:: Home

Screen Gems

BY ANNE BURKE
Today Staff Writer

Courtesy of UCLA Film & television archive The UCLA Film & Television Archive’s 13th Annual Festival of Preservation will screen; Laurel and Hardy’s “Way Out West” (above,  top); and director Hal Roach’s “Turnabout” (middle). “The Lineup” (bottom) screened last year as part of the archive’s retrospective honoring the late director Don Siegel.

The multiplex may be full of flops, but here in Melnitz Hall, they’re showing a real movie: “The Lineup” from B-movie king Don Siegel. This 1958 noir gem stars Eli Wallach as a psychopathic hired gun tracking down a lost drug shipment. Good prints of “The Lineup” are so rare that even hardcore Siegel fans might get a chance to see the movie only once or twice in a lifetime.

Ira Steven Behr, a Los Angeles television producer, his son Jess, 13, and friend Fred Rappaport, a TV writer, sink into red-cushioned seats halfway back in the James Bridges Theater. No way would these three have missed this screening. When the opening credits roll and the director’s name appears in big block letters, the Behrs and Rappaport clap, arms outstretched.

This is moviegoing UCLA-style. No popcorn or soda, and nobody’s complaining. It’s all about the film. The organization behind this and more is the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

Through public screenings of about 400 films a year at the James Bridges Theater and elsewhere, the archive exposes audiences to a stunningly rich array of films that would never make it to the local multiplex: deliciously naughty pre-Code films; inventive works by Iranian filmmakers; obscure gems from Belgium to Bangladesh; edgy works from up-and-comers. Long before Hollywood took notice, the archive screened  works by Jane Campion, Pedro Almodovar and Wong Kar-Wai.

The archive’s preservationists rescue prints of classics as well as little-known works that might otherwise succumb to the ravages of time. “Legong: Dance of the Virgins” (1935), one of the last feature films made in two-color Technicolor, was an unwanted orphan until UCLA preservationists undertook a loving and painstaking restoration. Their efforts resulted in a surprise mini-hit when the film made The New York Times and Amazon.com lists of top DVD releases for 2004.

Every other summer, thousands of filmphiles make a pilgrimage to UCLA for the archive’s celebrated Festival of Preservation, which showcases the university’s best preservation work. The 13th festival will run July 20 to Aug. 19, with screenings at the James Bridges Theater.

Among the festival’s most enthusiastic fans is Kenneth Turan, the Los Angeles Times film critic. Of the hundreds of film events that Turan attends each year  in Los Angeles — the Oscars included — none excites him as much as this event.

“It’s like putting yourself in the hands of a really great restaurateur who says, ‘I’ll order your meal for you, don’t worry about anything,’ ” Turan said. “Anything they pick … is going to be worth your time.”

“Baby Doll” with Carroll Baker will be shown at the upcoming preservation festival scheduled to run from July 20 to August 19.

Robert Rosen, former archive director and now dean of the School of Theater, Film and Television, credits the archive with doing much to make preserved and restored films “sexy and desirable” for even ordinary moviegoers. Rosen, who led the archive from 1975-1999, recalls that when he first talked about staging a festival of preservation, people liked the idea but they thought the name would be a real turn-off.

“People said, ‘Preservation sounds like dust. You should call it treasures of the archive or something like that,’ ” Rosen recalled. “I said, ‘No. The notion of seeing the best preserved image of a film will be value-added, and this will be one of the reasons that people come to see the film.’

“That, in subsequent years, has proved to be true,” Rosen continued. “Studios are releasing films in the restored version because they know the film will have new life.”

The archive has many fans and friends in Hollywood, among them Jodie Foster, Tom Hanks, Hugh Hefner, Dustin Hoffman and Michael Douglas. New Yorker Martin Scorsese enjoys perusing the archive calendar, if only from afar. But the archive’s hardest-working friend in Hollywood is surely “L.A. Confidential” director Curtis Hanson, its honorary chairman for seven years.

Curtis Hanson, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter and director, is the archive’s honorary chairman.

While “honorary” can be code for a celebrity who is trotted out for the cameras at black-tie events, Hanson rolls up his sleeves and helps with the heavy lifting, even if it means stealing time from his own projects.

Since 1999, Hanson has hosted “The Movie That Inspired Me,” a series of his own invention. Staged every year or so (the next will be in 2007), “The Movie That Inspired Me” pairs film artists with their pick of a movie that influenced their early life or career. Hanson is a genial interviewer during the Q&A that follows each screening, and his clout in the industry is evident from the caliber of artists who have joined him onstage, among them Diane Keaton (she picked “Stagecoach”), Drew Barrymore (“Annie Hall”), Sean Penn (“Minnie and Moskowitz”), Lily Tomlin (“Wicked Woman”) and Alexander Payne (“The Breaking Point”).

With 250,000 motion picture and television titles, the archive holds more media materials than any institution in the country, except for the Library of Congress. Most are viewable by the public on request, so long as the purpose is research. “The idea is for the collections to live and breathe and not be locked away in vaults,” explained Mark Quigley, coordinator of the Archive Research and Study Center.

Of the archive’s vast holdings, one of the most popular is the remarkable Hearst Metrotone News Collection. Spanning 1915 to 1975, UCLA’s Hearst collection, consisting of 5,000 hours of footage, is one of the most important historical resources of 20th-century history.

While the archive’s film holdings get most of the attention, it’s the television collection that is most sought after by researchers. In a given year, students, scholars, journalists, authors and filmmakers will look at thousands of television titles at the study center, from “Who’s the Boss?” to “Harvest of Shame.” 

Its reputation as one of the world’s great moving-image collections firmly established, the archive faces a future at once exciting and full of challenges. The Billy Wilder Theater, now under construction at the Hammer Museum, will replace the James Bridges Theater as the main venue for archive screenings. Archive director Tim Kittleson expects this new theater will help raise the archive’s public profile to a level that befits the quality of its programming.

Kittleson and his staff, meanwhile, are pondering the archive’s big question of the digital dawn. How do you harness digital technology to make the archive’s collections easily accessible to everyone while at the same time protecting the interests of copyright holders?  Kittleson envisions a day when a grade school child in East Los Angeles can learn about World War II by accessing the Hearst Metrotone Collection, or when a UCLA student who is researching the Rodney King riots can see how events unfolded by looking at KTLA-TV footage on a laptop in her dorm room.

“Currently UCLA offers the widest public access of any film archive I know of,” said Kittleson, “and new digital technologies challenge us to continue pushing the access envelope. These are very exciting times.”