Movingimage 17 1 0089

David Shepard: Excerpts from an Oral History
Author(s): Ed Carter
Source: The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists ,
Vol. 17, No. 1 (Spring 2017), pp. 89-121
Published by: University of Minnesota Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/movingimage.17.1.0089
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DaviD ShePaRD
ED CARTER
Excerpts from an Oral History

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Ed Carter, on behalf of the Academy Film Archive, interviewed David Shepard during
six sessions, recorded October 19 and 22, 2005; November 4, 2005; January 8 and 18,
2006; and February 21, 2006. The fifty-two-thousand-word transcript may be consulted
at the Margaret Herrick Library. This text has been condensed and edited for accuracy,
clarity, and flow. Some personal opinions and references have been redacted. We are
grateful to Ed Carter for providing the manuscript and to the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences for permission to print this version.
ed carter (ec): It’s October 19, 2005. I am Ed Carter, the documentary curator of the
Academy Film Archive, and I’m here with David Shepard to talk about his career and his
life. Let’s just go with the basics. Start with where you were born, where you grew up.
david shepard (ds): I was born in New York City, October 22, 1940; I’ll be sixty-five at
the end of this week. I grew up there, and in New Orleans, and in Tenafly, New Jersey,
which is a suburb of New York.
ec: What did your parents do?
ds: My father, Bertram D. Shepard, spent his entire career with the Grand Union Company,
which was a chain of supermarkets. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania,
started off teaching Classics at Harvard, and wanted to get married, but couldn’t make
any money as an instructor. He went to the Harvard Business School, and joined the
Bank of New York in New York City in 1929, just before the Crash. He was assigned
to manage the real estate leases of this Grand Union Company and rose through the
ranks; he eventually ended up as a senior vice president of the corporation. He died
in 1966 at the age of only fifty-eight.
My mother was called a housewife in those days. She was a trained artist and a
very good painter. She occasionally worked in art galleries for short periods of time
and in later years volunteered as a docent at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
and the Hammer Museum. She died in 2000 at the age of eighty-nine.
ec: You were fairly comfortable growing up, then?
ds: Yes, I was very lucky. It was an educated family, an interesting and a tolerant family.
We did a lot of things together.
ec: Was there an appreciation for the arts and literature and that kind of thing?
ds: Yes, we had lots of books. My parents were both readers. My mother was also a
phenomenal movie buff her whole life. I think she saw more films than I did and she
had a steel-trap memory. For example, I took her once to a show, I guess it must have
been the late 1980s, of The Covered Wagon [James Cruze, 1923], which was run at
the Gene Autry Museum, with Gillian Anderson conducting an orchestra. On the way

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91 d a v i d s h e p a rd : e x c e rp t s fr o m a n o r a l h i s t o ry
there, she was telling me how she had seen the film in 1923, at the Saenger Theater
on Canal Street in New Orleans, and what the best scenes were, where she sat in the
theater, and what some of the music in the score was. She was absolutely on. She
would go all over Los Angeles to see Asian films, Latin films, films from all over the
world. And she was very, very perceptive. My father also liked film. I can remember
him taking me to see some of the Preston Sturges films when they first came out.
And when I wanted to get into film, they gave me a nice room in the basement of our
house [in Tenafly], which was a fairly large house. I saved up my money, got a 16mm
projector, and made friends with a man in the next town who greatly influenced me,
John Griggs [1908–67]. He had a big film collection and used to run films in his base-
ment theater. In fact, I had started doing that even when I was a little boy. My father’s
brother, my uncle Myron, who is now ninety-three, after World War II brought back
from France a Pathé 9.5mm projector and a box of films. They were mostly cutdowns
of great German films of the 1920s, some Méliès films, and some Hal Roach comedies.
Anyway, I had this theater in the basement of our house, and my parents encouraged
that, but when they discovered that I wanted to actually go into film, they were very
discouraging—they didn’t think it was a worthy profession—it was acceptable rec-
reation. Sort of the way I imagine people in the nineteenth century reacted if some
child said that he or she wanted to go on the stage.
ec: So, let’s go back to your theater that you had in the basement.
ds: Well, neighborhood kids came when I was in high school, I was involved in drama,
and that kind of thing; I made a bunch of friends of like interest, and we used to run
films all the time. John Griggs, the man who used to lend me the films, lived a bicycle
ride away and had shows every week at his house. A number of people who made
their careers in film came out of that basement theater and those shows. Leonard
Maltin [b. 1950] was another disciple of Mr. Griggs.
ec: Was Blackhawk a distributor then?
ds: Well, Blackhawk was certainly in business then; it started in 1927. But these were
mostly Kodascope prints that Griggs had bought from places like Mogull’s in New
York, and nice direct reduction prints—he had some kind of deal where he was able
to get things from the negatives at the Museum of Modern Art.
ec: Were you just showing his prints, or did you have your own?
ds: I had a few films of my own. There were dealers at that time who sold used 16mm
films. One of them was a place called National Cinema Service, at 71 Dey Street in
New York, which is under where the World Trade Center used to be. It was in a little
early-nineteenth-century house. Two men owned it, Bill Flohr and Ray Cannon. They

