It’s wall to wall reel to reel: Film history lives here

With its green marble interior, light woods and crisp architectural lines, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences’ Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study seems like a set out of a Douglas Sirk movie. The only thing missing is Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman walking down the halls. But there are probably a few Sirk, Hudson and Wyman movies being stored for posterity at the Pickford Center, the new home of the academy’s ever-expanding film archive.

Located at 1313 N. Vine St. -- right next to the Big Lots! discount store -- the building has had almost as colorful a history as the academy itself. In fact, it is the oldest surviving structure in Hollywood that was designed specifically with television in mind.

Built in 1948, it was originally the home of the Don Lee Mutual Broadcasting Co. Not only was Lee a broadcaster, he was also a Cadillac salesman. Although one couldn’t buy a car at the studio, Lee managed to showcase his latest fleet of Caddies in two large windows that occupied the front of the building. During the 1950s, the grandmother of reality series, “Queen for a Day,” was telecast from the building, as were Johnny Carson’s earliest TV appearances in “Carson’s Cellar” and “The New Johnny Carson Show.”

When ABC occupied the building, in the 1970s and ‘80s, it served as the headquarters for the 1984 Olympics telecasts. Such series as “The Joey Bishop Show,” “The Dating Game” and “Barney Miller” were taped there. The top floor, now a lunchroom and lounge, was once a penthouse apartment where Frank Sinatra allegedly held trysts with his gal pals whenever he taped shows there.

It’s a fitting location, then, for the academy’s rich trove of Hollywood history. As recently as 1990, the archive was a one-person department at the organization’s Beverly Hills headquarters. Now, as the academy celebrates its 75th year, it has become one of the most important archives in North America, taking its place alongside the UCLA Film and Television Archive, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., and the Library of Congress in Washington.

The academy archive now has 17 full-time employees; more than 80,000 film and video elements, ranging from outtakes to trailers to special-effects reels; and about 35,000 titles. It contains the largest collection of documentaries in North America. And the 120,000-square-foot building gives the archive ample growing room.

The academy purchased the building for $20 million in 2000 and renamed it after screen legend Mary Pickford, who was one of the organization’s founders. “The academy is in the fortunate position of having the money on hand to buy it,” says executive administrator Ric Robertson. “Then we are going to spend about $12 million in what we have already done [and will do] in renovations.”

Lots of growing room

The academy has returned the building to its original glory, the architecture reflecting its late-’40s roots. Right off the lobby is the Academy Players Directory, a publication that has been around since the mid-1930s. “It’s a casting guide where the actors pay to have their name and information listed,” academy archive director Michael Pogorzelski says.

One of the four smaller sound stages, also just off the lobby, is being demolished to make way for a theater where the archivists will look at final prints of restored and preserved films; it will also be used for academy screenings. Behind the main lobby are several more sound stages, which are being converted into film vaults. Because there are so many sound stages at the center, the archive will have plenty of room for its growing collection. (Each vault has been named after a character Pickford played during her heyday, including Dorothy, Cinderella and Fauntleroy.)

“One of our primary mandates is to collect Academy Award-winning and -nominated films,” Pogorzelski says as he walks with Robertson down a long hallway decorated with huge vintage posters of “The Outlaw” and “Born to Be Bad.” “But we don’t have every nominee or winner. Certainly we are still continuing to collect these prints and do preservation and restoration.”

Among recent films restored by the academy archive are the 1932-33 best picture winner, “Cavalcade,” and the 1965 winner “The Sound of Music.” The archive is also busy at work preserving and restoring the first best picture winner, 1927’s “Wings,” which will be unveiled at the academy in May as part of its 75th anniversary celebration, as well as the 1964 Oscar nominee “Becket.”

Pogorzelski says that several of the early Oscar-nominated and even Academy Award-winning films are lost, including the 1928-29 best picture nominee “The Patriot,” directed by Ernst Lubitsch. The archive, he says, is doing everything it can to find these films. “For every film nominated, a copy had to be given to the academy,” he says. “Over the years, that was enforced with varying degrees of assertiveness. Some years the studios actually collected the prints and gave them to another archive or institution, or they deteriorated.”

But that’s not the case now. The studios are complying and giving the archive copies of all their nominated or award-winning titles, Robertson says. Also, “as the archives have grown in reputation, you have big filmmakers now depositing materials.”

It was only when it moved to the Fairbanks Center for Motion Picture Study -- the current home of the Margaret Herrick Library -- on La Cienega Boulevard in 1991 that the archive became aggressive in obtaining all the nominated and winning titles, Robertson says.

Cool, dry are watchwords

Pogorzelski enters one of the large sound stages that will soon be transformed into a vault. “One of the most attractive aspects of this building is that all the sound stages have 12-inch reinforced concrete walls for soundproofing purposes,” he says. “That’s perfect for building concrete boxes to keep cold, dry air inside -- ideal conditions for film and video storage.”

Across the hall is a completed vault filled from top to bottom with a variety of videos and films, special-effects and visual-effects reels, documentaries and silent film shorts. The vault is kept at a chilly 50 degrees to preserve the film elements.

“Basically this area is going to become the preservation masters’ vault,” Pogorzelski says. “It will be for the original camera negatives and the preservation masters that we make on films.”

There are no water pipes running through the vault. “One of the biggest dangers to the collection is water,” Pogorzelski explains. “When the film gets wet, it is almost always not salvageable, so having a sprinkler system in any vault space, whether it is a museum or an archive, is another way the collection could get damaged.”

Nor is there any highly flammable nitrate stock at the archive. “We are not going to have nitrate storage here,” Pogorzelski says. That material is stored in nitrate vaults that are designed to meet rigorous fire codes; whenever nitrate material is needed, it’s removed from the vaults and sent to the archive. At the end of the workday, all the nitrate stock is returned.

Workspaces are upstairs. They include an area where the archivists can inspect the condition of film elements -- equipped with a HEPA filter because deteriorating acetate film stock gives off strong vinegar gas fumes -- and a small screening room donated by Turner Broadcasting for viewing tests.

In another room, two women are busy winding film onto big reels. “Everything that comes in passes through this room,” Pogorzelski says. The films are put into archival cans for storage and recorded in the database.

“Our collection comes from every source you can imagine,” he says. “In one Silver Lake garage -- the former resident was a technician at Technicolor -- were early two-strip [Technicolor] tests on nitrate stock. That was really a find. We never know what we are going to find.”