I am sure that we have all been at one time or another walking thru a store and seen the previews on the televisions in the electronics department and wondered what the movie was that they were playing. I know that I have done this several times and then had an impossible task of finding that movie once I found the name of it. Typically the movies were new releases and were fairly easy to find, but sometimes it took a little bit of digging to find them. I know my husband had to do some digging when he found a movie from World War II for his grandfather that was filmed with him as an extra while he was in basic training. Here is how he managed to find that movie and found it without spending a fortune.
The first place that he checked was an older records and comic book store in town. Now I am sure most decent size cities will have at least one of these places that just specializes in older items. However, since this was a movie the store did not carry movies he was out of luck there. However, if you are looking for an older movie you can contact local companies that specialize in movies. You could also look at some of the antique shops that might have some older movies in them. Another great place to check for older movies are thrift stores I know that they have some really good condition items that sometimes have never even been opened.
The second place that he looked was at some of the local movie rental places to see if they had it for sale on their websites or in the store themselves. However, due to the age of the movie none of them had it for sale. That did lead him to search in the phone book for other older movie stores which still did not have it because of the age.
Finally he checked on EBay and Amazon. Now he did find the movie on both of those websites for a decent price, but he was wary of the edition that was being sold on EBay because the seller had a very poor feedback rating. Remember when you are purchasing from EBay you will want to look at the feedback rating to assure the seller is good. If it is a new seller you could be okay, but you will want to be in contact with the buyer and get shipping verification and such. I also always have insurance put on items from a new seller to assure that even if the item arrives damaged I can file a claim with the insurance company. The same can be said for the Amazon individual sellers. I know that some of the merchants on there are new and have no feedback, but Amazon does have some protection because the seller does not get money released to them until they verify shipping. Not only that Amazon also has a great protection plan for the buyer. Either of these two sites will work wonders for finding hard to find items because typically someone will have that item listed for sale.
So if you are looking for hard to find movies then you can check these three places that I talked about, but if you want to find it quickly then I would search the internet first. However, if you want to do some leg work and some digging on your own then I would check the phone book for movie stores or thrift stores that might have the item.
