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In it William K. Everson calls Raymond Rohauer "King of the Film Freebooters." This is different, mind you, from a bootlegger. The article makes an interesting claim, that the world is still waiting for an answer to Altman's The Player; one devoted solely to "the manipulation of copyright laws" and revolving around Rohauer and his more spectacular acquisitions - or announcements thereof.
One story in particular turned out to be true. Buster Keaton fans will tell you that the director would have benefitted from retaining ownership of his films, just as Chaplin did into his old age. However Keaton always worked for a studio, major or minor, and was never more than someone else's employee. As such, he could have done far worse than to be dealt out of control of his movies. They could have just disappeared, as so many others have, or wound up buried by corporations too uninterested to conduct proper inventory. Instead they were unearthed by James Mason, who had bought a house once owned by Keaton and found a pile of 35mm prints in the garage!
You might wonder why Mason didn't give them to Keaton himself, but at the time it made more sense to turn them over to the Coronet, a revival house and archive run by none other than the aforementioned Rohauer.
The Production Code was the raison d'etre of the Coronet, which thrived on a legal loophole that allowed revivals of pre-Code movies and public showings of racy European and independent films. Rohauer beefed up his personal collection by duping any museum print that came his way, but just as often he made genuine deals with filmmakers who had no one else to give them an audience. This included going out on a limb for artistic outlaws like Kenneth Anger.
The vice squad shut him down on the West Coast, but Rohauer popped up in the East at a venue with a name very like - and easily mistaken for - The Museum of Modern Art. It lasted long enough to make Rohauer a name to be reckoned with in Manhattan's art film world, and he took advantage of it to build an empire. Its cornerstone was his Buster Keaton collection.
Rohauer was good at turning the loopholes of international copyright laws against each other, especially when it came to films based on separately protected print sources such as stories and novels. William Everson tells his own story of coming under Rohauer's wrath, and Rohauer's embellished version - which had Everson in jail awaiting deportation to England, for showing the silent version of Ben-Hur in public!
Everson's article is filled with exasperating examples of the trickery Rohauer used to remove old films from the public domain. Chief among them for Keaton fans is one that also explains why some of Buster's classics have awkward titling: Rohaur had them redone so he could recopyright the films as "new" material!
To his credit - or salvation, depending on your point of view - Rohauer donated a lot of 35mm nitrate prints to the Library of Congress just before he died.