By Jill Draper
There’s a rumor going around south KC that the owner of an unusual piece of property near Wornall Road and Blue Ridge Boulevard left the estate to his cats when he died two years ago.
You can see cats still roaming around the 6-acre grounds which hold a sprawling yellow house and a two-story home theater and office, say neighbors in the adjacent Woodbridge subdivision.
“Not true,” says Brian Mossman. “Any cats there now must be feral.”
Mossman is the executor of a trust established by Wade Williams III, an eccentric film writer-producer and collector of vintage films who died in January 2023. And yes, Williams was a cat lover. His cats are being cared for, but they did not inherit anything, Mossman says.
He declined to comment on the trust, noting it was a private matter, but it’s he and his twin brother Ben who have inherited the property. The Mossmans met Williams back in the 1970s and began helping him renovate art movie theaters around town. Their interest in art theaters continued; they now own Glenwood Arts Theater as well as The Rio, both in Overland Park.
They previously owned art theaters at Red Bridge Shopping Center and the former Metcalf South Shopping Center. Williams was often a financial partner.
There are no immediate plans to sell the Williams property, says Mossman. Williams bought the existing house, later adding wings in order to make a courtyard for his cats. He also added a building called the “Dream Theatre” designed after a small town picture show.
Woodbridge residents say he supplied popcorn and showed movies every Friday for friends and neighbors for more than a decade, maybe two. The theater was never open to the public.
Butch Rigby attended films there. “I remember watching ‘The War of the Worlds,’ the 1953 version,” says Rigby, a real estate developer and founder of Screenland Theatres. “Wade had invited Ann Robinson. That was a fun experience.”
Robinson played a leading role in the film as one of the first characters to arrive at a meteor crash site, which turns out to be an alien invasion. Another time Rigby remembers how Williams tracked down the son of the lead actor in the 1945 thriller “Detour” and invited him to a showing. “He looked just like his father,” Rigby says.
“Wade had a deep passion for the Golden Age of Hollywood and was really good at following up and finding these stars. He named most of his cats after them,” says Rigby, recounting how Williams had a line of cats named for a 1930s-40s musical star.
“There was Alice Faye I, Alice Faye II, Alice Faye III. Also Tyrone Power and Ginger Rogers. He had an incredible love of cats and kept maybe a dozen.”
The Wornall Road property is not the only unusual house Williams owned. In the 1960s he was renting a run-down mansion at 5500 Ward Parkway as a movie set. At some point the house was donated to UMKC, and university officials made him “an offer I couldn’t refuse,” he said in an interview with The JM Archives. According to records from the Kansas City Public Library, he purchased the house for $69,000 in 1969 at age 26.
He sold it for $1 million in 1991—the same year it was toured by many as a Kansas City Symphony Designers’ Showhouse. Now beautifully restored, the 16-bedroom home is valued at more than $7 million. It was built more than 100 years ago by Robert Long, the same lumber baron who built what is now the Museum of Kansas City and Longview Mansion.
Rigby first met Williams at the Ward Parkway house, which also had its own home theater. He was enrolled in a film class and his UMKC instructor arranged for the students to see a screening of the 1954 musical biography “Deep in My Heart.”
The Mossman brothers also saw films at Williams’ Ward Parkway theater. He paid them to run the projectors so he could mingle with guests.
“I really got to know him later. We had a mutual love of old films,” Rigby says. “He was a great salvager of things, from architectural remnants and equipment in old movie theaters about to be torn down to obscure copyrights to obscure films and TV series.”
Salvaging and collecting came naturally to Williams. Growing up in the 1950s in KC’s Santa Fe Hills neighborhood, he begged his grandparents to take him to every science fiction film that played in the metro area.
He remembered it as an exciting time when the whole country was thrust into the Atomic Age and space travel to the moon and Mars seemed an alluring possibility. While still in grade school he began acquiring movie posters and preview trailers, retrieving some from trash barrels. His parents’ basement became his first storage vault and screening room.
“It was a hobby that turned into a business,” he said in The JM Archives, estimating that by 2017 he owned thousands of feature films and trailers. Many were just his personal collection, but he owned the distribution rights to many others, especially vintage sci-fi movies.
According to Rigby, Williams probably rescued a lot of movies that would have been lost or thrown away, and equally important, he helped save various local theaters.
Williams licensed the rights to some of these movies to cable TV, but he always loved the shared experience of watching them with an audience on a big screen. “These films take on a completely different look in the theater,” he said in 2017. “They’re a little bit corny, but charming.”
He moved to California in his 20s to study the movie business, but lacked financial support. After a stint in the Air Force Reserve, he returned to Kansas City to write and direct a low-budget movie called “Terror from the Stars.” He produced other movies, including a docudrama about Charles Manson called “The Other Side of Madness” (re-released as “The Helter Skelter Murders”) and also consulted with directors on films like “It Came from Hollywood.” But film collecting remained his main focus.
At the end Williams claimed to be one of the largest independent distributors in the U.S. (and probably the world) that own private film libraries and copyrights.
He was not without detractors. Some called him a pirate for playing games with copyrights and holding hostage so many films, long past their prime, from the public domain. He lobbied insults back, bemoaning the thievery of “pirates and bottom feeders” who ignored copyright law, arguing that without licensing rights, these vintage films would never have been preserved and restored because there would be no money in it.
The Mossman brothers are keeping quiet about Williams’ legacy, but according to internet posts, film historian Phil Hopkins has been quoted as saying he’s working with the estate. Hopkins launched a business called Film Masters (the same year Williams died) which he describes as “a consortium of historians and enthusiasts who seek to celebrate the preservation and restoration of films that have been sitting dormant…for decades.”
Hopkins disputes the idea that Williams was a film hoarder who made up dubious legal rights. “I’ve gone through documents. I’ve done the research,” he says on horrorandsons.com. “I think the opposite. Wade did an amazing job saving films that otherwise may have gone into dumpsters.”
Williams called his place on Wornall Road “Halfway to Hollywood.” But that was geographical. It was a full career he built here, not a midpoint.
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Mr. Williams slapped his name on films and claimed ownership to which he had no right. His reputation as a scam artist is his greatest legacy.