This is detail from a remarkable architectural rendering Bob DeFlores did in Kansas City. DeFlores had embarked on a successful career in commercial art there, leading to an art director's job at an architectural firm in Minnesota, but his love of film prompted him to divert his career toward film preservation. (Illustration:  Bob DeFlores Collection)

Bob DeFlores, right, formed a friendly relationship with Bing Crosby when he was able to provide films that Crosby didn't have in his own collection. A grateful Crosby reciprocated by giving DeFlores some of his home movies. (This photo was taken in 1977 at Crosby's home.) After Crosby's death, DeFlores maintained a friendship with the Crosby family and has worked with Crosby's widow, Kathryn, on various projects. (Photo: Bob DeFlores Collection)

Continued: Bob DeFlores

"I was a shy kid," he says. He spent hours in theaters and developed a love of movies and an encyclopedic memory of movie minutiae, along with "a real fondness for those people" in show business and films.

As a teenager, in about 1953, he began buying Castle Films -- many of which were old newsreels or shorter versions of theatrical releases edited and priced for the home market -- and Soundies, 16-millimeter shorts featuring bands and singers. To watch them he needed a 16-millimeter sound projector, so he saved up and bought a used one.

It was the beginning of the collection he has today, which numbers about 5,000 complete films and short clips made between 1900 and 1940, plus thousands of hours of original broadcast videotape. About 1,000 of those films were restored by DeFlores, who points out that even acetate "safety film" of a certain age is deteriorating now, giving off a vinegar smell as it decays in its cans.

When he reached college age, DeFlores stopped shuttling between parents and stayed in Kansas City with his mother. He studied art at the University of Kansas and started a career in commercial art, working in advertising, architecture and even billboards.

His work in Kansas City led to a job with Ellerbe Architects in Minneapolis in 1969. He became Ellerbe's art director. Today he's proud of the murals he designed and executed for Schoenecker Arena at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul.

But his interest in film and its history was deeply ingrained.

Most people assume that a movie or TV show, once produced at significant cost, lives on indefinitely. Early on, DeFlores learned otherwise and, by design or not, became a major part of the film industry's institutional memory.

His eyes widen and he gestures as he points out today: "In 1947, Universal burned 400 films -- mostly silents," made on flammable and deteriorating nitrate stock. "Today, people are looking all over the world for copies of those films."

So, DeFlores kept collecting. He knew that the studios tended not to value their product after its theatrical life had run its course, but some worker bees squirreled away prints tagged for the trash bin. He sniffed around and found films in garages, attics, old theaters and barns.

He has always had a particular interest in early jazz and big-band footage. One of his gems is a 1937 reunion of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. He said he had to run a race against the film's disintegration to copy it, the only known movie footage of the band.

'Swing With Bing'

DeFlores admired Bing Crosby and collected many of his movies, some of them the only copies. When Minnesota's 3M Co. sponsored the Bing Crosby Golf Tournament in 1976, DeFlores supplied his print of the obscure 1937 film Swing With Bing, and Crosby was moved when he saw his father and his brother in it. His own copy had been lost in a fire. Bing invited DeFlores to his house in early 1977, and that was the beginning of a relationship with the Crosby family that continues today.  

In 1977 DeFlores left Ellerbe Architects to become a full-time film archivist, and he helped fill in the gaps in Bing's film collection in the months before Crosby`s sudden death that fall. They also did some fishing together, and Crosby provided DeFlores with his own copies of extremely rare movies.  

A Minneapolis-St. Paul television station, KSTP, hired DeFlores to beef up its film library and show vintage footage of visiting celebrities who appeared on its weekday Dial 5 program. That brought requests from Hollywood figures to unearth films that were special to them. For example, Kitty Carlisle Hart -- the actress wife of playwright Moss Hart -- asked DeFlores in 1987 if he could come up with a copy of Here Is My Heart, which she'd made with Bing Crosby in 1934. She had been told no copies existed. DeFlores found her one.

Bonanzas also came in over the transom via Dial 5, DeFlores says. One afternoon a woman in Crystal, a Minneapolis suburb, called to say she had an old movie in her barn and he could have it. She said it had lain around since someone left it there in the 1920s. DeFlores dropped by and found a print of Outside the Law, a 1921 Lon Chaney silent. "It was covered with chicken feathers and straw," he said, but it was another of those movies he's come across that are the only remaining copies. "I'm sure it was one of the films burned in 1947," he said.

Can you have bigger stars than this in your corner? Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers pose with Bob DeFlores. DeFlores has helped many stars such as these find lost footage, and he's provided films for many documentaries and film tributes. (Photo: Bob DeFlores Collection)

July 2008 issue | © 2008 The Mississippi Rag

P.O. Box 19068, Minneapolis, MN 55419.