Auricon Sale (Hollywood History Rad Shit related)
anthonypearson
2,442 Posts
what an amazing day it was at the auricon company sale. it is not everyday that a major company that produced 16mm cameras goes out of business and blows out the entire headquarters, offices and plant. but to top it off the owner was an amazingly bizzare collector of everything from books and records and beyond...i am so burnt right now... it is 3 in the moring. i was picking there all day and night.tomorrow i will tell the story when i find the time.ap
Comments
Old man Bach who shut down the business in the late 70's because the advent of video put him out of business. For 50 years he was assembling 16 mm film cameras that were used for taping television shows. Video destroyed him and he never sold his business and never sold his gear. He just shut the doors. The place was sealed since the late 70's.
It is a rather large building with a decent sized factory floor around the back that you cannot see in the picture. Above that factory floor is a huge loft where he stored his collection of books, records, paper, periodocals, cameras, toys, games, assorted items. Big shelves of this shit. Tons and tons of boxes.
So I was at Pasadena record swap and Mike Vauge starts in on a rant about this place just going on and on ( Mike you are seriously on my props list for telling me about this shit ). " You gotta go there... Blah blah ". Him and Brunner loaded up two vans full of assorted shit for $350 each.
This is the thing. This was not an estate sale or auction where the person was putting $50 on a peice of used toliet paper. This was like " load it up and get it the fuck out of here ". The problem is that the guy who bought the contents of the building was some young German dude who bought it for the machines. All the drill presses and all that shit that was on the factory floor. All of the rest of this shit he needed to get out of there and fast.
He did not advertise it. He just put up a sign on Santa Monica Blvd. The people who went to this thing just stumbled on it so there was the biggest assortment of Hollywood crackpots there you could imagine.
They were taking shit out of there by the boat load. By the time Young Adam and I got there it was still tons of not so obvious shit and shit that was hidden amongst the mess. I found 4 German camera lenses for 16mm cameras. INCREDIBLE books and periodicals. Amazing machines and electronics that I have no idea what the fuck they are. Tons of unused trap cases. Hollywood photographs and personal photographs. A stash of childrens drawings that were really, really mindblowing. A dope homemade turntable and other amazing shit that will remain unnamed. It was just like " load up the truck and give me whatever ".
The feeling of magic and sadness was so strange. This guy Bach who had the business never sold it and he just let it rot. The roof of the wing you see in the picture was water damaged. You would walk into offices and the entire floor had collapsed. You would see an untouched office that had not been refurnished. It was like circa 1950's. And the desk and files were just sunken into the ground like 4 feet.
The upstairs area in the photograph is a big screening room. They would run film up there and it had like beautiful rotten furniture and art deco marble ash trays. It was so lovely and thrashed.
Today the people come to remove the asbestos and shit ( half of which i put in my lungs and took out for them ) and later this week they knock it down.
Me and my two scuptour friends were there till 1 in the morning. We would go back to my buddies house who lives 5 blocks away and look at all the amazing shit we got and take a smoke of a twiddle and get excited and drive back over and dive in for more. My friend dived into a unknown corner and found a particular nugget that is going to bring some dough. This was after 9000 dealers and 47,000 troll junk heads had been through the upstairs loft 100,000 times.
Old man Bach's amazing collections and amazing business went to the wolves. His son did not / could not deal with it and cast it to the wind. The stories I learned from the Germans were as interesting as being there.
I have dug through a lot of shit but I never had been in a situation like this before. Hollywood academy award raer for sure.
Anyone else can share some regional blowout raers?
Thanks for reading.
ap
True headz from Indiana will have heard about The Mooresville blowout of 1991. This was a few years before I was in the game.
A longtime mailorder dealer in Mooresville either died or just up and dissappeared. I can never remember which. Either way, someone took possession of the warehouse and just started a fire sale with very little advertising. Aisles and aisles of records. Millions. Guys are still living off storage units filled with these records to this day. A few guys I've spoken with were driving back and forth with vans filled with records. They recall the yelps of UK blokes discovering big records. Early discoveries like Ebony Rhythm Band - Soul Heart Transplant came from here.
After a couple of weeks things weren't going fast enough so they dropped the price to $5 for whatever You could carry through the doorway. And my fellows, this wasn't $5 of Montovani. One guy carried out several hundred copies of Grodeck Whipperjenny for $5 and basically built his entire collection around that one score.
Holy shit. I know how some German microphones do very well on eBay. To be able to have some of those camera lenses would be cool.
gnarls...
yea... sounds like that guy in LA in the early 90's... " rare records " or some shit like that. this guy had 2 million units in a warehouse in burbank. he used to rent music to the studios and would sell records. he will like the biggest private dealer in los angeles. boner decided it would be a great idea if he never paid taxes and the IRS seized his shit and they opened it up to the public ( or some shit like that ).
this was before my time. this was like 1991. so bestsoundsrecords ( alex ) and mostaffa and a bunch of other " headz " took heaping stacks of JB's and shit out of there. marva whitney and all that. craig moerer came in and bought the entire thing at the end.
i dont get it. anyone ever heard of estate planing?
same with this Bach guy from Auricon. never handled his shit so i am buying his 16mm camera lenses for " whatever " at 1 in the morning along with boxes upon boxes of other shit. i would have devoted my entire weekend to the place if i knew it was going down.
i got the Rudy Valle autographed photo and shit. " ehh, give me $20 for those 8 boxes there.
i say some haggered mom gripping in the loft like she was gonna die from heat stroke... i'm like " sit down lady ". she couldn't stop stacking. some of those locals had been digging for like three days straight.
i saw a mexican dude with a pachinco machine still in the box. circa 1970. shit was like 10 dollars or something.
what the fuck? i am still trying to wrap my head around that " situation ".
HELL NO! Darlene is smashin' her. Ice-T is an idiot for leaving Darlene.
Darlene wins hommie....
No doubt--this is not even a debate.
One of my best scores this year, not on the same level, but cool nonetheless, was an old florida cat who made a whole business around shooting and developing slides. Armful of weird mics: $15. Nice ribbon mic in there too. They threw in a big wooden carrying case, mic pre, some other stuff. My fiance got some lenses and misc. stuff. Oh and threw in some craaaaazy pictures. Early panoramic style, weird dimensions. We mounted this one in our living room, maybe 6" x 3', of british infantry in the kush or some shit. Psychotic looking.
Just a few weeks ago Rebecca got back from visiting a friend in green bay and went to a store of old cutouts. All kinds of strange knockoff midwest merchandise sold by weight. $10 for 10 pounds or something. She stuffed a suitcase full of this stuff. The best were greetings cards that are so bizzare.... like the front says "some things aren't the same without you" and has a drawing of 2 mushrooms, then the inside when you open it has the mushrooms without the caps. It's like what the fugg? I can't do them justice, I'll have to scan them and put them up some day.
I agree. Fake titties have limits, and yeah she can make her legs almost do a 180 standing up, but I've seen some other photos and videos of her, and she is uh-guh-lay. Darlene... I mean c'mon.
ha ha ha!!!!
by the way...
the excuses never end...
HI, i've been meaning to pay for these items, but i was recently in jail this weekend for personal reasons. please send me a new invoice & i will pay promptly i prefer (media mail) i'm in no hurry to get items thankyou
What other way is there to get put in jail???
Actually I thought it was a facinating post. Please to add stories you heard.
PS, Darlene wins, hands down.
Sorry.... but seriously, I was!