Joe Lauro Has a Passion for Film Posters (and Old Records)

Walking into Joe Lauro’s studio is a lot like taking a trip back in time. Housed in a restored barn behind his home, it’s a cacophony of Americana where Lauro keeps the treasured results of his long-term passion for collecting. Old-timey phonograph players, walls of vaudeville posters and wooden shelves filled with vintage recordings in color-coded sleeves organized according to year and genre are meticulously organized throughout the space and a feast for the eyes.

Lauro has made a living from his passion. In 1991, he founded Historic Films Archive LLC, a company based in Greenport that today houses over 40,000 hours of archival films and more than 50,000 musical performances that were shown on film and TV programs between 1923 and the 2000s.

On a personal level, Lauro’s primary passion has always been collecting rare pre-1935 blues, jazz and country 78 rpm records. He plays and discusses these records weekly on his show “American Grooves Radio Hour” which can be heard on WLIW 88.3 every Sunday at 4 p.m. and 10 p.m.

But Lauro, the bassist and front man for The HooDoo Loungers, is also a collector of vintage movie posters and film memorabilia, and from now through the end of the year, Sag Harbor Cinema is featuring “From the Vaults of the Historic Film Archive: Cinema Posters 1908-1947,” a display of just some of the items from his film collection, on its third floor. Posters dating

from the early 20th century, including Charlie Chaplain and Laurel and Hardy films, European posters for Fritz Lang films and the French poster for Jean Renoir’s 1937 picture “The Grand Illusion” are just a smattering of what’s hanging on the walls of the cinema for the remainder of the month.

“The impetus for the poster show was the Festival of Preservation which the cinema held in November,” said Lauro. “I tried to focus on some films that are legendary and others that have been restored and a few films that are lost. Of course, I also selected the ones that look nice. Often it’s the case that the poster is so enticing and the movie so boring.

“When I first started collecting movie posters, which I stopped 20 years ago, primarily I was focused on the earliest years of cinema — from the 1900s to the mid 1930s — mainly because I collected for their design and graphics,” he added. “It wasn’t about the specific films. I wanted the design of the poster.”

Those early posters of his focus were made using stone lithography, a printing process developed in Germany in the late 18th century that was created using many dyes and, while not photographic, produced imagery that was incredibly rich and vivid.

“It’s what they did everywhere, until they figured out a cheaper way to print,” said Lauro, who worked with Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan, the cinema’s artistic director, to curate what would be shown in the exhibition.

“Giulia is a gift. She is not only a lovely woman to work with, she’s so interested in it, so smart and knows how to give the person guidance,” said Lauro. “We both decided we didn’t want to get into the ’50s, but keep with the early years. I made my selections mostly of pre-1940s films. There was one that had an all-Black cast and was made specifically for Black audiences. It was a hidden aspect of the business. The rest of the posters are from the 1910s to 1930s.”

And as Lauro explained, these posters were never meant to last — and often didn’t.

“A one sheet is a standard movie poster. It was printed on very thin paper and they’d put them in the framed case,” Lauro explained. “They were total ephemera and only for that one purpose.”

There were also three sheets, he added, which were designed for bigger theaters or walls where they could be placed side by side to promote a film.

“Those were glued to the wall. Three sheets often came in three pieces and after the film, you were meant to return them or destroy them,” he said. “Then you had six sheets that were huge and would go on the side of a building.”

It’s not just movie posters on view at the cinema. In addition, a case on the third floor contains a selection of Lauro’s film memorabilia from the era, including a Pathéscope film container and several movie magazines.

One of the most intriguing items in the case is a shellac sound disc from “The Jazz Singer,” the world’s first “talkie,” which starred Al Jolson and was released in 1927. In those early days, recorded discs were played in sync (ideally) with the film footage to produce the sound track. It was a short-lived method, as technological advancements soon developed a sound strip that could be embedded directly onto the film itself.

The disc on view at the cinema was produced by Warner Bros.’ Vitaphone sound system and rescued from the home of the studio’s founder, Harry Warner. Lauro explains that this specific disc had been sent to Warner during production of “The Jazz Singer” for his approval, as it contained a scene where Jolson had ad libbed a talking segment not planned for the film. Warner did approve the actor’s ad lib, and the disc represents the first talking segment ever in a feature film.

“Jolson wasn’t supposed to talk, just sing, so they let it roll,” explained Lauro. “They sent the disc to Henry Warner and it was found in his projection booth by a friend who was friendly with his daughters, so he called me.

“He said, ‘This was the test disc. Do you want this?’”

Of course Lauro did.

Once approved, the sound discs went into wide production and were distributed to theaters along with the film reels. Each reel ran 10 minutes and each disc was about the same length.

“The discs had singing and talking on them. It was a vulnerable system, if the projectionist hit the record, the needle would jump and f--- it all up,” said Lauro. “When Warner Bros. launched ‘The Jazz Singer,’ there were only so many plays you could get out of a disc. They were played with steel needles and after it got to 20 or so plays, it was done.”

Lauro has always loved old films, and he notes that his foray into poster collecting began when he was a graduate student in the cinema studies program at New York University. In those days, the last of the poster exchanges were still in operation in New York City.

“I was on the film committee and I got to know the distributor,” he said of his college years. “There were 16mm films that they would loan for prisons and schools. If I was running a film, for $3 they’d give you a poster. I said, ‘’You got any old inventory?’ For $50, they let me take old posters that were made for the distributors.”

Lauro also happened to be at NYU in the early 1980s, a unique era when players from the earliest days of cinema were still alive and would sometimes come visit the students at the behest of professors who knew them. Among the legends who talked at Lauro’s classes were silent-era actress Lillian Gish and director Michael Powell, who shared with the students the details of how he produced a special effect in his 1947 film “Black Narcissus” and offered insight about working as an assistant director for Irish director Rex Ingram in the 1920s.

“With higher education, it just makes you think differently,” said Lauro of those years. “I would’ve never realized in college this could’ve been a way to make a living. I got a teaching degree, and thought I’d be a college professor. But I didn’t like it, so I picked a path that was more hands-on.”

Though Lauro’s passion for old media was something that kicked into high gear during his college years, he was actually intrigued by it throughout his childhood.

“I had to go there for a reason. I was the classic non-sports kid. I was the chubby kid, the last one picked for a team,” he said. “I found my films on TV, specifically Laurel and Hardy. Anything from 1935 or before was always on at three in the morning. So I’d set my alarm clock for 3 a.m., get out of bed and watch it.”

While he no longer actively collects movie posters — Lauro says he has a couple hundred in his collection — he’s always tuned into the 78 record market and has about 20,000 of those. But he laments the deep pockets and big business interests that have invaded the scene in recent years and are now scouring the market in search of the things he has always loved.

“With the movie posters, I kind of hit it at a good time to be doing it, before they got really hard to get,” said Lauro, who shared a story of how he was present at an auction house when a world-record price was set for a movie poster.

“It’s all about Dracula, Frankenstein, King Kong and horror films of the early 1930s, and to this day they are most expensive,” said Lauro who witnessed the auction action between two buyers for one such poster. “The bidding went to almost half a million bucks, and I was sitting between these two guys.”

“From the Vaults of the Historic Film Archive: Cinema Posters 1908-1947” will be on view through the end of the year at Sag Harbor Cinema, 90 Main Street, Sag Harbor. For details, visit sagharborcinema.org.