This Baton Rouge turned his home into massive media archive | Entertainment/Life

Many prefer a work-life balance. Not Randy Wheeler. His workday begins at the foot of his bed.

His Mid City bedroom in Baton Rouge is one of his five physical media transfer stations in his home where he started a digital transfer business in 2010. As technology has evolved, so has video, photo and audio playback formats, so Wheeler’s collection of equipment grew.

“It was a slow process,” Wheeler said of his growing collection. “It started in one room and just sort of grew, and then you have to buy two or three of everything.”

The collection of equipment grew out of his office, into his second office, living room, kitchen and bedroom.

And now, his home is a living time capsule of floor-to-ceiling stacks of old video playback machines, film reels, photo scanners and physical media capturing scenes across the world dating back a century.

Wheeler has seen thousands of weddings, birthday parties, high school football games and funerals. He’s watched babies grow up, seen the evolution of Mardi Gras parades, viewed Vietnam War footage and listened to celebrity interviews, including an audio interview with Jayne Mansfield four days before she died.

“That’s probably why I’m still doing it just because it’s a wide range of stuff,” he said. “I’ll be doing audio one day and prints, and then I’ll be doing video. The subject matter varies a lot.”

All of it is preserved and restored in one home. 

Down the rabbit hole

Each of his five stations have different purposes, all less than a 10-second walk from each other.

Right beside the front door is his photo scanning and restoration station, taking form as a desk with a big monitor and an early 2000s Nikon photo scanner. Photo restoration is one of the many services Wheeler offers, a job where he’s touched up photos dating back to the 1920s. Some are so old they don’t have a date.

His living room shelves are stocked with old DVDs, CDs, cassettes, film players or cardboard boxes holding what’s probably even more old film, camera gadgets and equipment parts that he bought from eBay.

Down the hall leads to two office rooms, one for film transfer and restoration, and the other office for duties like answering business emails and phone calls.

Wheeler also has a station in his bedroom.

“I have such bad sleep patterns that I better work when I’m awake,” Wheeler said. “That could be any time. Basically, I’m working unless I’m tired.”

To accommodate his sleeping patterns and long work hours, he created a solution so that he can monitor film transfer from his bed: an ensemble of baby monitors pointed at all stations with viewable monitors from his bed.

“I have a camera pointed at the station in the living room, and if I’m in the bedroom, I have a little TV monitor that I have pointed at the TV screen to make sure the tape is still running and there’s no problems.”

He has no hard clock-in or clock-out time, one of the benefits of having a home office, he said.

“That’s the big advantage of a home office,” Wheeler said. “Opposed to an office, you don’t have to do that nine-to-five kind of thing.”

And the collection meanders into his kitchen, with some film stacks a few feet away from his refrigerator.

Jayne Mansfield interview

Five paces further into his living room is the audio station, another big desk and monitor next to a wall of media players, and a shelf of even more media players.

There, Wheeler played an audio interview recording of celebrity journalist Taris Savell and actress Jayne Mansfield from June 25, 1967, four days before Mansfield died in a car crash. He doesn’t know if or where the interview broadcast.

Wheeler says Savell came to his house in 2020 with an assistant and a bunch of interview reels, some from her 1970s cable show and some audio interviews before the show began.

After a couple minutes of searching through files on his computer, Wheeler played the beginning of the audio interview.

“Hello, this is Taris Savell in Pensacola, Florida, actually in Biloxi,” Savell said at the beginning of the recording. “It’s an unbelievable hour for an unbelievably attractive television motion picture star. I don’t believe it. Jayne Mansfield, how are you? Are you awake?”

“I’m awake, and you’re in your pajamas,” Mansfield said.

And it’s relics like this interview that Wheeler can access at the touch of a few buttons.

A community service

Wheeler, born and raised in Chicago, came to Louisiana in 1988 when he enrolled at Tulane, soon transferring to LSU before deciding he didn’t like college. It was the weather that drew him to Louisiana.

“I had enough of the snow,” he said. “I’d rather be hot than cold.”

Hauling heavy video equipment through the snow just isn’t ideal, he said. Since setting up shop in Baton Rouge, his service has touched the hearts of community members.

The end product can be emotional for clients, he said, particularly if they’re seeing old family footage for the first time. Clients often bring unlabeled boxes they found in attics or garages, so they may not know what the film is.

“You get people crying, because I’ll usually show part of it over there on the laptop,” he said, pointing to one of his stations. “And I’ll show them how the folder structure is of the files, but then you get something, and they’ll start crying.”

For Wheeler, the job keeps him content. He has a couple of advertisements on Google and gets plenty of business, he said. There’s no nearby competition offering as many services as he does.

“I’m not getting bored with it. I don’t dislike it,” Wheeler said. “I might as well do it as much as I can as long as I enjoy doing it.”