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had been in business since 1936. Just as with video today, when a new title came
out the 16mm rental libraries would get several copies, and then when the sheen
was off, those copies would be surplused and sold to places like National Cinema
Service, who would resell them to road show exhibitors, collectors, libraries, or
whatever. There was another dealer in New York City named Abbe Films, [417] West
44th Street, and I used to get films from them. And then there were some people who
sold films by mail. There was one called Crawford Film Service somewhere in Texas.
And Blackhawk used to sell used 16mm prints. If you look at their old catalog, every
month they would have a couple of hundred for sale.
ec: Were these all silent titles, or were they also sound?
ds: They were mixed. Most of my early films actually came from Rieger’s Camera Store in
Hackensack, New Jersey. Before television was really established or widespread, most
large camera stores had 16mm rental libraries and projectors that could be rented.
People would rent films and show them at parties at home, show them for their kids’
birthday parties, that kind of thing. My father did that; I can remember seeing films
at my birthday parties. Of course, the market for those things dried up quickly once
free television was well established, so these camera stores had lots of film sitting
on the shelf, taking up space and generating no income. Rieger’s put their stuff up
for sale, for one dollar a four-hundred-foot reel. I had a paper route and made usually
between three and four and a half dollars a week. Rieger’s were interested that a little
kid—I was probably twelve, thirteen—would want these old movies. And they let me
buy them on installment, so I put down fifty cents on this one and fifty cents on that
one, which would keep anybody else from buying them, and I would pay them off a
little at a time. They went along with that.
ec: Did you have favorite genres, or actors, or directors at that time, or were you eclectic
in your tastes?
ds: In my teens, I was just kind of an omnivore. In the 1950s, there was not very much
published in English about the history of film. There was the Paul Rotha book The Film
till Now [originally 1936, with many reeditions] and the Lewis Jacobs book The Rise of
the American Film [1968], which I virtually memorized. But usually, everything was
a discovery once it came out of the can. Basically, I came on everything as a virgin.
I can remember, for example, the first time I saw The Passion of Joan of Arc [Carl
Theodor Dreyer, 1928], but I had no idea who Carl Dreyer was, and I had no idea
what to expect. The film just worked on me as it would have worked on anybody who
walked into a theater and saw it in 1928.
ec: Now, the silent prints, did they have music?

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ds: No, they were original silent prints. Mr. Griggs sometimes made scores for his films,
on 1/4-inch tape, using twin turntables. He needle-dropped some records. And they
were pretty good; he had a good knowledge of film and what would work, because
as a teenager and a man in his early twenties, he had played piano for silent pictures
at a small theater in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, where he grew up. But I found I didn’t need
music to enjoy the films; I would like them just as much silent.
ec: Were some of these tinted?
ds: Yes, many of them were tinted. His collection ended up at Yale University. Over the
years, I’ve done a handful of exchanges with Yale to get some of those original prints
of films that really meant a lot to me when I was a kid.
ec: Now does Yale even have a proper film archive?
ds: Yes, they do, and they have a lot of films.
I could talk a lot about Mr. Griggs. He was a huge influence. At that age, I really
had trouble talking to my own father, and Mr. Griggs became kind of a surrogate.
And I became kind of a surrogate son to him, although he certainly had his own son,
whose name was Timothy. I met Mr. Griggs through Tim, with whom I was friends
first. Mr. Griggs liked to take his films out and show them, and he would take me
with him to kind of act as an assistant and projectionist. But he didn’t treat me like
a lackey, he treated me like a friend. I would get taken to the Players Club in New
York and was introduced to people like Bobby Clark, Marc Connelly, and all kinds of
fantastic folks. And quite often, I got to know some people that way. He used to have
screenings at his house where he would invite people that he had met mostly through
his work in New York. For example, I remember running Orphans of the Storm [D. W.
Griffith, 1921]—this beautiful original print which he had—and Lillian and Dorothy
Gish were there, and so was Catherine Emmet, who’s in it, and Joseph Schildkraut.
They hadn’t seen the film for years, or at least said they hadn’t, and I believe they
probably hadn’t, because what was deader in the 1950s than a silent movie? I met
Buster Keaton [1895–1966] that way. Then I became friends with some of the people.
For example, Walter Kerr [1913–96], who was at that time the dramatic critic of either
the New York Herald Tribune or the New York Times—I don’t remember whether the
Herald had folded and he had moved over yet or not. He worked for years and years
on a book, which was eventually published as The Silent Clowns. And he used to
come out and we would run comedies all the time. And I got to be, independently,
quite friendly with him.

