Preserving Pictures

Local Web site BadAssMovieImages.com contains just what the name implies: stills, production photos, and other graphics, from 1917's Anything Once to 1982's Zapped!, and beyond. And if some of the images themselves aren't necessarily badass (note Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo), the collection certainly is. There are movies you'd expect (such as cult favorite Black Belt Jones, the most frequently viewed image, according to the site's statistics) and ones you wouldn't (a moody two-shot from the 1948 film noir Kiss the Blood off My Hands). Some are rare and uncommonly beautiful (a wonderfully lit image from 1932's Letty Lynton), and some are sheer kitsch (a cheesy still of the rampaging title character of The Deadly Mantis). As with so many amateur film sites, the content skews toward fanboy fare -- blaxploitation, kung fu, spaghetti westerns, and Tarantino. But the site's administrator and sole collector, who goes by the mononym of Blake, also favors loftier material, professing to watch Max Ophüls movies every day and posting images from the celebrated auteur's House of Pleasure. Conceived as an "online museum" for preserving rare images from movies that are "off the beaten path," the site is a labor of love, nonprofit in design and free of advertising (except for Blake's banner plugging the Alamo Drafthouse, "the coolest movie theatre in the world"). Yet this one-person effort, conducted alongside Blake's full-time job as a Web designer, manages 200,000 hits a month, even with "absolutely zero" in the way of marketing. According to Blake, the images come mainly from memorabilia shops -- "I've collected movie images since I was little and wanted to be Indiana Jones and had a crush on Michelle Pfeiffer in Grease 2," he explains. Many are "really worn out, torn up, beaten down from time" and must be restored for the Web, such as a grainy black-and-white print of a three-shot from the motel sequence in Wes Anderson's Bottle Rocket. "There are many days where it's, like, buy and save a super, super rare 1920s Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton image, or buy some extra groceries?" Blake concludes, "Saving their movie images always wins out."