I first heard about “The Man in the T.V.” from my Great Uncle Bernard. He had been a film editor in the fifties and early sixties, and while he hadn’t worked in Hollywood in decades, he never lost his love of movies and T.V. shows. Over the years, he’d collected a massive wealth of both—everything from antique original film prints from the early days of cinema to laserdiscs, DVDs, and even a few Blu-Rays before he died.
That’s why, when I was deciding on the theme of my final project for my capstone film class, I went straight to him despite being a bit nervous about visiting after such a long time. It was strange. I had vivid memories of my great uncle when I was very young. He had been fun and funny and energetic, and even though he lived a couple of states over, there were never more than a few months that went by before he stopped in to visit for a day or two, full of stories and jokes and excitement.
But then it just…stopped. I didn’t see him again until my high school graduation, and he seemed much older and stranger than I’d remembered him. He was nice enough as he patted me on the back and gave me an envelope with a large check in it for a graduation gift, but soon after he was gone. When I asked my mother where he’d went and what was wrong with him, she hesitated to answer, and when she did, I could tell she wasn’t telling me the whole truth.
“He’s just been through a lot. He lost his wife a couple of years back and he’s getting older, and sometimes that makes people strange. But it was nice that he came, wasn’t it?”
It was, but more than his visit what stood out to me the most about that night was how Mom had responded. It was the first time I’d ever known her to lie to me, and at the time I didn’t understand why. Still, when years later I was in graduate school and decided to go visit him, I didn’t mention it to her. Instead I tracked down his number and called him myself.
“Hello?”
“Uncle Bernard? This is Toby. Your great nephew Toby, I mean.”
“Oh? Hey there, Toby. Good to hear from you. Everything all right?”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m actually finishing up grad school this year. Film, if you can believe it.”
“Oh? Well isn’t that wonderful? It’s a great profession, I’m here to tell you.”
“Yeah, I’m excited for it. Which…well, the reason I’m calling is I want to do great on my final project for one of my classes. And I was thinking about finding some really obscure movie or t.v. show and doing a paper based on that. I’ve tried searching on the internet, but that’s just the same shi…same stuff over and over again, you know? So I was wondering if you still have your collection.”
“Hmm? Oh yes. It’s quite a preoccupation of mine.” He paused, and when he spoke again, there was a new tension in his voice. “But I don’t know if its anything you’d be interested in.”
“Oh, I doubt that. I remember Mom always talking about how you had more movies than anybody on the East Coast.”
He gave a brittle laugh. “Well, that’s an exaggeration, but I do have quite a lot.” Another lengthy silence and then, “Very well. You are welcome to come and visit. I can give you access to quite a selection for you to pick from. If you’re sure you’re interested in coming all this way.”
I told him I was, and the next weekend, I headed there to see what I could find.
At one time, Bernard’s house had likely been beautiful. A sprawling 5,000 square feet, it sat on the middle of ten acres of lawn that was still well-manicured and maintained, even as the house squatted in the middle, slowly rotting.
Or maybe rotting was too harsh of a term. Disrepair and decline? Definitely. But nothing that cleaning and painting couldn’t largely fix. Still, seeing the state of things made my stomach clench a little. Was this just a preview of how Bernard himself was going to be?
But the man that opened the door was much like he’d been before. If anything, he was a bit closer to the old Bernard I remembered from my youth than the pale, worn-thin man that had come to my graduation a few years before. This version of him was energetic if a bit jittery, and he seemed genuinely excited to have me there.
Giving me a quick hugging handshake, he ushered me inside, and for a moment I felt relief that this was just a nice, normal house. No trash on the floor or mazes made out of old newspapers. Just a weird but tidy old man that needed someone to paint his house.
But as we stepped further in to where the first doorways opened up, my heart began to sink. There was very little furniture in the rooms, and what was there was pushed haphazardly against the walls. That was understandable, however, as there was no room for that stuff anywhere else.
The rest of the rooms were devoted to his collection.
Rack after rack filled with banker boxes, film canisters, binders and various other containers—all neatly stacked, labeled and organized. On the one hand, it was incredibly impressive. On the other…I’d half expected a rat’s nest of old junk I’d have to go through. The symptoms of hoarding or some other compulsion that had spiraled into chaos.
But this was the opposite of that. There were catalogues for each rack at the ends of the row, and while I didn’t understand the system of order and organization he was using at a glance, there was no question there was such a system in place. A degree of volume and precision that, even just walking through the front rooms, seemed to border on insane. Particularly when I felt I already knew the answer to my next question.
