{"id":2068612,"date":"2025-10-04T12:05:45","date_gmt":"2025-10-04T12:05:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2068612"},"modified":"2025-10-04T12:05:45","modified_gmt":"2025-10-04T12:05:45","slug":"this-baton-rouge-turned-his-home-into-massive-media-archive-entertainment-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/this-baton-rouge-turned-his-home-into-massive-media-archive-entertainment-life\/","title":{"rendered":"This Baton Rouge turned his home into massive media archive | Entertainment\/Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Many prefer a work-life balance. Not Randy Wheeler. His workday begins at the foot of his bed.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s collection of equipment grew.<\/p>\n

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Randy Wheeler loads a 16mm film reel to a projector as he prepares to record at one of his video stations on Monday, September 22, 2025 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.<\/p>\n

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\u201cIt was a slow process,\u201d Wheeler said of his growing collection. \u201cIt started in one room and just sort of grew, and then you have to buy two or three of everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

The collection of equipment grew out of his office, into his second office, living room, kitchen and bedroom.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n

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Several different video playback machines from SONY digital and other proprietary formates line a work area in Randy Wheeler\u2019s office on Monday, September 22, 2025 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Years of ever changing formates requires a host of different machines to be able to transfer footage.<\/p>\n

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Wheeler has seen thousands of weddings, birthday parties, high school football games and funerals. He\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s probably why I\u2019m still doing it just because it\u2019s a wide range of stuff,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ll be doing audio one day and prints, and then I\u2019ll be doing video. The subject matter varies a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n

All of it is preserved and restored in one home.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Down the rabbit hole<\/h3>\n

Each of his five stations have different purposes, all less than a 10-second walk from each other.<\/p>\n

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Randy Wheeler compares photographs that he scanned in on an older Nikon slide scanner and a newer slide scanner at his slide\/negative scanning station on Monday, September 22, 2025 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The older Nikon scanner, c. 2010, does a better job at scanning Kodachrome slides that newer scanners with less dust and artifacts to clean up.<\/p>\n

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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\u2019s touched up photos dating back to the 1920s. Some are so old they don’t have a date.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n

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His living room shelves are stocked with old DVDs, CDs, cassettes, film players or cardboard boxes holding what\u2019s probably even more old film, camera gadgets and equipment parts that he bought from eBay.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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Randy Wheeler\u2019s Super 8 setup that is used to transfer and restore old video at his home office on Monday, September 22, 2025 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Wheeler has several different video setups like the one pictured that lets him capture booth the video and audio for clients.<\/p>\n

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Wheeler also has a station in his bedroom.<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n

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Randy Wheeler holds open a case with a video tape recorded in 1983 that he recently transferred with several other tapes for a client on Monday, September 22, 2025 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.<\/p>\n

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“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.”<\/p>\n

He has no hard clock-in or clock-out time, one of the benefits of having a home office, he said.<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p>\n

And the collection meanders into his kitchen, with some film stacks a few feet away from his refrigerator.<\/p>\n

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Randy Wheeler works at a video station surrounded by several 1990\u2019s and early 2000\u2019s video machines that he uses to digitize and transfer lossless videos for his clients on Monday, September 22, 2025 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.<\/p>\n

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Jayne Mansfield interview<\/h3>\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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Several different video playback machines with formates from VCR to DVD line a work area in Randy Wheeler\u2019s office on Monday, September 22, 2025 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Years of ever changing formates requires a host of different machines to be able to transfer footage.<\/p>\n

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After a couple minutes of searching through files on his computer, Wheeler played the beginning of the audio interview.<\/p>\n

\u201cHello, this is Taris Savell in Pensacola, Florida, actually in Biloxi,\u201d Savell said at the beginning of the recording. \u201cIt\u2019s an unbelievable hour for an unbelievably attractive television motion picture star. I don\u2019t believe it. Jayne Mansfield, how are you? Are you awake?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n

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\u201cI\u2019m awake, and you\u2019re in your pajamas,\u201d Mansfield said.<\/p>\n

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All types of old and new technology can be found at Randy Wheeler\u2019s home office like this reel-to-reel audio playback machine that allows him to transfer old audio recordings on Monday, September 22, 2025 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.<\/p>\n

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And it\u2019s relics like this interview that Wheeler can access at the touch of a few buttons.<\/p>\n

A community service<\/h3>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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Randy Wheeler holds a 126 film negative to show some of the different negative film formates that customers bring to him on Monday, September 22, 2025 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.<\/p>\n

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\u201cI had enough of the snow,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019d rather be hot than cold.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hauling heavy video equipment through the snow just isn\u2019t ideal, he said. Since setting up shop in Baton Rouge, his service has touched the hearts of community members.<\/p>\n

The end product can be emotional for clients, he said, particularly if they\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n

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Different output devices from monitors to audio displays allow Randy Wheeler to make sure he records the best quality audio and video in the transfer process on Monday, September 22, 2025 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. These are located in Wheeler\u2019s main video editing room.<\/p>\n

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\u201cYou get people crying, because I\u2019ll usually show part of it over there on the laptop,\u201d he said, pointing to one of his stations. \u201cAnd I\u2019ll show them how the folder structure is of the files, but then you get something, and they\u2019ll start crying.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.theadvocate.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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