Television Archive

UCLA Film and Television Archive: 'Out of the Past' Screening Series: 'Lonesome' When: 7:30 p.m. Monday Where: James Bridges Theater, UCLA Info: For more information, http://www.cinema.ucla.edu

There are plenty of usual suspects in the UCLA Film & Television Archive's expansive three-month Spencer Tracy film retrospective. Titled "That Natural Thing," the festival opens Saturday evening at the Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood with Tracy's 1960 drama, "Inherit the Wind," directed by Stanley Kramer, which brought the actor an Oscar nomination as an attorney based on Clarence Darrow. Over the months, cinephiles can watch the two-time Oscar-winning actor in classic films made at MGM such as 1936's "San Francisco," which brought him his first Academy Award nomination; 1937's "Captains Courageous," which earned him his first Academy Award as a colorful Portuguese fisherman, and 1938's "Boys Town," for which he received his second Oscar as Father Flanagan, the founder of Boys Town.

Officials of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences and the UCLA Film and Television Archive unveiled Wednesday a multi-faceted co-venture for opening the nation's largest television archive to the general public for the first time. UCLA maintains a 25,000-program archive in partnership with the academy, but access to it is primarily limited to researchers. That situation is expected to change dramatically by mid-1990, when a study center housed in the academy's new North Hollywood headquarters will be opened to provide added viewing facilities and related research resources for both serious students and curious TV fans.

In the late 1960s, the civil rights movement had entered a new phase. It was the era of black power — and universities were actively courting African Americans and other minorities to enroll. It was in this charged atmosphere that the "L.A. Rebellion" was born at UCLA. African American students enrolled at the School of Theater, Film and Television and, over the next 20 years, created a new culture of black films that was far removed from the Hollywood blaxploitation urban crime thrillers of the time, which included such box-office hits as "Coffy" and "Superfly.

"Nation's Only TV News Archive May Fade Out" (American Album, Sept. 20) draws attention to the Vanderbilt Archive's quarter-century of distinguished and innovative service. The American public owes a tremendous debt to the archive, and it would indeed be a national tragedy if budgetary shortfalls forced Vanderbilt to close. However, I would like to call your readers' attention to the existence of other television news archives in the United States. The UCLA Film and Television Archive holds more than 90,000 hours of news programming, with a strength in both local and national coverage.

In addition to their recordings, Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks occasionally took their 2,000-Year-Old Man act to television ("2037--and Counting," by Steve Schmidt, May 25). The collection in the UCLA Film and Television Archive holds two of these appearances, broadcast following two "NBC Saturday Night at the Movies" telecasts in 1961 and 1962. These hilarious 12- to 15-minute routines focus on the 2,001-Year-Old Man's (he had just celebrated his birthday) recollections of the French Riviera and of the origins of baseball.

The article on director Hugh Wilson ("Having a Blast With a Little Fusion," by Kathleen Craughwell, Jan. 31) failed to mention my favorite of his many credits: the wonderful but too short-lived series "Frank's Place," which he produced in association with Tim Reid in 1987. A marvelous, poignant, funny, and intelligent comedy, it was never really given its chance by the network. Although it had a criminally too-short life span on TV, all the episodes are held in the television collection at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, where they are very popular indeed.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science's Academy Foundation's Institutional Grants Program announced Tuesday that it has awarded $500,000 to 58 film-related nonprofit organizations in the U.S. and Canada. Among the local organizations receiving money for programs are the California Institute of Arts, Loyola Marymount University, USC's Master of Professional Writing Program and School of Cinematic Art, UCLA's Film and Television Program and Workplace Hollywood. Local institutional grants were awarded for the job training program at Hollywood Cinema Production Resources, the screening series at UCLA Film and Television archive, the Access LA Seminar Series and Screenwriting Lab at Outfest.

I was perplexed to read that Sean Penn wants to burn all the old films ("Don't Get Him Started," by Rachel Abramowitz, Jan. 6). He recently participated in the UCLA Film and Television Archive's "The Movie That Inspired Me" series, choosing John Cassavetes' "Minnie and Moskowitz." Although we have restored two well-known Cassavetes films--"Husbands" and "Shadows," which are screening at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival--we didn't have this lesser-known title in our collection. After scouring the other major U.S. archives for a presentable 35-millimeter print, we finally tracked one down at the British Film Institute.