“There’s more of this than just these two rooms, aren’t there?”
His face split into a grin. “Oh yes. Much, much more.”
There were nineteen rooms in my great-uncle’s house, and at least fifteen of them were filled with more of the same well-organized racks of movies and shows, all labeled and categorized as meticulously as the first rooms I’d seen. The kitchen, the bathroom, and one bedroom were the only areas free from the collection, and despite my protests Bernard insisted I take that bedroom, as he had a fold-out couch in his office. I’d seen his office and wondered how he’d actually pull out a bed in there with the rows upon rows of 1970s sitcoms and westerns occupying the space, but he was adamant he’d be fine and slept in there much of the time anyway.
And I say “at least” fifteen rooms because there was a final room at the back of the house that he told me was off-limits. He gave the impression there were more films or something similar in there, but he wouldn’t give any details and I thought it was rude to press the issue, so I just agreed to stay out and we moved on.
We had lunch and I got my stuff unpacked, and by late that afternoon I was starting my dive into his treasure trove. His house was actually ideal for what I was doing—he had high-quality equipment for viewing both modern and older formats, and despite the constant crowding from the collection itself, he had allowed sufficient workspaces throughout to easily view things in different rooms depending on what kind of media you were looking at. As for Bernard himself, he would occasionally come by and check in on me, telling me a story about something I was looking at or where he discovered it and rescued it from obscurity, but to a large extent he left me alone to explore the collection as I wanted.
The deeper I got into looking at everything, the more I realized how much I’d underestimated how long this might take. While everything was very well organized, the content of the collection itself was dizzyingly eclectic. This wasn’t a man who had just salvaged hidden gems or rare prints of acclaimed films and shows. He had some of that, sure, but most of his collection was strange stuff I’d never heard of and that I doubted many people had.
A Canadian film about vampire bikers made in the 1940s and set in a “futuristic” 1960s America. I just scrubbed through it quickly, but there was some kind of subplot about bears developing telekinesis.
A pilot episode for a T.V. show about a family with a robot butler. It was generally played for laughs, but twice during the episode it became clear that the robot was secretly trying to murder his family and kept being stopped by bad luck and circumstance. The episode ended with the youngest son, Johnny, walking in on the robot mixing rat poison in with the family’s evening meal. This moment of terror was punctuated by a canned “oooooh” from the “audience” followed by raucous laughter as the credits began to roll.
A documentary about teaching parrots to quote poetry.
And on and on it went. A lot of the things I looked at in the first couple of days were boring and pedestrian, bizarre only in the fact that anyone bothered to collect them. But scattered among them were enough gems that were either quirky or interesting enough to warrant a project all on their own. The longer I looked, the more I found, and while it was exciting, it was also overwhelming. I didn’t know what to pick, and I wasn’t sure if I could find out a lot about these more obscure productions unless I learned it from my uncle.
I brought up doing an extensive interview with him about his film collection, and initially he was resistant to the idea. But I think he could tell by the third day that I wasn’t making as much progress as I’d hoped and so he agreed to answer any questions I had that night after dinner.
I started the interview off more formally. I told him I was going to record him, and I had a few pages of questions I’d scribbled down to give some structure to what I was asking. I didn’t mention it to him, but as I’d worked on those questions, I’d come around more and more to the idea that my project should be about Bernard as much or more than any individual film. His love of stories and films, his meticulous and odd collection of so many obscure things that most hobbyists would pass over or ignore. So I started with questions about him and his life, how he got into making movies, what made him stop, and what led him to start collecting.
His answers were somewhat interesting, and Bernard was always an engaging conversationalist, but it wasn’t until I got past those initial questions and we started just talking that I felt like we were getting somewhere. He told me stories about tracking down a barn full of old silent movies that were somehow actually still largely intact despite their typical fragility. About bribing a Brazilian custom’s officer who was threatening to seize a duffel bag filled with Betamax tapes of Japanese game shows from the 1980s. Every story was funnier and wilder than the last, and it was clear that Bernard was enjoying having someone to share the stories with. When he started getting into finding an impounded car that had a cache of DVDs in Kansas, I laughingly stopped him for a moment.
“How…how are you finding all these things? I mean is it all through classifieds and stuff, or are you actively hunting things down…or?”
