Meet curator, archivist, and co-host of the 2023 Orphan Film Symposium: Mark Quigley!
by Lisa van der Loos and Bella Masterson
A remarkable event is coming up in Los Angeles April 21–22, an All-Television Edition of the Orphan Film Symposium. The five sessions at the UCLA Hammer Museum are free to the public. Nine-time participant and now co-host Mark Quigley presents this unique event with May Hong HaDuong, Director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and Dan Streible, organizer of the biennial symposium since 1999. We were thrilled to sit down recently with Quigley and discuss his passion for television, his work as a curator and archivist, as well as his relationship with the NYU Orphan Film Symposium — including a sneak peek at what he will be presenting.
Quigley holds a unique position as the John H. Mitchell Television Curator at the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Our conversation revolved around both his professional and personal interests in presenting orphaned television series. At the symposium, Quigley will introduce two special pieces from the archive. His selections throughout reflect his career-long commitment to inclusive and social justice-oriented TV programming.
On opening night, he will premiere the 35mm film preservation of a CBS closed-circuit TV presentation of the anthology drama series Playhouse 90, an in-house preview of its 1956 debut. He recalled seeing this and another pioneering series The Ernie Kovas Show (1952-62) replayed on PBS in his youth of the 1970s and 80s. Both were groundbreaking moments for TV history. Quigley described these series as “in some ways more innovative than anything that came after and mostly obscure. I definitely have an interest in outré TV, things that are off the beaten path and unusual, especially as related to social justice or public service. So, a big interest of mine are programs that were designed to win hearts and minds, or to change people’s opinions about things, especially things related to race relations, or just humanist themes, about being a good person.” Quigley even credits Playhouse 90 episodes like The Comedian (directed by John Frankenheimer) and Requiem for a Heavyweight, both written by Rod Serling, for sparking his lifelong interest in television.
The Playhouse 90 promo is distinctive, not only because of its content, but because it has never been seen by a public in 35mm — until this April 21st world premiere screening at the Orphan Film Symposium. While the Closed Circuit telecast had been screened before in a digital iteration, UCLA preservationist Miki Shannon worked on a 35mm preservation project blown up from 16mm elements. The kinescope—recorded live from CBS Television City studios in Hollywood and presented by producer Martin Manulis—went out exclusively to CBS affiliates two weeks before the premiere. It introduced them to Playhouse 90, the first ninety-minute drama series made for television, a move away from the previous standard of hour-long teleplays.
Screening a “teleconference” that never aired is different from showing something that has had public viewings. “It was intended for a very specific audience, so it allows you to put yourself in the seat of people in 1956, where there was no such thing yet as Playhouse 90,” Quigley tells us. “Showing an up-close circuit telecast is really like taking a time machine, to be either somebody working in a television station in 1956, or a member of the press in 1956 when the medium is still in a state of rapid evolution.” If you make it to Quigley’s presentation during the symposium in April, you will get a window into a moment important to the development of television, when studios were moving from the East coast to the West coast seeking grander stages with better technological abilities.
The kinescope of the 30-minute rehearsal reel wasn’t easy to find, and Quigley described the process to us. “It’s a super interesting artifact and one that came to us in a really interesting way. It was part of a much larger collection that was mostly marginal material. After sifting through the collection we found the promo of Playhouse 90, and interestingly enough, I contacted CBS and they didn’t have it, so it seemed like it was super rare.” About two months later, Quigley found a second original kinescope on eBay, but when the bidding got too high, he had to let it go. However, as it turned out, they were bidding against a friend of the archive, who allowed UCLA to use the second kinescope in their preservation efforts. “Those are the only two known original kinescopes of this program that I have ever been able to track anywhere. It’s only a half hour; it ends a little abruptly. We don’t know if there was a part two.” Quigley thinks it likely there was a second part, so there’s a possibility a second reel may show up.
