Robert Rubin's Cinematic Collection on View in Sag Harbor

As an avid collector, Wainscott resident Robert M. Rubin has a number of passions — chief among them, movies, art and cars. And when he has an opportunity to merge all three of those passions at once? Well, you could say it’s a great day.

That’s entirely the case right now at Sag Harbor Cinema where several of Rubin’s pieces are on view in a third floor exhibition titled “Movie Art and Artifacts From a Private Collection.” The stuff that movies are (or once were) made of can run the gamut — from posters and production stills designed to get people into theaters to see them, to the scripts, props and vehicles that star in the making of them and are often viewed as detritus afterwards. This show, which is curated by Rubin himself, has a bit of everything, including contemporary artwork that incorporates imagery and themes from a few of the movies he loves, as well as an intriguing selection of artifacts related to the filmmaking process itself.

An earlier version of this show, “Walkers: Hollywood Afterlives in Art and Artifact,” had a 2015 run at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City. For the Sag Harbor iteration, in addition to artwork among the objects on view are set designs, screenplays, posters and props from films like Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now,” William Friedkin’s “The French Connection,” Billy Wilder’s “Double Indemnity,” John Ford’s “The Searchers,” Luis Buñuel’s “Belle de Jour” and other classics.

“There’s artwork based on the different movies, a prop skull and the playing card from ‘Apocalypse Now.’ I also have something from ‘Psycho’ — the original design for the sign from the Bates Motel,” Rubin explained during a recent interview at the cinema. “I think I have a screenplay for every movie in the show, except ‘Belle de Jour.’

“It’s a small number of iconic movies that everyone has seen. I want it to be accessible,” he added. “And since I like car movies, there are some items from ‘Bullitt.’

That makes sense since Rubin, the son of a mechanic, is perhaps best-known locally as the founder of The Bridge Golf Club, the course designed and built by Rees Jones on the site of the former Bridgehampton Race Circuit. Remnants of the property’s past (and Rubin’s love of automobiles) remain intact at the course in the form of vintage roadside billboards and the Chevron bridge that you drive under near the entrance.

Rubin began collecting movie materials some 15 years ago. He first started as a book collector, but after purchasing a screenplay at a book fair, turned his attention to items with more cinematic provenance. His tastes are reflective of the film genres that were influential to him during his formative years — specifically, Westerns, Film Noir and New Hollywood, all three of which are highlighted in the cinema exhibition.

“Growing up, you could say that my three interests correspond to three phases in my life,” he explained. “The Western, when I was a young kid and everything on TV was a Western; Film Noir, like the work of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett when I was in high school; then the New Hollywood era in college.

“I saw a lot of movies in college. I ran the film society and watched a movie a day for four years,” he added. “Movies mattered then. When ‘The Godfather’ came out, it was really important. I dropped everything to go see it. My first job out of college was at a newspaper where I did reporting on zoning boards and they let me write movie reviews.”

Among the actors who show up in this exhibit in one way or another are Steve McQueen, Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Catherine Deneuve, Louise Brooks and Faye Dunaway. The artists whose work is included in the show include Richard Prince, Ivan Messac, Richard Avedon, Martin Kippenberger, Fiona Banner, John Divola, John Bock, Pierre Bismuth and Agnieszka Kurant.

Sometimes the art on view illustrates not a final cinema product that was, but rather, one that never came to be. That is particularly true with Banner’s imagined poster for Orson Welles’s unrealized adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novel “Heart of Darkness.” When the studio refused to back the making of the film, Welles made “Citizen Kane” instead. And of course, nearly 40 years later, Coppola would go on to make his own version of the “Heart of Darkness, albeit one named “Apocalypse Now” set in Vietnam rather than the Congo.

The transition of movie making to digital technology in the 21st century has rendered largely obsolete much of what defined the celluloid era that dominated the century before. But the stuff of filmmaking is still out there to be found. And though some of it is the kind of material most people would overlook, for collectors like Rubin, it’s pure gold.

“I collect, not according to an algorithm, but there’s a randomness to it. I have focused interests and what is out there comes along randomly,” he explained. “Basically, you’re standing on the riverbank watching stuff float by. You just have to know where to look.”

Rubin finds those places to look for collectibles include entertainment memorabilia auctions, private dealers and eBay.

“I’m about meaning. I have thousands of screenplays. My first purchase was the early screenplay draft of ‘Blade Runner,’ which was originally called ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,’ from the novel,” he said. “In terms of Film Noir collectibles, they were always such shoestring productions there was not a lot of material kicking around.”

Though online auctions and websites have made buying easier and more convenient in recent years, they have also made collecting far more competitive.

“Now, things that only I had an interest in others are finding. There’s a strange competition for things,” Rubin said. “There is also the archival value versus the artifactual value. Archival is stuff no one wants to collect, but when you put it in an archive, you learn something. An artifact is Steve McQueen’s watch from ‘Le Mans,’ which sold for $1 million as an artifact. The script might teach you about driving, but that’s not valuable.

“I’m more on the archival side,” he added. “Part of the reason I like artifacts is it gets people interested.”

Though not represented in the exhibit at the cinema, one film that Rubin is particularly passionate about is Richard C. Sarafian’s “Vanishing Point.” Released in 1971 in a vein not unlike that of Dennis Hopper’s “Easy Rider” from the year before, “Vanishing Point” tells the story of Kowalski, a Vietnam veteran and driver for hire who makes a wager with his drug dealer that he can deliver a Dodge Challenger from Denver to San Francisco in under 15 hours. That’s half the time it normally takes and, of course, the drugs help in his mission, but so does a blind DJ named Super Soul (played by Cleavon Little) who, from his perch behind a mic at KOW, a radio station in Nevada, cheers Kowalski on in his personal odyssey and helps him evade the cops.

In conjunction with the exhibit, this Saturday, May 25, at 6 p.m. Sag Harbor Cinema will screen “Vanishing Point” followed by a Q&A and book signing with Rubin, author of “Vanishing Point Forever,” his latest book which offers a deep dive into all the details of the film, including the story of its pseudonymous screenwriter Guillermo Cain (in reality the celebrated Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante) and, of course, the Dodge Challenger that starred in it.

In many ways, “Vanishing Point” and road movies like it offer a final reflection on the Wild West — or what was left of it anyway in the early 1970s — a denouement before the uniformity of suburbia and shopping malls popped up on the horizon of what had been the vast open spaces of the United States. It’s fitting that it was the kind of movie you’d see at a drive-in back then — another lost relic from that period. In fact, Rubin notes that “Vanishing Point” was released on a double bill with “Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry,” a film starring Peter Fonda, Susan George and a souped-up 1966 Chevy Impala.

“Filmmakers in their 30s and 40s still consider the ’70s the golden age of movies,” Rubin said. “‘Vanishing Point’ is fascinating, it’s a great document of America. Hollywood was blowing up and they brought in more creative types to do the work. It was the hangover of the ’60s. We had draft cards. We had skin in the game. ‘Vanishing Point’ is the western — and the closing of the frontier was the vanishing point.”

Rubin’s previous books include “Richard Prince Cowboy” (Prestel, 2020) and “Avedon’s France: Old World, New Look’ (Abrams, 2017). He has also published books and essays on Pierre Chareau, Alexander Calder, Buckminster Fuller, Bob Dylan and other cultural icons.

For details about the exhibit “Movie Art and Artifacts from a Private Collection” and for tickets to Saturday’s screening of “Vanishing Point” and the Q&A and book signing with Robert M. Rubin, visit sagharborcinema.org. Sag Harbor Cinema is at 90 Main Street in Sag Harbor.