“The Tip”: dirty movie found in Adam Grant basement
When Duncan/Channon partner Andy Berkenfield told the management of the Adam Grant building about the Tip's new historical status, the management told Andy about a room in the basement that used to be extra storage for the Tip and invited him to take a look.
Mostly it was weird junk down there – broken glassware and chamber pots, a rusty flintlock rifle, a half-dozen elk-skin condoms, a bottle of some really, really old wine from France. But underneath it all was a reel of 16-millimeter film. It was dusty and grimy and torn and frayed, but the cool, dark environment of the basement had kept it from disintegrating. And, with extraordinary audio assistance from Lance Duncan ("Pops" Duncan's eldest son), the D/C film restoration team was able to digitize the old footage, soundtrack and all, and bring it back to life.
It turns out that in the mid-sixties an independent movie studio in Encinitas named First Electric sent a Dutch director named Jan "Ian" Ashenbremer (he would go on to a measure of fame/infamy as director of The Admiral's Ball) to make a high-budget, feature-length documentary on the Tip. The sensationalist documentary Mondo Cane had recently become a surprise box-office hit, and the First Electric honchos thought they had another on their hands with the violent, salacious, bibulous, revolting, heart-warming, head-spinning story of a long-running bar called the Tip.
Forty days of new footage had been shot and several hundred hours spent searching film archives when the studio was abruptly shuttered by the California authorities for unspecified moral and financial irregularities. So, alas, the complete Tip epic never got made. The good news is that before he went to jail (for three years) Ashenbremer finished a trailer. Enjoy.