It’s April 21, 2023. Time to begin the Orphan Film Symposium: All-Television at UCLA.
The UCLA Film & Television Archive team put together this Digital Cinema Package of objects born on videotapes and films. John H. Mitchell Television Curator (Mark Quigley!) sent this photo of the DCP today.
The symposium originated as a film preservation event, but it’s always incorporated television (and video, audio, and digital). The 1999 event included this panel:
Television and Video Preservation
• Linda Tadic (then director of the U of Georgia Media Archive and Peabody Awards Collection, and president of AMIA) “Archiving Local TV Stations”
• Steve Davidson (then of Louis Wolfson II Media History Center, Miami) “Local Television News Archives at the 50th Anniversary of TV”
• Mike Mashon (LOC) “Television and Video Preservation at the Library of Congress”
• William T. Murphy (NARA) respondent (and author of Television and Video Preservation 1997: A Report on the Current State of American Television and Video Preservation: Report of the Librarian of Congress)
• Gregory Lukow (then of UCLA, but thereafter and now Library of Congress NAVCC) moderator (Lukow and Mashon hosted the 2016 NYU Orphan Film Symposium at the LOC Packard Campus in Culpeper, Virginia.)
Tonight Mike Mashon returns to the OFS podium as Head of the Moving Image Section at the Library. He’ll present excerpts from pilot episodes from four programs made for three major American TV networks. One will be shown in its entirety (33 minutes). It’s entitled It’s Joey (ABC, 1953), a sit-com in a Broadway-style musical format. Young Joel Grey stars. Shot on film before a live audience, the pilot never found a sponsor and therefore was never broadcast. So this is it’s premiere! Mr. G. turned 91 on April 11 and recently watched It’s Joey for the first time, thanks to LOC.
Also presenting a never-aired TV program (on Saturday) will be Margaret A. Compton (U of Georgia, Brown Media Archives) “Purex Block-Buster Show” (air check) (WAGA-TV, Atlanta, 1958). Since the archival artifact — a kinescope — contains a note “Do not show,” we will of course watch it on the big screen. She is also the author of “The Archivist, the Scholar, and Access to Historic Television Materials,” published in Cinema Journal (Spring, 2007).
Ruta Abolins, director of said UGA Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection, presents tonight’s closing screening. It’s an episode of a public affairs program made for Savannah, Georgia, TV station WJCL in 1971. Community Profile: James Brown features a neophyte reporter-interviewer, Willie Brown (no relation). (Yes, that’s three Browns, including broadcast journalist Walter J. Brown, for whom the University of Georgia Library’s media archive is named.)
Other television and video presentations at past Orphan Film Symposium events include these from the 2013 “Orphans Midwest: Materiality and the Moving Image” at Indiana University Bloomington.
Mona Jimenez (NYU) “Early Video Processing Tools: Art & Technology”
Andy Uhrich (Indiana University) “The Film Group of Chicago: Advertising Films and Verité Documentary”
Jake Austen (Roctober Productions): Chic-A-Go-Go highlights (Chicago Access Network Television, 1996-2013)
Sara Chapman (Media Burn Independent Video Archive): Cheat-U-Fair (Columbia College Visual Production Seminar: Carl German, Thomas Phillips, Bruce Real, Scott Rosenthal, Marsha Rudak, Bob Schordje, and Al Stoncius; instructor Jim Passin, 1980)
Also this panel at the second symposium in 2001.
Early Television
Lynn Spigel (Northwestern U) “Television at the Museum of Modern Art, 1948-1955”
Barbara Selznick (U of Arizona) “Chicago TV’s Portrait of America” (1949)
Mark J. Williams (Dartmouth College) “Los Angeles Television in the Late 1940s”