Quigley has worked full-time at the UCLA Film & Television Archive since 2001, after earning his MFA from the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. He initially managed the Archive Research and Study on campus. In 2018, he stepped into the role of television curator. A year later the school received a major gift that created an endowment to support his position, renamed the John H. Mitchell Television Curator. That same year the archive became part of the UCLA Library. Since 2021 he has worked with archive’s new director May Hong HaDuong to coordinate public screenings of TV holdings, oversee TV acquisitions, and manage UCLA’s ever-growing collection. The television holdings are, of course, a significant part of the second-largest moving image archive in the United States.
We asked about upcoming projects Quigley is working on, and he was quick to credit the John H. Mitchell Television Preservation endowment UCLA received in 2019 for enabling new opportunities for TV preservation and programming. The $10 million endowment supports four key areas: television preservation, public programming, the curator position, and a new digital infrastructure for the archive. John H. Mitchell was a pioneering TV studio executive, joining Screen Gems productions in 1952 and eventually founding and directing its offshoot, Columbia Pictures Television from 1968 to 1977.
Quigley mentioned projects the archive has initiated with the funding, including preservation of surviving episodes of Reflecciones, a 1970s Chicanx public affairs program in LA. He works with the Chicano Research Study Center (CRSC) at UCLA on this and other projects. While episodes held on aging ¾” tapes were originally conserved on DigiBeta videotapes over a decade ago, Quigley’s recent project (with lab partner DC Video in Burbank) digitized Reflecciones tapes to uncompressed 10-bit files for preservation purposes. An access project to host these episodes online is underway.
The endowment has also allowed Quigley to present more free public programs of archive television, one of the most rewarding parts of his job. His programming is a testament to his commitment to sharing unknown television with the Los Angeles community. In February he organized Bruce Lee: “The Way of the Intercepting Fist,” a tribute presented with the screen legend’s daughter Shannon Lee. The title comes from the first episode of the detective drama series Longstreet (1971-72), in which the actor plays a martial arts teacher. As Quigley’s program notes tell us, the event was also a way to reveal the preservation of an ABC-TV promo for The Green Hornet (1966). For ten seconds, Lee directly addresses viewers, “perhaps the first time an Asian American starred solo in a network promo.”
Public access and social justice are major priorities for Quigley as both an archivist and a curator, priorities shared by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. We talked about how the archive is determined to reach and be reflective of the city of Los Angeles, and to institutionally support marginalized communities. This greatly informs its decisions to support the preservation and access of materials that otherwise would not get preserved. Regular symposium-goers and online viewers may remember Quigley’s presentation from last year’s symposium. of a 1962 press conference given by Malcolm X after a deadly Los Angeles police raid. (Watch his presentation “Social Justice Activism and Surveillance Television” here). For this 2023 symposium, Quigley is also teaming up with recent UCLA Library & Information Science graduate Shawne West to present selections from the Tom Reed Collection, a local series called For Members Only .
Tom Reed came to Los Angeles in 1958, where he found popularity as a disc jockey and columnist for the Los Angeles Sentinel, one of the oldest Black-owned and operated newspapers in America. From 1981 to 2004, he self-produced an African American information news and entertainment program, For Members Only. Working with a shoestring budget, Reed bought airtime on local UHF station KSCI, which primarily reached Spanish-speaking audiences. By the early 2000s, Channel 18 became a multilanguage channel, serving generations of Asian and other LA immigrants. The show was relatively under the radar but popular in the city’s Black community, as Reed was well known from his radio presence as a DJ. (“Revisiting a Legend of Black Los Angeles,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 29, 2013.)
[Screenshot from For Members Only. Courtesy UCLA Film & Television Archive]
The For Members Only Collection is a treasure trove of over 100 episodes hosted by Reed, where he interviews both famous and local guests, from Nina Simone to Kareem Abdul Jabbar to LeVar Burton. The interview segments are often interspersed with music videos, and both local commercials and national commercials from corporations (Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Budweiser, etc.) trying to reach Black audiences. Watching the episodes today is like entering a time capsule, and Quigley emphasizes just how important the series was as a resource for Los Angeles.