He grinned and gave a small shrug. “Lots of ways, really. When I started out, it was mainly going to rummage sales and occasionally finding a mail-order company that was looking to sell stuff cheap. A lot of that stuff…well, it’s just the same garbage over and over.” He chuckled. “I know you think I have a ton in here, and maybe I do, but over the years I’ve discarded ten or twenty times as much, especially at first.”
Referring back to an earlier note, I interjected. “Because you want to keep stuff that has merit and other people might have forgotten about.”
He nodded. “Yes, that’s a big part of it. And over time, I’ve developed a lot of ways of finding the kinds of stuff I’m looking for. It’s just like anything, I guess. The deeper you go down into a particular hole of interest, the smaller the pool of people becomes. Where I started with swap meets and widows, I wound up making contacts around the world that specialize in looking for this kind of stuff. Weird, obscure stuff that still has quality about it.” His smile faded a little. “Other stuff too.”
I thought about the room he kept locked. “Have you ever found any…you know, extreme stuff? Like, um, snuff films or something?”
His smile was gone now, but he gave another smaller nod. “I have. I don’t keep anything like that, of course. Filthy stuff. And most of it is faked. But yes, you have to be careful swimming in the deeper pools of the film discovery community. There are some sick people out there. I’ve had a couple of times where I’ve had to notify the authorities when I get wind of someone potentially hurting others.”
“Yeah, well, I knew you wouldn’t have it. But, I mean that’s good that you helped them get caught. Um, like what about some of the really weird stuff? Like the show about the robot butler that’s trying to kill his family? How’d that ever get made at all?”
Bernard didn’t smile again, but he did give a brief laugh at the robot butler’s mention. “That was shot in Arizona in 1991. The supposed pitch was that it was supposed to be a weird and dark sitcom with an edge—bear in mind that Twin Peaks had come out the year before so there was some market for that kind of thing, though most never got past pitching. But the guy that made this, his father was a decently rich producer. I think everyone knew it wasn’t going anywhere. It was way too much for a network to pick up. But that happens a lot. People call in favors, make dead-end projects to spread the wealth, that kind of thing.” He rubbed his lip. “Still, I think the guy that made it must have been pretty passionate about it.”
I quirked an eyebrow at him. “What makes you say that?”
He started to respond and then waved his hand. “You don’t want to hear all this stuff.”
Frowning, I shook my head vehemently. “No, I do. This is cool as shit.”
He did smile a bit then. “Fine, fine. Get me a drink first. Maybe two. And then I’ll tell you more about the butler.”
Bernard was sipping on his second glass of bourbon when he cleared his throat and started back to telling his tales.
“So the guy who made the robot butler pilot, his name was Bertrand Stokely. Not exactly a glamourous name for the big or small screen, but the Bernards of the world aren’t in any position to judge. Best as I can tell, he only ever shot three things commercially. A couple of ads for soap companies in the late eighties and then this robot butler T.V. pilot in 1991. Naturally it didn’t get picked up, and he never made anything else, so that’s the end of that, right?
“Except it’s not. Because I’ve got a copy of another T.V. show that claims to have been made in 1994 with a robot butler that wants to kills his human family. Except that one had four episodes and was in the middle of shooting the fifth and sixth when something happened that stopped production for good.”
I stared at him incredulously. “So what? Someone else took that weird idea and tried to copy it? And they actually made it a show?”
He gave me a strange look. “That’s what I thought at first, too. But when I actually got the copies of the second show and watched them, I realized something else was going on. The father and mother? They were the same actors. So was little Jack or John or whatever his name is.”
“Johnny.”
Bernard pointed with his nearly empty glass. “Yeah. Him. That kid looked a little older than he had in the original, which would make sense if it was made a couple of years later.”
“So it was the original show being made again? Same plot and everything?”
He waggled his hand slightly, the puddle of bourbon sloshing around. “Kinda sorta, but not exactly. The first episode is almost shot for shot like the pilot except it’s a few minutes longer. After…who’d you say? Johnny? After Johnny sees what the robot is doing, the robot convinces him its for the best. That he’s trying to make a better version of the family for them both. So the boy helps him poison his family, and then they take their bodies down into the basement. Next episode, new versions of the family are back upstairs like nothing ever happened. The mother is the same, but the father and older daughter are different this time. Over the course of the episode, they do things the robot and boy don’t like, and before its done they’re dead and back down in the basement again. This pattern somewhat repeats in every episode, though the parts I’ve seen of five and six were going in an even stranger direction.”
I wondered if he was drunk or just full of shit, but despite the oddness of what he was telling me, I thought I believed him. “That’s so fucking weird. So who made that version of the show? The same guy?”