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COLLEGE AND COLLECTING
ds: I went to a liberal arts college called Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. We
restarted the film society, alternating about every other week with another film
society that ran more recent Hollywood films. We ran foreign films, silent films,
documentary films. I used it as a chance to rent films that I had read about and
wanted to see.
ec: How did you find out about films?
ds: The New York Times. I spent hours and hours in the library, reading back issues of
the Times; I’d read whole years from the 1920s and 1930s and find films admired by
their critics, who by and large were not a very perceptive lot. And there were a few
16mm distributors of foreign films, documentary films, silent, art films, who were
staffed by people just a few years older than me who shared my interests. I got sum-
mer jobs working for those distributors, and had the privilege as part of the job, in
lieu of decent money, of taking films home at night and looking at them. Sometimes
they would pay me in surplus prints. Brandon Films was one of the companies. They
were a fairly large operation. Contemporary Films was another. Another was a com-
pany called Audio Film Center. I never worked for them, but I did work for the first
two. But I knew people who worked for Audio Film Center, so we would pass prints
back and forth.
ec: Did that merge, then, with Brandon, to become Audio-Brandon?
ds: Eventually Macmillan Publishers bought them all out. Well, no, McGraw-Hill bought
out Contemporary, and almost immediately shut it down. Contemporary had been
started by a man named Charlie Cooper [1910–2001], the American branch of a Brit-
ish Contemporary Films that he had. He had to leave the country in the McCarthy
period, so he sold Contemporary to a man named Leo Dratfield [1918–86], who ran
it for many years. Then Leo finally sold it to McGraw-Hill. Brandon Films was run by
a man named Thomas Brandon [1919–82], whose real name was Julius Bendemark.
He was the most successful “capitalist communist” I ever met. In the 1930s, he had
been part of the—oh, that collective that was making left-wing . . .
ec: The Film and Photo League.
ds: Film and Photo League, right. He had set up a deal with Amkino, which was the
American distributor for Soviet films, to handle them in 16mm. It was a company called
Garrison Pictures. So, he started off with the Russian films, which were distributed
mostly to workingmen’s clubs. Then Bendemark bought out a little company called
the French Motion Picture [Corporation], run by a man named John S. Tapernoux,

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and built his catalog, little by little. He was a real film lover, although an extremely
dishonest businessman.
ec: You mentioned in passing that your family was a tolerant family. Can you explain
what you mean by that?
ds: Well, my family was Jewish, and at that time there was lots of anti-Semitism. We
didn’t really endure any of it directly that I was aware of. Although my father’s birth
name was Shapiro, and he changed it to Shepard, because in the banking business,
which is where he was, he felt it was an advantage to not be so obviously Jewish.
But when you grow up in that kind of an environment, you certainly learn to be not
judgmental of others. And they weren’t judgmental of others. They—I’m trying to
figure out how to put this—they were willing to accept into their circle, and allow
me to accept as friends, a wide variety of people that the more paranoid parents of
today, who are looking around every corner for somebody that might be imperiling
their children, would reject.
ec: So, you completed your studies at Hamilton, and then you wanted to go to graduate
school?
ds: I didn’t want to go to graduate school at first, and my father thought I should. We
left it that if I could get a full, free ride—full fellowship—then I would go. And I did, so
I did. That was what brought me to the University of Pennsylvania. And that turned
out to be a wonderful experience, not particularly because there was a focused study
of film, but because of the faculty. The Annenberg School was a small school; there
were only forty people in our class. The dean was Gilbert Seldes [1893–1970], who
wrote The Seven Lively Arts [1957] and many other books. I became his assistant
and we became very good friends, in fact. I rented a room on the second floor of his
house. He was elderly and lived on the first floor. But, sort of like Mr. Griggs all over
again, I had the opportunity to serve tea and pay practically nothing, but I kept the
place clean. Gosh, he had Picasso drawings stuffed in drawers! He knew everybody
of any cultural interest in his part of the century. He had edited The Dial magazine in
the 1920s and had been head of programming of CBS Television in the years before
there were any television receivers. Amazing people would drop in to visit: Walter
Lippmann [1889–1974] and Kenneth Burke [1897–1993]. I got a chance to sit in on
conversations among these interesting “old lions” of the 1920s and 1930s who still
had a little steam in them, in the early 1960s.
Annenberg was kind of a graduate, liberal arts version of Hamilton, with an
emphasis on communication: communication theory, history of communication, the
nature of broadcasting, film from largely a sociological aspect. When I was teaching

