Film Archivist Screens Rare Rock Footage in Stamford

Bill Shelley is an analog guy in a digital world and that’s a good thing for fans of classic rock music.

For the last year or so, on the first Thursday of the month, the in Stamford has been the place to catch Shelley’s presentations of classic clips by rock giants, including Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, The Who and many others, which he put together from reels and reels of film he fished out of the trash back in the 1980’s.

Shelley's apartment in Long Island houses a veritable museum of antiquated artifacts, including 78 rpm records, cylinder seals, a five-foot Coca Cola sign, player pianos, a calliope, old radios, plenty of LP records and, of course, canister upon canister of film.

A sound purist, who loves vinyl, he has successfully adapted to technological change throughout his career. He used to edit films by cutting and splicing, but now he transfers his movies onto digital and puts together his rock reels with help from a computer.

“Sadly, I have CD’s and DVD’s,” he said. “I’m around 50 now, so I’ve lived through lots of change.”

After working several menial jobs for a film company in Manhattan that put him in the right place at the right time, he worked selling stock footage to commercials, documentaries and History Channel productions, obtaining the copyright by re-editing, re-tinting or scoring the film.

“That dried up as everyone got it on the Internet and could download it for free, so I needed a new plan,” he said. "I called up a theater in Huntington near where I live [the Cinema Arts Center] and asked if they wanted to screen some old moves, like Chaplin or silent films. They said that probably wasn’t going to go over.”

At that point, he said, he had 56 cents to his name, faced eviction and had a storage bill due, so he asked about their interest in rock concerts, figuring he could stitch together a 90-minute program about The Beatles. Around 2,000 people came from as far away as Pennsylvania and Shelley knew he had a hit on his hands.

Shelley acquired the film when he was charged with cleaning out the basements of two Manhattan buildings, including the Brill Building, home to several prominent pop songwriters in the 1950’s and 1960’s.

“Down the hall, an ad agency was erasing stacks of tapes labeled ‘Chuck Berry,’ so they could use them again for demos," he said. "I thought, ‘What are they doing getting rid of this stuff?' So I went to my boss and offered him my entire paycheck if he’d let me have the tapes.”

Shelley eventually salvaged thousands of tapes. The quality is generally good enough to work with, though some are time-stamped. His footage includes recording studio sessions, TV appearances, live concerts and impromptu jams. In some cases, the filmmaker used five cameras in a concert, training each camera on an individual band member, so Shelley puts them back together into one cohesive concert.

Shelley’s final product represents the best available versions. “I’ve logged 10,000 hours on the rock stuff so far,” he said. “For a Bob Dylan show, we took 60 hours of footage and narrowed them down to a real tight two hours. We’d maybe have 10 versions of one song, but the lighting would be weird, the sound wouldn’t be right — maybe the vocals were buried beneath the instruments.”

Shelley also has several reels of great 1950’s artists and plenty of vintage 1920’s and 1930’s jazz performances. And there’s no shortage of rock bands.

Adam Birnbaum, director of film programming at the Avon, brought Shelley in to do his monthly rock shows after a friend of his who worked at the Cinema Arts Center told him about them.

“We’re a similar non-profit, art-house cinema, so I thought his would be good,” Birnbaum said. “It plays into our mission to present documentaries — in this case rare and otherwise unavailable footage — and it aids our educational mission because younger viewers now have the opportunity to see something exclusive that they can’t get anywhere else and to also see what the classic rock era was all about.”

Shelley still provides stock footage for television, licensing his work to MTV and VH1, but his rock complications are taking on a life of their own. He has made presentations in Texas and California, and will be heading to Hawaii this year.

In Stamford, baby boomers have responded well to his programs. “A lot of times, we get the same people every month,” he said. “We know each other — it’s like family.”