From: "Scott Burns" <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: [MOPO] Eric Spilker 1939-2024: The Ultimate Film Fan
I’m posting this for those of you who may have encountered Eric Spilker, the ultimate film fan, at the Columbus Cinevent. He was a regular for many years and that’s where I became acquainted with him. Eric was one of a kind, as his obituary posted below, clearly shows.
His sense of humor was unusual—eating in a restaurant with Eric was always memorable as he often would place a plastic cockroach on his dinner plate to harass the staff. Eric knew a lot of golden age celebrities and I have him to thank for my “Wizard of Oz” 8X10 autographed by the Wicked Witch herself, Margaret Hamilton. I always found it interesting that Eric wrote many of the movie plot descriptions used in TV Guide magazine. He became a film distributor in 1971 when he purchased the rights to “The Gang’s All Here” from 20th Century Fox and had dazzling new technicolor prints struck—helping to revive public interest in classic Hollywood films, long before AMC or TCM would enter the scene. Eric loved the old neighborhood movie houses around Columbus, so it wasn’t surprising that in the early 1980’s he spearheaded an effort to restore and reopen the suburban Arlington Theatre. The theatre opened in 1935 but closed in 1950. The effort sadly did not succeed. Declining health kept Eric from travelling back to Ohio for many years, so I lost touch with him. But I will always remember him….and will miss him greatly.
Scott
MoPo List Owner
Eric Spilker 1939-2024
Eric James Spilker, 84, film distributor and writer, passed away in Manhattan July 6, 2024. He is preceded in death by his parents, Francis Spilker and Bernice Buege Spilker of Upper Arlington, Ohio, and his brother, Allan J. Spilker of Grove City, Ohio. A number of Buege cousins in Ohio survive. There will be no services.
Fascinated with movies from an early age, Eric was born August 13, 1939, in Toledo, Ohio, moved to Columbus in 1941, and graduated from suburban Upper Arlington High School in 1957 along with friend Jack Nicklaus. As a child he took buses by himself all over Columbus to see movies in small neighborhood theaters, a passion he never lost. He also developed a habit of never passing a dog on the street without petting it: no dog in New York went unpetted. And few farmers markets went unvisited. As a young man he worked for the Columbus Dept. of Water, and served in the Army. Following a stint as a floor director for WLW-C (now NBC4) and WBNS-TV in the early 1960s, he moved to New York, writing for the Muscular Dystrophy Association, ASCAP and TV Guide, where he crafted capsule film reviews. He worked a year at the 1964 NY World’s Fair, then returned to Columbus and graduated from The Ohio State University in 1968 with a B.A. in Journalism and a member of Kappa Sigma fraternity.
Returning again to New York, he was a reporter for Variety, a researcher at Photofest photo agency, a witness to the Stonewall riot, and as a continuing education teacher at Marymount Manhattan College, he brought Celeste Holm, Otto Preminger, Margaret Hamilton and others to speak to his classes.
His life changed In 1971 when he purchased the distribution rights for the 20th Century Fox film, Busby Berkeley’s “The Gang’s All Here,” (1943) famous for its psychedelic Technicolor and iconic appearance by Carmen Miranda. After a clip featured on the Johnny Carson show piqued public interest in the film, Eric took it on the road. He was its sole distributor for a number of years. He later licensed reissue rights to ten more 20th Century-Fox classics, including “Laura” and “All About Eve.”
He remained self-employed as the Spilker Film Company, renting films to museums and film festivals around the world. In 2019 he sold his collection of 2,000 film titles in both 16 and 35mm to the Harvard Film Archive. For many years he was the proud owner of Clark Gable’s personal print of “Gone With The Wind.”
Eric counted stars of Hollywood’s golden age among his friends, including Carleton Carpenter, Gale Sondergaard, Piper Laurie, Robert Osborne, and many more. Kitty Carlisle once tried to identify a film industry person on CBS’s “To Tell the Truth” quiz show by asking, “Do you know who Eric Spilker is?” Besides his large film collection, he was known for his encyclopedic knowledge of Hollywood films of the 1940s and '50s. He is cited in accounts of the history of Technicolor and the history of film. His final credits ran on July 6, 2024.
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