With 250,000 motion picture and television titles, the archive holds more media materials than any institution in the country, except the Library of Congress. Confidential in the mid-1990s that he came to appreciate the archive’s research facilities. Hanson actually attended archive film showings as far back as the 1970s when he was a screenwriter breaking into directorial work. Since 1999, Hanson has hosted an archive event that takes a fresh look at the movies by pairing film artists with a discussion of the film that had a seminal influence on them. “The Movie That Inspired Me,” a Hanson brainstorm As it happened, Eastwood “so enjoyed not talking about himself, but talking about this filmmaker that he admired, that he was fabulous,” says Hanson. “Because Clint can be sort of the opposite of loquacious,” Hanson says, smiling. The discussion was informative and entertaining, perhaps surprisingly so. The coup of the sold-out Siegel series was persuading another of the late Siegel’s Dirty Harry collaborators, Clint Eastwood, to attend. The clutter in Hanson’s office suggests someone who is comfortable with chaos but nonetheless found time to host the archive’s two-and-a-half-week series honoring Don Siegel, his mentor, friend and one-time collaborator. The meetings included a bedside interview with an ailing John Ford and a beer-soaked gab session with writer Dalton Trumbo. Later, as an ambitious young journalist, he photographed and interviewed many of Hollywood’s old-master filmmakers for Cinema Magazine. ![]() Hanson’s love affair with classic cinema dates from his years growing up in L.A., when he haunted revival houses like the Silent Movie Theatre on Fairfax Avenue. Confidential, and continues the heavy lifting on its behalf, even if it means stealing time from his own projects. As honorary chairman for seven years now, the 60-year-old writer-director first rolled up his sleeves here to create the titles for his Oscar-winning film noir, L.A. Of all its fans and friends in Hollywood, Curtis Hanson is surely one of the most active. Today “studios are releasing films in the restored version because they know the film will have a new life.” The notion of seeing the best-preserved image of a film will be one of the reasons that people come to see the film.” He was right. When Rosen first talked about staging a festival of preservation, people thought the name would be a real turn-off. He agrees with former archive director (1975 –99) Robert Rosen - now dean of the School of Theater, Film and Television - that the archive has done much to make preserved and restored films “sexy and desirable” to ordinary moviegoers. Times film critic Kenneth Turan, who says none of the hundreds of film events he attends a year excites him like this one. Among the festival’s biggest fans is L.A. ![]() The Festival of Preservation: A cast of thousandsĮvery other summer, thousands of filmophiles flock to see the university’s best preservation work. UCLA’s efforts resulted in a surprise mini-hit when the film made the New York Times and lists of 2004 top DVD releases. Legong: Dance of the Virgins (1935), one of the feature films made in two-color Technicolor, was an orphan. ![]() The archive’s preservationists rescue classics as well as little-known films that might otherwise succumb to the ravages of time. ![]() Long before Hollywood took notice, the archive screened works of Jane Campion, Pedro Almodovar and Wong Kar-Wai. The archive exposes public audiences to a stunningly rich array of work in venues like the James Bridges Theater on campus and elsewhere: naughty pre-Code films inventive work from Iranian filmmakers and obscure gems from Belgium to Bangladesh. Working with a modest budget, less than half of which comes from the state, “we do a lot with very little,” notes Timothy Kittleson, the archive director. This quasi-obscurity is undeserved and not for lack of effort, enthusiasm or accomplishment on the part of the archive’s staff of 63. Confidential) finds it remarkable and very frustrating that even alums who’ve lived within walking distance of the campus for 20 years “didn’t know that movies were shown there that were open to the public.” Thanks to the miraculous work of the UCLA Film & Television Archive.Ī treasure trove to many, under-the-radar to mostĬurtis Hanson, the archive’s honorary chairman and Oscar-winning screenwriter (1997’s L.A. No popcorn, no sodas, but nobody’s complaining.
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