Archival Misadventures at UCLA: The Earliest Years

Confession may be good for the soul, but it's also good for one's sense of humor. Especially now that I am retired, and the statute of limitations has expired, I am prepared, from time to time, to confess to a few things out of my past that I remember with affection. I was stimulated to do so by reading Robert Birchard's article in the Spring 2004 issue of The Moving Image about early archival operations and political confrontations at the UCLA film school. I have had the pleasure of being a colleague and good friend of some of the people mentioned in that article, especially Howard Suber, but also Phil Chamberlin and Bob Rosen. Birchard, Chamberlin, Suber, and Bob Epstein preceded Rosen, but I and my colleagues, Jack Driscoll and Ernie Rose, had arrived long before any of them, and although our contributions to the UCLA archival operation were minimal compared to theirs, I think we had more fun than they did.

I entered the UCLA film school as a freshman in 1949, a year or so after it opened, took my BA and MA degrees in film, then joined the faculty in 1957 and rose with painful slowness through the ranks to tenure and an associate professorship in 1965. During the same period, I took my Ph.D. degree and taught part time at USC. Once safe and soundly tenured at UCLA, I surprised everyone by leaving to take a position as senior professor in the film program at the University of Iowa, and from there, to adventures elsewhere.

During my eight years on the UCLA faculty, as chairman of the departmental library committee, and with the help of many others, I became involved in building the research resources of the theater arts department. My partner in the enrichment of the research library was our librarian, Shirley Hood (later, Shirley Hawkins). At the heart of the early collection were books and documents donated by Kenneth MacGowan, a longtime producer at Twentieth Century Fox, a distinguished scholar in his own right and our first departmental chairman. The department as a whole had a sizable budget for library acquisitions, but neither the radio-television nor theater programs had any interest in research or the acquisition of library assets, and so Shirley and I got to spend the entire budget on film materials. In the years that followed, working closely with Milt Lubovisky of Larry Edmunds Bookshop in Hollywood, and with others elsewhere, we were able to acquire, by gift or purchase, numerous collections, books, manuscripts, complete runs of early trade papers, letters, photographs, and related vertical file materials. By the time I left in 1965, the library was in pretty good shape, and in the years that followed it was greatly enlarged and enriched by others, today being regarded as one of the country's outstanding research libraries in the field.

Early in 1965, through the good offices of film preservationist Kemp Niver, I acquired the Shaw Kennedy Collection of antique cameras and related equipment. During that period, I protected the collection and exhibited a small part of it in my office for the pleasure of visitors. We also got a good deal of print and television publicity out of the collection, which stimulated further donations. My acquisition of mechanical artifacts for a university department was a great mistake, however, for which I will probably be punished someday. After my departure, the collection disappeared, either into the dumpster or into the trunks of people's automobiles.

We also acquired a complete 3-strip motion picture camera outfit from the Technicolor Corporation, with all lenses, prisms, magazines, motors and its so-called portable blimp, the latter of which weighed about a quarter of a ton. It was a fabulous gift, one of the few such cameras left in the world, but after I left it was traded by the departmental chairman for a couple Cinemascope penthouse reproducers for the 35mm projectors...