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| Established | 1965; 61 years ago (1965) |
|---|---|
| Location | 405 Hilgard Ave. Powell Library, Room 46 Los Angeles, CA 90095 |
| Type | Audiovisual archive |
| Key holdings | John H. Mitchell Television Collection,Hearst Metrotone News collection, and collections fromColumbia,Paramount,Warner Brothers,Twentieth Century Fox |
| Collection size | 500,000 items |
| Director | May Hong HaDuong |
| Website | https://cinema.ucla.edu/ |
TheUCLA Film & Television Archive is avisual arts organization focused on thepreservation,study, and appreciation offilm andtelevision, based at theUniversity of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
As anonprofit exhibition venue, the archive screens over 400 films andvideos yearly, primarily at theBilly Wilder Theater, located inside theHammer Museum inWestwood, California. Formerly, it screened films at theJames Bridges Theater on the UCLA campus. The archive is funded by UCLA, public and private interests, and the entertainment industry. It is a member of theInternational Federation of Film Archives.
The Archive is a division of theUCLA Library. As of January 2021, its collection hosted more than 500,000 items, including approximately 159,000 motion pictures and 132,000 television programs, more than 27 million feet of newsreels, more than 222,000 broadcast recordings, and more than 9,000 radiotranscription discs.[1] The archive has the largest nitrate-safe storage facility on the West Coast, located inSanta Clarita and funded by thePackard Humanities Institute (which the archive shares the building with) andDavid Packard.[2]
The UCLA Film & Television Archive was initially created as the ATAS/UCLA Television Library when theAcademy of Television Arts and Sciences and theUCLA Theater Arts Department worked together to create the library in 1965. In 1968, the Film Department of UCLA founded the Film Archive. After this, graduate students and staff members began collaborating to rescue copies of movies thatHollywood studios were discarding. This includednitrate film prints, which are notoriously unstable.[2] The two institutions operated separately until their unification by Robert Rosen, afilm preservationist who was appointed director of both the library and archive in 1976.[3] The archive began its film preservation and restoration program. It hired Robert Gitt, and began restoring several classic films includingDouble Indemnity,Blonde Venus, andThe Big Sleep.[4]
The Archive hosted virtual screenings in lieu of its in-person presentations during theCOVID-19 pandemic.[5]
The archive appointed its fourth director, May Hong HaDuong in January of 2021. She was the first woman and person of color to become director of the archive.[6]
The Archive has hosted its collection in aStoa building inSanta Clarita, California since 2015. It shares the facilities with thePackard Humanities Institute. The building was funded and built to the specification ofDavid Woodley Packard.[7]
The archive's holdings include35mm collections fromParamount Global/Paramount Pictures andRepublic Pictures,Disney/20th Century Studios,Warner Bros. Discovery/Warner Bros.,Sony/Columbia Pictures,New World Pictures,Amazon/MGM,United Artists andOrion Pictures,NBCUniversal/Universal Pictures, andRKO. Additional film donations have been made by theAcademy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, theAmerican Film Institute, theDirectors Guild of America, and figures includingHal Ashby,Tony Curtis,Charlton Heston,Orson Welles,Rock Hudson,Jeff Chandler,Radley Metzger,Richard Conte,Audie Murphy,John McIntire,John Wayne,Fred MacMurray,[8] andWilliam Wyler. It holds the entireHearst Metrotone News Library. It holds over 300 kinescope prints from the now-defunctDuMont Television Network. It holds restored prints of the cartoon library of Paramount Pictures.
_Sept._2024.JPG)
The Billy Wilder Theater is on the courtyard level of theHammer Museum. Funded by a $5 million gift from Audrey L. Wilder and designed byMichael Maltzan Architecture, the 295-seat Billy Wilder Theater is the home of the archive'scinematheque and of the Hammer's public programs, which includes artists' lectures, literary readings, musical concerts, and public conversations. The theater, which cost $7.5 million to complete, is one of the few in the country where audiences may watch the entire spectrum of moving images in their original formats from the earliestsilent films requiring variable speed projection to the most current digital cinema and video.
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