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film [later], I always tried to recommend to any student who would ask my advice that
they try and obtain a liberal arts education. I would suggest that they take courses in
literature, in history of theater, in figure drawing, in stage design, in all these things,
which essentially represent the components on which a film is built. They could learn
to read music and play a musical instrument. I felt those things were much more im-
portant than taking courses in camera and editing and so on, because those crafts
would change by the time they were out of school, if indeed they weren’t already
being taught in obsolete fashion. But nobody listened to me.
ec: But you feel that it worked for you?
ds: It’s been the basis of what I’ve been able to use, intellectually, and to trade on as a
livelihood, for my entire career. That Hamilton College education and my one year at
Annenberg were very valuable experiences to me.
ec: What was your first job coming out of Annenberg?
ds: Actually, I had summer jobs, because I was going to continue graduate school. [I made
films for the] Weyerhaeuser Timber Company for two summers. Now, I didn’t know
much about making films either. But I could see that I had the budget, the commission,
and the opportunity. I knew lots of people who were doing films for places like the
Army Pictorial Center [in Astoria, Queens]. I would call a cameraman and say, “Well,
I’m making this industrial film and I have a week or ten days in which to shoot it, and
I would like to hire you as my cameraman. And I’ll pay you your price. The condition
attached is that you teach me at the same time.” And people were happy to do that. I
never met anyone who was disgruntled at being asked for their opinion [laughs]. So
that was really my film school: making those films for Weyerhaeuser Timber Company.
They were industrial films, and point-of-sale films. Salesmen carried around
projectors, which had little rear-screen systems built into them. Weyerhaeuser’s
principal customers were lumberyards, wholesale lumber dealers, and so on. Sales-
men would pay calls on these people and show these films, and induce them to take
these products, and the films would explain how they could be used.
[After Annenberg, I went to Syracuse University] to pursue a PhD, which, however,
I never finished. I finished all my course work, stood my comprehensive examina-
tions and passed them, got a dissertation subject selected, and that was just about
the time I went [to teach] to Penn State. So, I left an ABD, which stands for “all but
dissertation.”
ec: What was your dissertation subject?
ds: Well, it changed a number of times. The chairman of my dissertation commit-
tee drowned, so then I had to find another subject. I was going to write on the

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relationship between music and the rhythm created by film editing in certain sound
films. But it never happened. [While a student, Shepard had accepted a position at
the American Film Institute.] I took a leave from my job at the American Film Institute,
cutting back to half time, so that I could write my dissertation. Just about that time,
Peter Bogdanovich [b. 1939], who was an old friend of mine, was offered the oppor-
tunity to direct The Last Picture Show [1971]. He was in the middle of a documentary
film called Directed by John Ford. He’d already filmed interviews, but he had not yet
worked out how this was going to be put together into a film [or] acquired any of
the clips from the Ford films. In order to take The Last Picture Show, he had to find
somebody on whom to shuck the documentary. So, he asked me. Well, that sounded
a whole lot more interesting to me than writing a dissertation. I took on Directed by
John Ford [1971] as associate producer, got Richard Patterson to be the film editor,
and we finished it.
My job was to negotiate for and insert all the film clips. I didn’t really have any-
thing to do with the creative shaping of the film. But I had a lot to do with getting
the thing finished, and mixed. Orson Welles recorded the narration and sent a tape
back from Spain.
The idea was to present Ford [1894–1973] as the author of his work by showing the
personal threads that ran through it over many years. Peter had photographed—László
Kovács [1933–2007] I believe was his cameraman—35mm color interview footage with
Ford, John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Henry Fonda. I was around for some of it. The
Ford interview was shot in Monument Valley [Arizona/Utah]. Ford had agreed to do
this, but then he thought better of it and didn’t want to do it. But he had made his
promise, so he said, “Well, I’m not going to do it. Peter, you can take me out there,
but I’m not gonna give you a goddamned word that you can use.” So, he was sort of
telling us that he was going to fill his interview with profanity and make it impossible.
Well, at that time, the major film education movement in secondary schools was in
parochial schools. We got three nuns who were teaching film in the Los Angeles area
to come out to Monument Valley.
ec: Ah, so he wouldn’t swear!
ds: Right, and we put them on a plank, a couple of apple boxes under the camera, so
that whenever Ford looked at the camera, he would see these three nuns. One of the
things that Ford took quite seriously was his Catholicism. Just to be sure, since he
didn’t see very well, so he would remember they were there, every time the camera
stopped [the nuns would say], “Oh, that was so wonderful, Mr. Ford”; “May we bring
you some water, Mr. Ford?” “Is there anything we can do for you?” So, he had to be

