Ucla Film

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

Film can be an unstable environment - and not just in the executive suites. Take for example the 1973 Oscar-winning best film "The Sting,"which had chemical stains over several frames in the original negative. Steven Spielberg's landmark 1975 shark thriller "Jaws" showed the ravages of time with nasty tears in the original negative, notably the scene in which Quint (Robert Shaw) arrives at the town meeting on Amity Island. These are some of the challenges facing technicians performing digital restorations of 13 classic movies as part of Universal Studios' 100th birthday celebration.

"I want to be gay, I want to be free," the stunning young woman says, vivacious, casually amoral, all but blistering the screen. "Life is short and I want to live it while I'm alive. " The actress is Jean Harlow, and the bitter irony is that she lived only eight years past that moment of dialogue in Howard Hughes' legendary "Hell's Angels," dying of kidney failure at age 26 in 1937. Yet in that short span of time Hollywood's original platinum blond created an impressive body of work that is shockingly little seen today.

Jamaa Fanaka, who emerged as a dynamic black filmmaker with his gritty independent 1979 film "Penitentiary" and later made headlines with his legal battles alleging widespread discrimination against women and ethnic minorities in the film and television industry, has died. He was 69. Fanaka was found dead in his apartment in South Los Angeles on Sunday, said his daughter Tracey L. Gordon. The cause of death has not been determined, but she said it probably was the result of complications of diabetes.

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.

Jamaa Fanaka, who emerged as a dynamic black filmmaker with his gritty independent 1979 film "Penitentiary" and later made headlines with his legal battles alleging widespread discrimination against women and ethnic minorities in the film and television industry, has died. He was 69. Fanaka was found dead in his apartment in South Los Angeles on Sunday, said his daughter Tracey L. Gordon. The cause of death has not been determined, but she said it probably was the result of complications of diabetes.

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.

Film can be an unstable environment - and not just in the executive suites. Take for example the 1973 Oscar-winning best film "The Sting,"which had chemical stains over several frames in the original negative. Steven Spielberg's landmark 1975 shark thriller "Jaws" showed the ravages of time with nasty tears in the original negative, notably the scene in which Quint (Robert Shaw) arrives at the town meeting on Amity Island. These are some of the challenges facing technicians performing digital restorations of 13 classic movies as part of Universal Studios' 100th birthday celebration.

Visual effects visionary, director and producer Douglas Trumbull has a "broad" philosophy of film. He believes that everything in a movie is, in essence, a special effect. "Movies are all about illusions, whether it is makeup or wardrobe or some location or being in a period of time or being on an alien planet," says Trumbull, 69. Trumbull has created some of the screen's greatest illusions in such seminal sci-fi films as Stanley Kubrick's 1968 masterwork "2001: A Space Odyssey," his own 1972 cult classic "Silent Running" and Steven Spielberg's 1977 "Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

'Looking for Richard Brooks: An Appreciation' Where: UCLA Film & Television Archive's Billy Wilder Theater, 10899 Wilshire Blvd. When: Friday through May 25 Price: $9 for general admission; $8 for students and seniors Contact: (310) 206-8012 or visit http://www.cinema.ucla.edu

Fred Zinnemann, who won directing Oscars for 1953's World War II drama "From Here to Eternity" and 1966's historical epic "A Man for All Seasons," never played by the rules. He rankled under the studio system and fought to get the films he wanted to make, not the inconsequential pictures the studios chose for him. "What he was interested in were characters who had to fight for what they believed in against all odds," said his son, Tim Zinnemann. "That is how he was in life. " So it's no wonder that the Getty Research Institute's retrospective on Zinnemann is called "Cinema of Resistance" because it reflects both the themes of his films and his personal philosophy.

For three decades filmmaker Nina Menkes has made poetic, evocative films that have placed her in the forefront of American experimentalists. She's a visionary who trusts in the power of image, movement and composition to communicate narrative, meaning and emotion. Her work has received awards and acclaim in international film festivals, but only her most recent film, "Dissolution," has received a theatrical release. On Saturday that film kicks off a UCLA Film and Television Archive retrospective of her work, "Nina Menkes: Cinema as Sorcery," that runs through March 7 at the Hammer Museum's Billy Wilder Theater.

Visual effects visionary, director and producer Douglas Trumbull has a "broad" philosophy of film. He believes that everything in a movie is, in essence, a special effect. "Movies are all about illusions, whether it is makeup or wardrobe or some location or being in a period of time or being on an alien planet," says Trumbull, 69. Trumbull has created some of the screen's greatest illusions in such seminal sci-fi films as Stanley Kubrick's 1968 masterwork "2001: A Space Odyssey," his own 1972 cult classic "Silent Running" and Steven Spielberg's 1977 "Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

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.

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.

"I want to be gay, I want to be free," the stunning young woman says, vivacious, casually amoral, all but blistering the screen. "Life is short and I want to live it while I'm alive. " The actress is Jean Harlow, and the bitter irony is that she lived only eight years past that moment of dialogue in Howard Hughes' legendary "Hell's Angels," dying of kidney failure at age 26 in 1937. Yet in that short span of time Hollywood's original platinum blond created an impressive body of work that is shockingly little seen today.

It's hard to find anything in cinema history books about the 1929 quasi-silent/quasi-talkie romantic drama "Lonesome. " The film wasn't a success upon release and faded into obscurity. But it has developed a cult status in the last 16 years, since a George Eastman House restoration of the picture debuted at the Telluride Film Festival. Since then, it has become Eastman's most highly requested distribution print. "That says a lot about this particular film," says Caroline Frick, the senior curator at Eastman.

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 Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin has acquired the archives of Nicholas Ray, the director of such classic film noirs as 1950's "In a Lonely Place" and 1952's "On Dangerous Ground," and of 1955's seminal troubled youth melodrama, "Rebel Without a Cause," which transformed James Dean into a spokesperson for his generation. The archives include scripts, storyboards and correspondence. "There are about a dozen document boxes," said Steve Wilson, film curator of the Harry Ransom Center.

Robert Mitchum westerns? The quintessential film noir actor, whose distinctly urban air of seductive menace galvanized films such as "Out of the Past," riding hell bent for leather on some galloping steed? There must be some mistake. Of course, as all Mitchum fans know -- and as the new UCLA Film & Television Archive series "Tracking the Cat: Robert Mitchum in the West" starting at the Hammer Museum on Friday proves -- the actor had extensive western experience. So much so that, as he once famously told an interviewer, "I have two kinds of acting: one on a horse, one off a horse.