Events & Revivals Midnights at the Nuart Nuart Theatre, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., L.A. (310) 478-6379. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) Screening of the campy horror classic. Sat., midnight. UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Hammer Museum Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., L.A. (310) 206-FILM. Brazilian Films of the 1950s Screening original prints from Brazil's "period of optimism." For more information visit www.cinema.

— Say "Kazakhstan" to most filmgoers and their minds will jump to "Borat," Sacha Baron Cohen's mockumentary about a plow-driving, shower-averse horndog that took the U.S. box office by storm in 2006. The film put the vast but obscure oil-rich nation of 16 million, wedged between Russia and China, on the map for many Americans but left Kazakh officials objecting that Cohen had misrepresented the country: For starters, many of its inhabitants are not Eastern European-sounding people with bushy mustaches but Koran-reading Central Asians.

I've been writing about the incomparable UCLA Festival of Preservation for nearly 20 years, and every time a new edition appears, I fear I'll run out of fresh adjectives to describe the UCLA Film & Television Archive's gift for restoring the widest possible spectrum of fascinating and hard-to-see cinema. I'm clearly getting low on superlatives, but UCLA has not run out of films for its festival, which opens Thursday at the Hammer Museum's Billy Wilder Theater with Robert Altman's "Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean.

UCLA Film and Television Archive: 'Out of the Past' Screening Series: 'Lonesome' When: 7:30 p.m. Monday Where: James Bridges Theater, UCLA Info: For more information, http://www.cinema.ucla.edu

Long before his death in 1998 at the age of 88, Akira Kurosawa was widely regarded as the world's greatest living director and one of the most influential filmmakers of any era. His 1950 "Rashomon," a period tale in which a bandit's assault on an aristocratic woman traveling through a forest, is told from four different viewpoints, took the grand prize at Venice in 1951 and went on to win a special Oscar as the best foreign film of the year (before that...

We pay lip service to old Hollywood, to the storied age of the movie studios, but do we really know what happened on those fabled lots? Do we understand that world that is no more? A fascinating new series put together by the UCLA Film & Television Archive offers a window into that reality and a whole lot more. "Rarities From the Warner Archive Collection," a 19-film program starting Friday at the Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum in Westwood, is of great interest on a number of levels.

The National Film Preservation Foundation and the New Zealand Film Archive on Monday plan to announce the formation of a partnership to preserve and make available a collection of 75 silent films that have been unavailable for decades. All of these rare films, made in the U.S., are on highly volatile, hazardous nitrate stock. The crown jewel of the collection is "Upstream," a "lost" John Ford silent from 1927 about a romance between a Shakespearean actor and a girl from a knife-throwing act. Only 15% of the silent films made by Ford, who won four Oscars, including for "The Grapes of Wrath" and "How Green Was My Valley," survive.

For four decades, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has fed film aficionados a steady diet of movie classics -- retrospectives that included works from Roman Polanski, Cary Grant, Ernst Lubitsch and, in a current series, James Mason. But the museum's weekend film program was losing both money and its audience, and LACMA said Tuesday that it was pulling the plug on its cinematic centerpiece.

The film landscape is changing so quickly these days with lively debates over whether to shoot in 3-D or 2-D or use digital or traditional film cameras. But a new UCLA Film and Television Archive series, "From Nitrate to Digital: New Technologies and the Art of Cinema," illustrates that technological change is the norm in Hollywood. The program, which opens Saturday at the Billy Wilder Theater, "is about reminding people that the industry has been through these changes before and Hollywood and artists have adapted and adopted to those transitions," notes programmer Paul Malcolm.

Events & Revivals Midnights at the Nuart Nuart Theatre, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., L.A. (310) 478-6379. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) Screening of the campy horror classic. Sat., midnight. UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Hammer Museum Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., L.A. (310) 206-FILM. Brazilian Films of the 1950s Screening original prints from Brazil's "period of optimism." For more information visit www.cinema.