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grudgingly cooperative. And he was more cooperative than the finished film indicates,
because Peter wanted to cut the film to make him appear as much of a curmudgeon
as possible. He was the director, and I didn’t like the idea, but it was his idea, it was
his movie, and he prevailed.
After that, I made one more stab at trying to finish my degree. The five-year time
clock ran out on my quals [qualifying exams], and I retook them and passed them a
second time, but I never did finish my dissertation. Which in retrospect was a mistake,
because when I finally did some serious university teaching, it kept me from ever
getting a tenured position. All my teaching was as an adjunct.
[When I taught at Penn State] there was no curricular program, just a couple of
courses. I taught film history, I taught film production, I taught some writing courses,
and I also did some stage theater. But the film courses were very successful.
ec: Did Penn State have a film library that you could draw from?
ds: Yes, they had an excellent film library. I don’t know what’s become of it. But, again,
like many land-grant universities, they rented prints of films to schools all over the
state, and for that matter, all over the country. Besides which they had something
that was sponsored, I believe, by the American Psychiatric Association, called the
Psychological [Cinema] Register, a large collection of clinical films. It included things
that were very hard to get otherwise, like Let There Be Light [John Huston, 1946]. And
I had my own collection. We did of course sometimes rent films for my classes at Penn
State, but their film library was vast.
ec: Did it also feature Hollywood product?
ds: It had some Hollywood product. One could get a certain number of Hollywood films
on lease from companies like Learning Corporation of America. There was a company
called Post Pictures that leased films. In fact, I once blew—through Post Pictures—a
whole month’s salary to get a new IB Technicolor print of The Thief of Bagdad [Michael
Powell et al., 1940], which I still have. One could get abridged versions of a lot of
Hollywood features through the Motion Picture Association of America. A division
called Teaching Film Custodians sold versions cut to classroom length and edited to
emphasize various discussion points. For example, they had a version of David Cop-
perfield [George Cukor, 1935] which was about two-thirds the length of the original
film—that’s still ninety minutes long. And four-reel versions of films like The Good
Earth [Sidney Franklin et al., 1937], A Tale of Two Cities [Jack Conway, 1935], a lot of
things based on literary sources. They had a short version of The Ox-Bow Incident
[William Wellman, 1943] under the title Due Process of Law Denied. They were not
suitable for teaching those films as works of art because they weren’t the whole films.

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ec: Were you still collecting films on your own?

ds: Yes, I was. I never really stopped. A couple of times I either gave away or sold most
of my film collection, but I made the mistake of keeping—“Well, I think I’ll keep fifty
films”—so that if somebody comes over, and we decide we want to see a movie,
there’ll be something to look at. But you put those fifty films in a dark room—and
they breed! And soon, there’s a thousand of them again. Then it’s time to dispose
of the collection again. My last big film collection, I deposited at USC [the University
of Southern California] about twenty-one years ago. The understanding is that the
films still belong to me, but they store them at no charge, and they’re free to use
them for classes. The University of Wisconsin has one of my former film collections.
[The University of California, Los Angeles] has another.
ec: You believe in spreading things out.
ds: Let’s just say that I’m sort of conflicted. I don’t believe in surrounding myself with
stuff, but I’m an accumulator. So, there’s an inherent tension in it [laughs].
I was down at USC earlier this week looking for a film that I need and they can’t find.
And standing in this vault with an enormous number of films was very depressing. It
was as if some other person from some other life had invested such passion—not to
mention money—in acquiring all these films, which hadn’t really been in my physical
possession for twenty years. I looked at them and said, “Did I do this? How could
this be? Who was I?” It just seemed as if it was the product of a different mind. For
any collector—a bibliophile, a stamp collector—unless they’re completely possessed
and want to have everything, their collections reflect their nature. I no longer can see
my nature in that collection. But I’m proud that the films are in these schools, and
available, and people get to use them.
ec: So, you don’t have that collector mentality.
ds: I don’t even understand it anymore. My film collection was unusually important to
me. I think at one point it kind of defined who I was. And now I stand there and look
at this mountain of films, and wonder what kind of person I could have been, to have
spent all this money, and have them to be so important to me. And of course, the
films are wonderful. I don’t look at the films and wonder why anybody would want
them; I just wonder why I would want them [laughs].
For Directed by John Ford, we wanted to get one or more of the early John Ford
Universal westerns, which were not to be found in this country. We got one from
Czechoslovakia. That was an interesting story too. It had belonged to some itiner-
ant exhibitor over there, who only had a couple of films. He would travel around in
the summer and show his movies, and in the winter he would reedit them, put new

