Nitrate Machos vs. Nitrate Nellies: Buccaneer Days at the UCLA Film and Television Archive

I never quite thought of myself as a freebooter or corsair—but Robert Rosen's article "The UCLA Film and Television Archive: A Retrospective Look" (The Moving Image 2, no. 2 [fall 2002]) took me back to the "buccaneer years" of the Archive, and I reckon I was one o' them buccaneers he was talking about. Rosen is absolutely right in his outline of the unconventional manner in which the Archive was created, but, perhaps because he wasn't there in the earliest years, he offers only the bare bones of the story, picked clean of detail and perhaps sanitized for an age that often shows little patience for those "utopian aspirations of the 1960s" that did indeed shape the UCLA Film and Television Archive's core identity.

I came to UCLA as a student in 1969 and I was there at the beginning, but I hasten to state that what follows is a reminiscence. The events described took place thirty years ago or more, and the personalities are as I remember them at the time. Having worked so often with original documents in my writing on film history, I am acutely aware of the limitations of memory as a primary source. But memories are what I have to offer, and I'd be the first to say that others may recall differently.

It would be no exaggeration to state that the UCLA Film and Television Archive would not exist in its present form if it were not for Bob Epstein (he always pronounced it "Epsteen")—who has to be one of the most colorful, dedicated, and sometimes maddening characters I ever met.

Bob was a lecturer in the School of Theatre Arts-Film Division at UCLA. He taught American film history and other film-related courses and was part of a faculty that included the humorless and self-absorbed Lou Stoumen, a famed still photographer who had made some mark in the film world with his use of kinestasis—that is, moving a camera over still images. With a show of great modesty, Stoumen politely pooh-poohed his documentaries The Naked Eye (1956) and The True Story of the Civil War (1956)—but made sure that his students had an opportunity to see them every quarter whether they were appropriate to his current course or not.¹ Another faculty member was the volcanically eruptive David Bradley, director of They Saved Hitler's Brain. David Bradley was more valued by the university for his huge film collection than for his abilities as a teacher, and he rented prints from his collection to all the school's film courses. He was a mountain of a man—six feet plus, weighing in at close to three hundred pounds—and his temper was legendary. He loaned a 16mm print of The Iron Horse to film organist Chauncey Haines for a presentation, and the print was scorched by the projection lamps during the screening; Bradley was annoyed when Haines refused to compensate him for the damage. In front of one of his classes, with Haines as a guest, Bradley blurted out, "You ruined my print, you fucking old man!" Fisticuffs ensued, with octogenarian Haines holding his own against the bellicose but largely impotent flailings of the enraged Bradley. This was one of many incidents that would lead Critical Studies chairman Howard Suber to fire David Bradley, and the very mention of Suber's name would send Bradley into ecstatic fits of fury to the end of his days. UCLA lost any chance of inheriting Bradley's film collection, but Bradley's alma mater, Northwestern University, didn't fare any better—for that