UCLA Film & Television Archive
The UCLA Film & Television Archive dates to 1965 when “the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (ATAS) joined forces with the UCLA Theater Arts Department to create the ATAS/UCLA Television Library” (UCLA). The Film Archive segment was soon added three years later by UCLA’s Film Department. The archive received three major donations in 1972 which helped it grow. These include the Jack Benny Television Collection, the Hallmark Hall of Fame Collection, and thousands of prominent television programs from Capitol Cities/ABC. The archive became even more established with the donation of the Paramount Pictures Nitrate Print Library in 1976 which included almost all films the studio produced between 1930 and 1950. Warner Brothers, Columbia Pictures, 20th Century Fox, and Republic Pictures soon followed suit making this repository Hollywood’s most prominent and trusted. The archive continued to grow exponentially in the 1980s and 1990s beginning with the acquisition of the Hearst Metrotone News Collection which contains “more than 27 million feet (5,000 hours) of footage, documenting the fabric of life from 1915-1975” (UCLA).
Over the years, the UCLA Film & Television Archive has grown to include more than 350,000 motion pictures, 170,000 television programs, news footage, amateur films & home movies, 10,000 commercials, and radio programs. This makes it the second largest film repository in the United States. Located in the film capital of Los Angeles, California, the archive mainly collects works produced in the United States, though they do maintain a smaller international selection. Their collecting policy states that they accept works from “national, state and local institutions, commercial entities, independent artists and companies, and students and amateur filmmakers” (UCLA). Works must also meet certain “artistic, cultural, historic and/or socio-political significance” guidelines since they do not have infinite storage to collect everything (UCLA). A selection of typical formats include 8mm, 16mm, 35mm, 2-inch video reels, as well as born-digital materials. They accept tax-deductible donations as well as deposits known as permanent loans of materials. In addition to the films themselves, they also collect objects pertaining to film including scripts, studio records, and documents relating to cast & crew. A state-of-the-art archival facility opened in 2014 to house the entire UCLA Film & Television Archive in nearby Santa Clarita, California.
The UCLA archive launched a preservation division in 1977 and began restoration on “Hollywood classics, documentaries, contemporary independent productions and cutting edge works of international cinema” (UCLA). They have won numerous awards for their hundreds of Golden Age films, and early television program restorations, which have included classics such as Double Indemnity by Billy Wilder, Stagecoach by John Ford, and The Dinah Shore Show. The archive is currently working on full negative restorations of the iconic comedy duo Laurel and Hardy.
A free UCLA Festival of Preservation was launched in 1988 allowing the public to see restoration efforts up close. The festival allows the public to view rare films, but it also boosts the morale of the staff who can experience their hard work on a larger scale (Rosen, 2002). Continuing public outreach and accessibility, the archive opened the Archive Research and Study Center (ARSC) in 1989, providing research access to the public by way of the UCLA Library. They began releasing DVDs of their restored films in 2005 bridging the gap for those unable to attend in-person screenings. Keeping up with the times, the archive began streaming content online in 2011. The 2019 merge with the UCLA Library allowed the archive to promote teaching and learning while expanding access “through the Library’s robust digital platforms” (UCLA). Several film databases are available to browse online and many of the collections are digitized.
Robert Rosen, UCLA Film & Television Archive director for many years, helped the archive expand from a humble storage facility to the famous powerhouse it is today. He published a retrospective on what he learned about film preservation over many years. Rosen believed that the archive was able to achieve great success, based on its open access to everyone in the community through its library research and public screenings, its collaboration among sister film archives instead of competition, and its ability to quickly embrace innovative technological advances (Rosen, 2002). This sense of direction helped the UCLA Film & Television grow into its status as one of the best film archives around the world.
References
Rosen, R. (2002). The UCLA film & television archive: A retrospective look. The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, 2(2), 116-121. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41167085
UCLA Film & Television Archive. (n.d.). About the archive. https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/about-the-archive