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Czech titles in them, and present them the next year as different films. . . . But Straight
Shooting [Ford, 1917] we could figure out by the cast. There was a detailed synopsis
that had been deposited by Universal for copyright at the Library of Congress that
we used as the basis; edited the film to follow that story. I wrote title cards for it.
I remember several years later, there was an article published, I believe, in Film
Comment, which discussed Straight Shooting, among other John Ford films, and
how Fordian it was, and how amazingly prescient these titles . . . how it was just like
Ford’s later work [laughs].
ec: Little did they know.
ds: Well, that, of course, was bad archival practice. We tried to present them as facsimile
titles, without indicating that they were new. A mistake I made a number of times. I
guess we made them “Fordian” enough that they passed.
LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART
ec, regarding Shepard’s position at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art: What were
you actually doing?
ds: Planning film programs, arranging for prints of the films, arranging the publicity—all
the stuff that Ian Birnie does today. With the help of Ron Haver [1939–93], of course.
We got retrospective series, which in some ways tied in with a new film the studios
wanted to promote. For example, Alfred Hitchcock had made Family Plot [1976].
Hitchcock [1899–1980] had never won a Best Director Academy Award, so Universal
decided to launch a campaign to get him recognized as the master he was, to see if
they could get him an Oscar. Good idea, but too late [laughs]. With that connection,
and with them paying some of the costs, we were able to get out of Hitchcock himself
the five pictures that he owned. These were absolutely unseeable at that time—Vertigo
[1958], Rear Window [1954], The Man Who Knew Too Much [1956], The Trouble with
Harry [1955], and Rope [1948]. We got the Hitchcock silents from the [British Film
Institute], and Hitchcock loaned us his own prints.
ec: Did you meet him?
ds: Oh, yes, many times. I went to Universal and met Hitchcock in his office. He amazed
me: he recalled every shot in every film he had ever made. And we planned what we
would do, and in what order we would run things, which was not necessarily chrono-
logical; the films that we would show and the films that he would prefer we did not
show. And then he agreed to come to . . .
ec: What films did he prefer you not show?

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ds: I don’t think he wanted us to show Lifeboat [1944], as I recall. He didn’t want us to
show—there was some musical he did—a British musical, I believe it’s called Waltzes
from Vienna [aka Strauss’ Great Waltz, 1934]. He agreed to come down for the open-
ing night of the show and talk to the audience, but he didn’t want it announced in
advance. Nor did we want to announce it, because we had six hundred seats, and
there was no point in creating a stampede. We ran Vertigo, which at that time had
been impossible to see for years. That alone created a stampede. But then at the end,
I remember coming out and saying, “Now, if you stay in your places, you’ll have the
opportunity to ask some questions. Here is Mr. Hitchcock, and here’s Mr. Stewart”
[laughs]. And they came out and sat down and talked for about forty-five minutes. When
it was over, I was walking him back to his car, and he said, “You know, that was very
nice. Would you mind if I came back tomorrow?” [laughs]. “No, as often as you wish.”
We did, I remember, the same thing with George Cukor [1899–1983]. I think in
that case, the new film was Rich and Famous [1981], which was an MGM film, and
they were the most difficult studio to get anything out of. But because of this, they
gave us all their Cukor films, which were most of his best. Cukor came down several
times. I remember standing in the lobby with him before the show and chatting, and
somebody came up to him and said, “Pardon me, aren’t you Max Laemmle?” [laughs].
And he said, “No—name’s Cukor.” “Pardon me?” “Name’s Cukor!” “Ohhhh, how do
you do, Mr. Zukor” [laughs].
THE AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE
ec: So, how long did you teach at Penn State?

ds: About three or four years. There’s an organization called the University Film and Video
Association—in those days it was called the University Film Producers’ Association.
It was really an association of all the production units that were subsidiaries of the
land-grant universities. I went to one of those conferences, and a man named Richard
Kahlenberg was there talking about this new organization called the American Film
Institute [AFI] and all the things it was going to do. Kahlenberg said I should come
to work for the Film Institute, that they wanted me. They were based in Washington.
I went down there, and he’d arranged for me to meet their archivist, Sam Kula [d.
2010]. We got along well, and they hired me. I went home, and then I discovered that
I wasn’t hired after all. There was a new administrator by the name of Mr. [Robert C.]
Goodman. And he hadn’t seen me. And as a matter of principle, nobody got hired
unless he saw them. So, they said I had to come back to Washington so he could

