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Shown are scenes from the films (top to bottom) “Formula 17” (2004), “Beautiful Boxer” (2003), “Tropical Malady” (2004) and “The Mudge Boy” (2003). These works are expected to become part of the Outfest Legacy collection. |
The legacy of Outfest
BY cynthia Lee
Today Staff Writer
In 1982, a group of faculty and graduate students who were disturbed that gay and lesbian images were virtually absent from movie screens across America decided to take a bold step. With the UCLA Film Archive as a sponsor, they organized the Gay and Lesbian Media Festival and Conference at UCLA, the first of its kind in the nation.
That year, Twentieth Century Fox released the first gay-themed film by a major studio. “Making Love” starred Harry Hamlin, Kate Jackson and Michael Ontkean in a drama about a physician who jeopardizes his marriage when he comes out of the closet after meeting a sexually liberated novelist. It was one of the films showcased at the campus festival.
 Now, 13 years later, such landmark films — most of them independently produced — are coming home, in a sense, to the campus where they will be recognized as works that have given the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) community a voice and an identity on screen. In a historic collaboration with the nonprofit organization that grew directly out of the campus festival, UCLA will now become the permanent repository for thousands of such films.
The UCLA Film and Television Archive and Outfest, which continues the mission of showcasing films and videos of interest to LGBT people, will together create the largest publicly accessible collection of such works in the world.
The Outfest Legacy Project for LGBT Film Preservation, as the project is entitled, will make UCLA a national focal point for scholarly work in this area. “Having a centralized location for the study of these films at UCLA will foster the critical and historical study of LGBT struggles at a time when they have assumed an ever-larger role in American culture,” said archive director Timothy Kittleson.
 “We think of this as a homecoming for the organization that became Outfest and a reestablishment of our direct connection to the UCLA campus,” said Stephen Gutwillig, executive director of Outfest, which stages, among other events, the Outfest Film Festival, attended by 40,000-50,000 each year in Los Angeles.
This past summer, Outfest began transferring some 3,500 titles it has collected over the last decade to the archive. But this is only the first step. There is still much research and work to be done, Gutwillig said. Many of the rarest titles will be digitized, and the archive will create online finding aids and study guides to help researchers.
To insure the survival of important works, organizers plan to collect archive-quality 16mm and 35mm prints. Donated prints will be solicited from filmmakers, collectors and distributors, and new prints will be made to insure they are accessible.
 “If Outfest and UCLA didn’t step in to address this crisis in LGBT film preservation, the works that represent the legacy of an entire community during the decades when it came into its own would be effectively lost,” Gutwillig said. “What we’re really talking about are the crucial titles that were made in the most critical period of gay and lesbian political history — the last 30 years.”
The project is supported in part by private university funds from the UCLA Center for Community Partnerships. The David Bohnett Foundation has also contributed funding. In a separate project, the foundation is also funding a collection endowment to the UCLA Library to acquire materials in LGBT studies.
“The creation of the largest collection of media materials of this kind is important not only for scholars, researchers, filmmakers and historians worldwide, but also for the broader society,” said Franklin D. Gilliam Jr., UCLA’s associate vice chancellor of community partnerships. | 