He drained his drink and shook it at me. “Have to pay the toll.”
When I was back with another drink, he continued. “Again, you’re riding the same train of thought I was at the time. I checked and it wasn’t Bertrand Stokely. It was Bertrand Stoker.”
“He changed his name? Like…slightly? Why?”
Bernard shook his head. “That’s the thing. He didn’t. Bertrand Stokely killed himself the week after the original pilot was filmed.”
“Oh. Damn. So what, he filmed two versions before he died?”
“No, I don’t think that’s possible either, for several reasons.” He held up a finger as he ticked off each point. “First, like I said before, the actors that are the same do seem older than before, especially the boy. Second, one of those actors had a variation on their name the second time too. I think the last name was the same but the first name was different. Third, there are a handful of times in the second batch of episodes that events or pop culture is referenced that wouldn’t have existed in 1991.”
“Like what?”
“The Jurassic Park movie for one, which didn’t release until June of 1993. The Waco thing where all those cult members died for another. That was in the spring of the same year.”
“Jesus. On a sitcom?”
He shrugged. “Yeah, but remember this is the same show that is murdering and resurrecting the family every week. Point being, stuff that wouldn’t have been known to reference when Bertrand Stokely was still alive to make it.” He took a deeper swig as he went on. “But more than that, there are references to other things that are clearly supposed to be similar type references to other events or movies or other things, but they’re things that, at least as far as I can tell, don’t actually exist in our world.”
I paused at that last, but pushed on with the more obvious question. “Like what?”
Bernard shook his head slightly. “I don’t remember them all, but the one that stood out the most was Sonic Man. They talk about a Sonic Man movie, some superhero movie with Nicholas Cage in it, in the same breath as Jurassic Park. Like it’s a real thing.”
I felt a nervous chill creeping up my spine and pushed it away. “Well, okay. I mean, but it’s obviously some weird shit anyway. Is it that strange that they mixed in some made up movie with real stuff?”
He finished his drink and stared down at the glass. “The thing is, that’s not the only time I’ve seen that movie referenced. At last count, I have approximately 21,345 pieces of media in this house. And across those I’ve found at least twenty references to the Sonic Man movie franchise. I’ve also found over three hundred repeated references to other events or popular culture that does not exist in our world. And I’m not talking about things that are obviously made up for the story being told. I’m talking about matching references to the same thing across different movies and shows made years apart with no apparent connection other than they’re aware of the same things—things that never happened here.”
My mouth felt dry as I forced myself to ask the harder question. “You keep saying ‘our world’. Do you think this stuff is from somewhere else?”
There was no warmth in his smile this time. “Well that would be crazy, wouldn’t it?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. It does sound crazy, I guess, but I don’t think we know everything there is to know, either. Maybe it’s like alternate realities or something.”
My answer seemed to mollify him a little. “Maybe. Yes, maybe.”
I pushed on. “Where did those things come from? The ones that seem off from our world?”
Bernard shrugged. “Not one place. Not even a dozen. They just come in with other things. If I didn’t collect so much and pay so much attention, I’d never even know the oddities were there.”
“Have you ever tried asking around about it? See if anyone else has noticed the same stuff?”
He pursed his lips. “At first I did, a little. But some of these circles are…and I don’t mean this unkindly as I may be counted among them by many…lonely nutjobs looking for a bit of magic in their lives. You’re a lot more likely to get made up bullshit or conspiracy theories than you are any useful information. Experience has taught me to only trust what I can see for myself.”
We sat for a few moments in companionable silence, and when I spoke next, I realized I’d woken Bernard up. “Would you be okay with me looking at all of this stuff? Both the things you’ve found and seeing if I can find more?”
Blinking blearily, he stared at me for a moment before nodding. “I…yes, I think so. But we need to agree. Agree before you put things in your paper.”
I nodded. “Sure. No, I understand that.” Bernard was already drifting back off to sleep. “We can talk more about it tomorrow.”
I let him doze a few minutes more, and would have left him in his chair but I was afraid he’d be stiff if he slept like that all night. Gently shaking his shoulder, I told him it was time to go to bed. I was startled when his eyes snapped open, wide and fearful, and he gripped my arm hard enough to hurt.
“Don’t…Don’t let him see you.”
Yanking my arm free, I assumed he’d been having a dream, but I couldn’t help but ask anyway. “Who? Don’t let who see me?”
Tears were forming in the corners of Bernard’s eyes. “The man. The man in the T.V. He keeps staring at me.”