Orphans in Hollywood: a teaser

In May 2009, the Los Angeles Filmforum hosted "Orphans West" at the Silent Movie Theater. We featured highlights of past NYU Orphan Film Symposium screenings and talks.

www.cinema.ucla.edu

May 13-14, 2011: LA Filmforum again instigates an Orphan Film event, this time, thanks to the generosity of the UCLA Film and Television Archive, you are invited to convene in the Billy Wilder Theater (in the Hammer Museum). Evening screenings Friday and Saturday; afternoon sessions on Saturday.

www.lafilmforum.org

Much more metadata about this event forthcoming, but now that dates and venue are official, the good news couldn't wait. NYU thanks UCLA. MIAP meets MIAS. Win win. Los Angeles Filmforum. Win win win. Thanks to Jan Christopher Horak, Shannon Kelley, and Mark Quigley at UCLA, and to Adam Hyman and Stephanie Sapienza at the Filmforum.

The programming will include an eclectic group of neglected films and other moving images, mostly short, most rediscovered and preserved in recent years. Unique materials from the UCLA Film and Television Archive will anchor the screenings, joined by Bill Brand's BB Optics and its recent preservation work on experimental and small-gauge films. Expect something special from the University of South Carolina's Moving Image Research Collections too.

More about this as the spring approaches.

As always, the Orphan Film Symposium's year-round work is made possible by NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and its Department of Cinema Studies and MIAP,  the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation master's degree program.

Rediscovery: Grimm finds earliest known use of "orphan film" (1949!)

FROM: Buckey Grimm
February 6, 2011

Found this poking around instead of doing stuff I should be doing:

Many filmers take these orphan film scenes and make them up into a sort of newsreel or oddity film. You might name yours "Cook's Oddities of 1949," if your name were mine and you had enough footage to make up a reel for that year. 

         Color Movie Making for Everybody by Canfield Cook, 1949

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Dan Streible email reply to Buckey Grimm
February 6, 2011

Buckey,
You win the research prize (again), this time for earliest known mention of the term "orphan film," nosing out Rick Prelinger and Alex Thimons' rediscovery of this ad in Industrial Marketing  (Oct. 1950).

Here's to color movie / found footage making for everybody!

"Examine it free for 10 days."