Remembering David Shepard

KEVIN BROWNLOW

David Shepard had an uncanny sense for where lost films were lurking. As archivist for the American Film Institute in the late 1960s, he had the enviable job of driving around America in search of lost films—and by that time a great many were lost. He was a colleague of mine at the American Film Institute (AFI), and he let me accompany him on several film hunts. I remember him pulling a two-thousand-foot can off a shelf, blowing dust and debris off it, and revealing a tinted original 35mm print of Chaplin's masterpiece The Rink (1916).

It was surprising that he got the job, because he was a dedicated film collector. At his rural home in Pennsylvania, one saw no sign of film cans until he opened a trapdoor in the kitchen and led one down to a well-lit, air-conditioned vault containing rows of glistening cans. Despite the secrecy, the whole collection was cleaned out by burglars; with his usual luck, pluck, and acuity, David got the whole lot back.

He was as interested as I was in the people who made the pictures. He drove me to the house of [James] Jimmie Smith [1892–1975], editor for D. W. Griffith. The old man, suspicious, wouldn't open the door, so David called out, "Wouldn't you like to see Intolerance again?"

"Nope."

"Why not?"

"I saw enough of it when I was cutting it."

As compensation, he suggested an epic drive to Charlottesville, Virginia, to meet Miriam Cooper [1891–1976], who had played the Friendless One in Griffith's Intolerance (1916). We stayed up all night recording her memoirs.

David had an amazing knowledge of world cinema, but he was fascinated by silent films. His favorite was Tol'able David (1921), and he knew its director, Henry King, who told him where the picture had been shot. This spurred another epic drive to Virginia, delayed only slightly by the fact that the village had changed its name from Crabbottom to Blue Grass.

David's work at the AFIresulted in the rescue of hundreds of titles, most of which went to the Library of Congress. His most outstanding coup came from a call from a meter-reader in Missoula, Montana, who had spotted rusty cans in a basement. They proved to contain mostly prize-fight films, but there was one silent feature, Regeneration, a gangster picture of 1915 directed by Raoul Walsh (once married to Miriam Cooper!) and shot on location in the Bowery—a lost masterpiece.

When the AFIbuilt its theater in Washington, D.C., David took care to ensure that it was fitted with three projectors in case Abel Gance's Napoléon (1927), with its famous triptych sequence, ever came his way. The expenditure was justified on the opening night. Costa-Gavras's State of Siege had been announced, but because it dealt with the CIA involvement with torture in South America, it was hastily withdrawn. Costa-Gavras persuaded fifteen other directors to withdraw their work as well. In charge of programming, Shepard put on Napoléon. Nine years before the Radio City Music Hall opening, this marked the beginning of the skyrocket revival of Napoléon, which is still on course forty-five years later.

I owe David a tremendous debt for making it possible to acquire so many important and often forgotten silents. He was an adviser on the Hollywood series of 1980 and in recent years produced many restorations for DVD release through Flicker Alley, including Gance's J'accuse (1919) and La Roue (1922). At the time of his death, he was working on Cecil B. DeMille's King of Kings (1927).

N. CICCONE

The film preservation community will never be the same without David Shepard. I'm sure of this just as much as I'm sure the world will never be the same either. He was, of course, a dedicated film lover whose one desire was to have culturally significant films shown in the best...