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see me. I came back to Washington, was led into his office, and he looked at me and
said, “Yes, he’ll do” [laughs]. He was proving some sort of a point. But anyway, I left
Penn State to go to work for the AFI in 1968, shortly after it had been organized and
was first getting off the ground.
[The AFI] was such a grand idea. The institute was funded, I think, in 1965, under
President Johnson with some initial start-up funding for planning from the National
Endowment for the Arts. George Stevens Jr. [b. 1932], who had been at USIA [the US
Information Agency] during the late Kennedy and Johnson administrations, was the
director. Originally it was going to have an archive program, a publication program, a
filmmakers grant production program, and an education program. They hired a staff
of people, many of whom didn’t stay very long. But it certainly was a Who’s Who of
my generation in cultural film—the former staff of the early AFI.
ec: Were you hired for a specific area?
ds: Yes. My initial job title was acquisitions manager. At that time, there was a union list
of films, American silent film that had been preserved in archives. It amounted to about
750 titles, which was a little more than one year’s production of the silent days. And
then there was a huge gap, until 1942, when [the Library of Congress] began to accept
nitrate prints of motion pictures for copyright. And the Film Institute was interested,
largely, in filling this gap. Before I got there, someone, probably Kahlenberg, had
come up with a search list of the most important films from this thirty-year period,
from 1912 to 1942, that were deemed to be missing or endangered. In large measure,
it was a public relations gesture, since they knew where many of the films were. Their
first thought was that the AFI was going to collect all these films, announce that they
had saved the American cinema for these thirty years, and the job was done. But they
hadn’t reckoned on Sam Kula and me. We went out and were able, by an agreement
between the institute and the Library of Congress, to represent the library and its
national film collection. And not only did we go to a lot of private collectors all over
the world—enraging the archives of some other countries—but also to the studios.
Our first big deposit was RKO. The RKO rights had been fragmented. But somehow
or other, the burden of owning and caring for the original negatives fell on a French
company, Compagnie d’Entreprises et de Gestion, which was paying storage bills for
these films. But they had a lot of dupe elements in France. They were thrilled to get
out of their storage obligation, and they made a deposit agreement with the Library of
Congress because the material wasn’t theirs to give away. But it was deposited for an
initial period of ten years. The library would accept storage and would have the right
to make preservation copies at its expense, which would belong to the people of the

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United States. That brought us in about 750 feature films. Then the RKO shorts were
owned by somebody else, a man named Jackson [E.] Dube [1922–2002]. And we were
quick to make a deal with Dube to get the RKO shorts. And that was followed by the
entire collection of original negatives of Warner Bros. films, which were deposited by
UA [United Artists], which wanted to take a huge tax break from them, which they did
claim, and which ended up in litigation with the IRS that went on for years and years.
But the negatives came to the Library of Congress. Paramount had a lot of elements
on films which it had sold to MCA–Universal, and the silent pictures, which they still
owned but didn’t care about. Those came to us—we found a lot of them in Fort Lee
[New Jersey], a lot of them at the studio here [in Los Angeles] on Marathon Street, and
a lot of them at the old Paramount Studio on Occidental Boulevard. They all went to
Washington. Columbia gave us their original negatives. And we brought in thousands
of films from individual collectors. I can tell you stories about those until the sun sets.
By the time we got done, this “rescue list”—that’s what they called it—was like a firefly
in the blaze of the noonday sun compared with the films that we brought into the
Library of Congress, about eight thousand titles in the years I was doing that work.
ec: What kind of connections were there, that you could go and talk to these people?
ds: A lot of the connections were people I knew as a private collector who had a net-
work of connections within their country. For example, in England, Kevin Brownlow
[b. 1938] was my lead into things. There was a network of collectors, but it was kind
of underground. They were pretty secretive because there was an organization called
the Kinematograph Renters’ Society, which had among its missions to harass and
prosecute private collectors. In France, there was a man named Jean Gaborit, who
had a company called Les Grands Films Classiques, an art film/revival film distribu-
tor, and we had traded prints. He knew where there was lots of material. We had
connections like that in several countries. There was a man in Germany who had a
Chaplin museum [Wilhelm Staudinger, in Frankfurt]. It was a network of people who
knew each other. We were only interested in American films, American fiction films.
I’m ashamed now to say that I passed by lots of actuality films and newsreels
that I really should have taken in. That’s because our agreement was with the Library
of Congress and the National Archives was supposed to be collecting nonfiction
material. To my regret now, I passed by a lot of collections. For example, we were
offered the Josef Joye Collection, which was in Switzerland, and which fortunately
now has been preserved. But most of the material was of European origin, and
the AFI didn’t want to commit to taking that material in, even though at that point
nobody had expressed any interest in it. And there was quite a lot of decomposition.

