and walking Harrison Ford down to the shops to buy a newspaper while dressed up as Indiana Jones.

KS: Like a real Forest Gump of cinema history!



Yeah. And, heartbreakingly, he was telling us stories about discovering great tips full of audition tapes from the fifties and sixties featuring all of these amazing actors who came through the studio on their way to being famous. And they'd been tossed out.

KS: It's so strange. I read a story about the original Wicker Man and the twisted f*cking history of how long it took that film to become a cult classic and how it was pretty much thwarted at every turn. I guess part of their film wound up paved under some road that they were building at the time. They were clearing out an office and dumping sh*t and it just wound up getting paved into the road near the office. It's The Wicker Man, how could that happen?!

I guess it comes down to hindsight being a wonderful thing, but it's hard to wrap your head around the concept of anyone doing that or of anyone equating a screen-used lightsabre to a metal pole of no value.

KS: Absolutely right. I've always been something of a packrat so I've kind-of kept everything that I could and if I didn't keep it I went back to get it. When we were shooting on Clerks II we had to swap out the big Quick Stop sign at the front of the store with a burned-out version, so we took the real one down and then we had to replace it with a very clean, crisp new version for the end of the movie. So when we were done shooting I asked the Thapars if we could just give them the clean, crisp new version and just take the old version, and they said yes, so it's now the most precious prop I have and it was an unintentional prop, it just happened to be the store sign when we shot the movie, thirteen years ago, but now I own it.

I've been very good at keeping everything but the one regret I have is Mallrats. It was the first film we made with a budget and when the movie was done I didn't lobby to keep any of it because they owned it all. There were some things I managed to collect over time - I got the grappling gun and little sh*t like that - but like the wardrobe just went back into general circulation at Universal and then they had a f*cking garage sale and somebody walked away with Brodie's jacket and that shirt and all the clothes. I kept, of course, the Jay and Silent Bob stuff.

But ever since then, from Chasing Amy forward, I've kept everything; I've kept all the wardrobe, I've kept all the f*cking props. Every once in a while I'll get a call from Miramax Archives going like, "I think you should give that stuff back." And I'm like, why? It's just going to sit in some storage unit somewhere, I'm going to put it up in the store, you know, where people can see it and appreciate it and touch it.