Lights, camera... artwork

FILM buffery has taken Neil Lambess on many a time warp.
And thanks to Lambess, visitors to an exhibition at Whangarei's Old Library can go along for the trip - to an afternoon matinee or the Saturday night flicks, to the roll-the-Jaffas down the floor magic of the flea house or the brain-or-groin-strain of art house.
Lambess has curated It Came from the Back Row, an exhibition entirely of classic movie posters. In true time warp fashion, the posters are from movies made before the end of the 20th century.
They're not all there because of artistic merit.
"There were good posters from bad movies and bad posters from good movies," Lambess said.
Putting together this show gave him the chance to revisit much-loved treasures, but choosing which ones to bring back into the light of day was quite a task.
"What do you do?" Lambess muses. "Do you go for the stunning artworks? Do you go for the ones worth a lot of money? Or do you go for ones from the popular movie industry?"
Fortunately, he came up with a wonderful mix - from bad art to bad ass, from blockbuster to B-lister, from Fellini's Satyricon to Kiwi classic Goodbye Pork Pie.
Lambess owns "thousands" in a collection which began when he was in the cinema industry "last century". Many people share his  "saw it only yesterday" feeling about memorable movies, he says.
A former projectionist who screened films in the days before multiplex cinemas - when Whangarei had the Odeon and Regent theatres - Lambess has been experiencing another level of pleasure from his posters, through visitors' reactions.
When one woman, an architect who will work on a proposed restoration of the Old Library, saw the poster for Gone With the Wind she pointed out to Lambess that Margaret Mitchell's book, on which the film was based, hit the streets the very day the Old Library was opened on November 11,  1935.
 A Brit who now lives in Whangarei ended up chewing the fat with Lambess about how she worked with Ken Russell and John Slazenger at the BBC in the 1960s, before they became famous moviemakers.
One Whangarei couple was amazed to see the poster for the film they had been to see on their first date together - the 1973 sci-fi Soylent Green.
And for a show called It Came from the Back Row, there have been a few "back row" stories Lambess is far too discreet to repeat.
Another visitor, on seeing the poster for Andy Warhol's movie Heat, said he was in New York in the 1960s and one night saw Warhol's entourage running about pasting those posters on lamp posts and walls.
Made in Warhol's New York studio, The Factory, the Heat poster is an odd shape compared to standard poster sizes.
Among the more dramatically artful posters is one for Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Its artist, Robert McCall, worked for Nasa, painting images of outer-space and early astronauts when Kubrick shoulder-tapped him and said "paint my poster".
McCall, who permanently left Nasa's real space for Hollywood's reel space, died last month.
The poster for unforgettable teen movie The Breakfast Club is in the line-up because it features a photo of the cast by Annie Leibovitz - photographer of the stars. Leibovitz's opus includes  images of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Whoopi Goldberg lying in a bath of milk, a pregnant and nude Demi Moore, to name just a few. 
Also in there for novelty value are posters by an infamous Australian artist said to have spent most of his time in the pub or imbibing illegal substances. His job was to paint copies of the original movie posters for the local release, but he did an extremely bad job, Lambess says. Some odd physical traits on his Namu the Killer Whale characters illustrate this point.
A daybill he did for Tarzan movies (showing some peculiar musculature on the comic hero's body) also has a large blank space on the bottom half. There were so many Tarzan films being churned out at the time the poster was generic and the space filled in with the title of each new release.
A poster from Night of the Creeps is special for showing a skeletal hand clutching a door handle - yet, there is no such scene in the movie itself, Lambess says. Ironically, scenes that made good poster art often didn't make the cut for the movie itself.
Paying homage to some prim censorship warnings, one poster has stamped on it in true moral-police style: "Caution - Not for the mentally immature."
 Like flaws on rare stamps, these are the treasures within treasures that make the posters far more interesting than they seem at face value, and also make some very valuable in money terms.
And they've been painted or drawn or collaged by a working artist. Modern posters are usually photo-shopped images taken from the movie, with no artists or hand lithography involved, Lambess says. Film posters are serious art business, involving swaps, sales and scouring of old theatres and junk shops around the world.
And many a yarn about how some of those on display in Whangarei were procured or exchanged could fittingly be woven into a movie script.
It Came From the Back Row was due to close tomorrow  but is to be extended another week. That means another week of movie talk and time travel for Lambess, and a whole new look at the movies for visitors.