In 1999, Marilyn Wagner and DJ Ginsberg paid $2,000 at an Omaha antique store for several hundred boxes of letterpress blocks and plates from a closed-down block manufacturer nearby. The blocks, which had been sitting in a back room at the store for 15 years, were once used to create old movie advertisements in the golden age of Hollywood—for films like House of Wax, Superman, The Thing, and Planet of the Apes. The friends restored them to their original condition, and in 2015, the collection was appraised at between $8 to 12 million.
Now, the filmmaker Adam Roffman has produced a short about the friendship and their unlikely find. Beautifully shot, with a clear love of letterpress that matches our own, the film can be viewed in its entirety above. “We just feel these blocks are too beautiful and too important not to be seen,” say the pair in the film.
“When someone does acquire the collection, I’m hoping that they will set it up in a museum so that people could see these pieces. But also, set up the press and re-strike some of these pieces. And now everyone can take a little piece of 50 years of motion picture history home with them.”