David Shepard (1940–2017)

In an interview from December 2000, David Shepard noted that he was not really interested in preserving American sound films because their copyrights are owned by the major studios: "I would rather work for my own account, not so much for finances, but because I don't like people sticking their thumbs in my stuff and telling me how to do it." Indeed, although David was one of this country's best known film preservationists, he worked for the great majority of his career outside the institutions of film preservation, privately buying, selling, collecting, trading, transferring (to electronic media), and distributing the silent films he loved best. For his life work, he earned the gratitude and admiration of generations of collectors and film buffs, as numerous obituaries attest. Yet within the film archival community, he remained a somewhat controversial figure, precisely because of his lone-wolf status as a film collector.

Figure 1.

David Shepard, 2006. Photograph by Carol Yoho from the Kansas Silent Film Festival.

Born in New York City in October 1940, David H. Shepard grew up in Tenafly, New Jersey. At the age of five, he discovered silent films when his uncle brought a 9.5mm projector and films back from World War II France. By the time he was twelve, Shepard had bought himself a used 16mm projector and was purchasing reels of film from various libraries. His father also took him to screenings at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Thus began a lifelong obsession.

While earning a bachelor's degree in religion and philosophy from Hamilton College (1962) and a master's degree in American studies from Penn State (1963), Shepard continued to pursue his avocation. He broke off his doctoral studies at Penn State in 1968 when Richard Kahlenberg of the newly founded American Film Institute (AFI) hired David as an associate archivist. His brief: to save American films, especially from the nitrate era. In 2011, Shepard received an honorary doctorate from the University of Colorado.

At AFI, David was credited with securing hundreds of silent American films, including the Paramount Collection, which, along with Kahlenberg's acquisition of the RKO catalog, formed the basis of the AFI Collection at the Library of Congress. As a longtime collector, David had excellent contacts in that community—unlike most institutional archivists, who considered collectors film pirates. He was thus able to bring many unique films into the archive, even if that sometimes meant making 16mm print-downs for trading purposes. Unfortunately, the AFI's funding structure soon changed. Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts were now given directly to the film archives, while the AFI merely coordinated the grant procedure. Its collections increasingly were divided between the Library of Congress, the George Eastman Museum, MoMA, and the University of California, Los Angles (UCLA).

In 1973, Shepard moved to Blackhawk Films in Davenport, Iowa, as head of product development. There he felt he could make silent films accessible and not just "preserve them for the shelf." Shepard noted, "Blackhawk had customers who remembered the films when they were new. … Blackhawk had a pretty good library, a couple of thousand films, and they had, independent of anyone else—sitting out there in the prairie—developed their own equipment and techniques for making extremely high quality copies."

Three years later, Shepard accepted a job at the Directors Guild of America (DGA) to work on special projects, a position he retained until 1988. He organized the DGA Oral History Program, interviewing silent film directors like Henry King and King Vidor and coproduced the Academy Award–winning Precious Images (Chuck Workman, 1986) and several other films. He founded the DGA's Workshop for Educators.

A few years after moving to Los Angeles, David Shepard joined the faculty of the University of Southern California as a visiting professor, an appointment he kept for thirty-four years. Several generations of film students benefited from his film history courses, which were structured around gorgeous prints from his own collection. David also taught briefly at UCLA, where Alexander Payne was one of his prize...