Quigley acquired the private collection For Members Only from Reed after closely working with him for over two years to gain his trust (Reed reportedly passed away in 2020). The UCLA Film & Television Archive has big preservation plans. Quigley is working with Shawne West and Lisa McAuley at UCLA’s Digital Library Program to put Reed’s entire collection online. A large project for the archive recently has been to build and expand its digital infrastructure to improve access for researchers and the public. “I’m really excited to bring that hidden treasure of independent Black television to a broader audience,” Quigley says. “It’s one of the most gratifying projects I’ve worked on in the whole time I’ve been here.” The show is reflective of the history and people of Los Angeles, taking on political issues and while programming now-vintage music videos and even video art pieces.
Quigley has long admired the ethos of the Orphan Film Symposium, helping to bring a “Celebrating Orphan Films” edition to UCLA in 2011. He described what he thinks makes these events unique. “Dan [Streible] kind of takes this definition of symposium literally, it’s a gathering of people to share knowledge. And he takes that part really seriously, but the thing about Orphan Film Symposiums is they’re also always fun. And that’s something I think distinguishes them a lot from other conferences. You know if you go to an Orphan Film Symposium that you’re going to be not just enlightened, but entertained, to a high degree in both orders. And there’s something really unique to this symposium and something that’s really special, and you’re always going to be exposed to something that you’ve never seen before, something that you’re going to love that you never knew you needed, or wanted.” He recounted an example of a preservation project at UCLA for the film The Way of Peace (1947) that he first saw at an NYU Orphan Film Symposium in 2012. Streible put the film’s presenter, scholar Ethan de Seife, and Quigley on the program, both showing films sponsored the Lutheran church. The match led to the preservation of The Way of Peace and its eventual adoption into the National Film Registry. (Read more about the production, and watch it here).
Quigley is quick to say that this is not the first time that TV has been included in the Orphan Film Symposium, but it was time to highlight television explicitly. Quigley applauds the founder for his work putting the program together. “Dan is really adept at building connections between materials that may seem disparate and are not necessarily connected. The other thing that happens with those connections, is other connections emerge that even Dan didn’t necessarily think of, but his specific genius probably unconsciously brings them out. Through serendipity, you’ll find connections between parts of the symposium.”
Quigley described how the symposium’s wide variety of TV artifacts are connected. “What they all have in common is these are programs that are either underappreciated or under-seen, and that’s a thread that runs throughout.” Other subjects running throughout the symposium include programs from the early period of the medium, the unpredictability that comes with its “liveness,” and marginalized communities within television history.
The symposium’s emphasis on preserving TV is important to Quigley as he looks to the future of the archive community and the students and researchers who will become stewards of the TV collections. TV preservation has not been as extensively studied or presented as cinema. These growing archival holdings need a lot of attention.
When asked what other screenings he is looking forward to, he tells us that it is nearly impossible to single out a specific presentation because everything is not to be missed.
You can find more information about the April 21-22 Orphan Film Symposium: All-Television Edition here.
Bella Masterson is a master’s student in New York University’s Visual Arts Administration program, where she serves as Chair of “other content,” the VAA MA Program curatorial collective. She received a BA in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 2020, and has interned at film nonprofits like the Lightbox Film Center, the Chicago International Film Festival, and FACETS. Her research interests include transnational curation, microcinemas and alternative film exhibition spaces, and repatriation.
Lisa van der Loos is a master’s student at the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She received a BSc in Communication and Media studies from Erasmus University Rotterdam in 2022 and during this time worked as an assistant at the Zeeland Archives and interned at Dutch public broadcaster BNNVARA. Her research interests include underground cinema, queer cinema, and diversity, equity, accessibility and inclusivity in the museum experience.