MOVIES

Trying to save the images of Texas

Film organization launches roundup, free digitization in statewide preservation effort

By Jane Sumner
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, March 01, 2009

Some folks redeem sinners. Others rescue dogs and cats. Caroline Frick will be trying to save "historic" Texas cinema next weekend with the launch of the Texas Film Round-Up, a traveling educational and on-site digitization program.

For most of us, American film has meant Hollywood. For Frick, founder and executive director of the nonprofit Texas Archive of the Moving Image, "American film also means film from all 50 states."

But the archivist-historian burns with particular passion for historical film and video shot in or about Texas by Texans — native and naturalized.

By "historic film and video," Frick means moving images — home movies, hobbyist films, industrials, campaign spots, commercials, educational films, training videos, newsreels, local TV, outtakes and features — that help tell the story of life in the state.

"A forest service film about how to set a campfire so you don't burn down East Texas is historic film," she says, in the organization's office at 500 San Marcos St.

So is film of a circus parade coming down Congress Avenue in 1912, a boy lion tamer with big cats in Brownsville in the 1930s and a barbecue with Walter Cronkite interviewing Lyndon Johnson at the LBJ ranch in 1960.

And by "archive," Frick, a graduate of the University of East Anglia, U.K., where the self-described "supernerd" trained, doesn't mean a cold storage vault or "repository where stuff sits there unseen for years and years."

No, the witty conservator, who teaches film history and preservation at the University of Texas, is all about accessibility and sharing. "In a digital age," she wrote in her Ph.D. dissertation at UT, "perhaps access itself is the new preservation." Oxford Press will publish her thesis as a book titled "Saving Cinema."

That "access-driven" philosophy of preservation is why the 6-year-old archive's unique collection is up on the Internet for all to see at www.texasarchive.org.

To raise awareness about the need to save and showcase such footage, the archive is rolling out the Texas Film Round-Up, starting in Austin.

Every year moving image records of Texas are lost. They decay, are misplaced and forgotten or simply discarded. To encourage area businesses and residents to dig out those old reels gathering dust, the archive will digitize Texas-related film and video for free.

Bring reels to the archive's "Wanted: Texas Film Series" (March 2-4) at the Alamo Ritz Downtown and/or to the Texas Film Round-Up at Austin Studios (March 7) and Alamo Drafthouse Cinema South Lamar (March 8).

"Whatever you have sitting around, before you pitch it, let us see it — whatever the format," Frick pleads. "The service is available at no cost to anyone willing to donate a digital copy to our online library."

In return, the archive will transfer Texas-related 8 mm and 16 mm films and video to DVD, then hand the donor two copies with advice on proper care of the original.

One major donor was Bay Area resident Susan Solomon, granddaughter of pioneer Texas filmmaker W. Hope Tilley, whose 1911 footage of a horse-and-buggy Austin is the earliest known of the city. His 1926 movie of the first mail plane taxiing down Congress is a must-see.

Another was Melissa Mellard of Plano, granddaughter of businessman, sportsman and recreational filmmaker A.M. Harper, who punctuated his travelogues with snappy, animated titles. "It makes me proud for my grandfather that we can pass on his legacy," Mellard says. Fourteen of his films are on the Web site.

"He didn't film while he was hunting in Africa," Harper's granddaughter says. "But when he got home, he staged scenes in the brush in South Texas and at the San Antonio Zoo, and you can't tell where it was spliced."

There's a reason the archive's partner in the Round-Up and digitization is the Office of the Governor's Texas Film Commission. While working as a location manager in Chicago in 1991, film office honcho Bob Hudgins saw first-hand what can happen to neglected film.

"We were working on old movie row in an empty building that had been the film vault for Universal," he says. "But when we opened the cans, they were filled with dust."

A champion of preservation, Hudgins feels strongly enough to help support the archive's mission with $250,000. "Texas has the only film commission that funds a film archive," he says.

"It's exciting to find a bit of film from 40 or 50 years ago," says Frick mentor David Francis, an archive board member. "It's a microcosm of what life was like at that time."

A major force in preservation and archiving, Francis, now retired, should know. Before serving as chief of the motion picture, broadcasting and recorded sound division at the Library of Congress, he ran the U.K.'s National Film and Television Archive.

"What Caroline is doing in Texas is important," he says. "Texas is one of the states that has had an independent lifestyle, an identity all its own. Regional archives are important in states like that."

Meanwhile, Frick, who modeled the archive's Film Round-Up after successful "lost film" search initiatives in Australia and New Zealand, is on fire to find the state's endangered historic film and video.

"We're not sitting in Austin waiting for stuff to come in," she says. In May, the archive will take the Film Round-Up to the Lower Rio Grande Valley. In July, the film chasers head for the High Plains and Lubbock.