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ec: Did the AFI’s mission sort of change in midstream?

ds: Yes, without the Film Institute ever quite exactly acquiescing to it. After I had been
there, doing this for a couple of years, they realized that the material they had was
far beyond their resources. Essentially, they then put a halt on acquisitions. I stayed
with them a while longer, doing other things. They opened a theater, initially at the
National Gallery of Art in Washington, then it moved over to a failed commercial
movie theater on L’Enfant Plaza. And finally, they built their own theater at the Ken-
nedy Center. And I was programming and managing those. I was loaned to KCET [Los
Angeles independent television] for a while to cowrite, with Kevin Brownlow, a series
that was going to be called The American Film Experience, which never got made.
But we were smart enough to get a contract clause that if they didn’t produce these
scripts, they would revert to us after a certain amount of time. Some of those scripts
contributed to the Thames Television series Hollywood.
The institute opened a cinema at the Kennedy Center. I worked with the architects
on the design of that theater, and it was quite an unconventional, nice theater—small.
And done for relatively little money. We also put projectors in the Eisenhower Theater,
which was a large theater intended primarily for legitimate stage productions. Once
the theater at the Kennedy Center was done, of course the L’Enfant Plaza theater was
closed. I planned a gala opening—a month of spectacular programming to open the
Kennedy Center theater.
ec: What year is this?
ds: [It was] 1973, May. I don’t remember all the things we ran, but to me the most excit-
ing thing was Napoléon [Abel Gance, 1927]. Kevin Brownlow had mostly restored it
by that time, but I finished working on it and was responsible for the English title
cards. We had a three-projector system because our idea was to make the theater a
paying proposition by running multiscreen films for tourists that had originally been
produced for the World’s Fair in New York and the World’s Fair in Montreal during the
day, and to run a cinematheque/repertory program at night. So, we had the ability
to run films like To Be Alive! [1964], the Francis Thompson [and Alexander Hammid]
film. We ran the three-strip version. Johnson Wax owned the film and gave it to us. A
beautiful, beautiful film. In any event, I was left to plan this program, and it was going
to be a mix of new and old, foreign and domestic films. One of the films I chose was
State of Siege [1972], directed by Constantin Costa-Gavras. The film was essentially
about the CIA’s collaboration in an assassination in Chile.
ec: And of course, you’re showing it in Washington.
ds: Yes, in a political center. And the institute was dependent on money from the National

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Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities. George Stevens Jr. had been head of
the film section of USIA [before the AFI’s founding] and now it was the Nixon admin-
istration. Anyway, this really hit the fan and ended my employment with the AFI. You
know, somebody had to take the fall, and that was me. It took me years to learn to
think in political terms. And some bad experiences. I had a job offer waiting for me at
Blackhawk Films any time I was free to accept it. I agreed to start there in September.
BLACKHAWK FILMS
ds: Well, I think I can spend five years talking about three years [laughs]. While I was at
the AFI, I’d become friendly with the Blackhawk Films people, who were sitting on lots
of original film elements and were very willing to make them available for preserva-
tion. They offered me a job. I felt that films didn’t really exist if they were simply on
a shelf at the Library of Congress—they had to be in front of people—so I decided I
wanted to go to work for Blackhawk. Besides, it was getting harder and harder to do
stuff below the radar. So, it seemed time to move.
I had developed a relationship with Kent Eastin [1908–81], who had founded the
company in 1927. He had agreed to let us have access to a lot of their 35mm originals
and unique copies of films for preservation and archiving at the Library of Congress.
I used to go to Davenport, Iowa, to visit and select stuff. In fact, I can tell you exactly
the first time that I was in Davenport because it was the day the astronauts landed
on the moon [July 20, 1969]. I watched it on television at the Blackhawk Hotel.
I went to work there in September of 1973. It was kind of a patriarchal company,
the sort of thing that it’s hard to imagine existing today. They had about eighty-five
employees, most of whom were middle-aged women. They worked a four-day week.
They could get very smart, good people, because there were lots of women who
needed a job to get some extra money, but they didn’t really want to be away nine to
five, five days a week. Mr. Eastin was president of the company; his partner, Marty
Phelan [1913–2013], had come to Blackhawk after World War II. He’d been a buyer of
ready-to-wear women’s clothing for Montgomery Ward. But he was a good marketing
man, and Eastin was a film man.
ec: How does a film company like that end up in Iowa?
ds: Well, it didn’t start in Iowa. It started in Galesburg, Illinois. It was a 16mm rental library
originally. And, of course, the degree of success you can achieve in a rental library
depends upon the amount of circulation you can get out of each print. Davenport was
a major railroad junction. Eastin Pictures, as it was then called, was a small company.

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Figure 1. David Shepard at

Blackhawk Films, 1976.
Courtesy of Pamela Wintle.

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But Davenport had a reputation as a 16mm town because of a manufacturing concern

called the Victor Animatograph Corporation. It was founded there in 1910 as an offshoot
of a company that made washing machines—the White Wringer Washing Machine
Company. Alexander Victor came up with the idea of motion picture presentations
in nontheatrical venues. Victor began making 35mm film projectors, lantern slides,
and lantern slide projectors. The lantern slides were rented as sets, so Victor was in
the rental business in Davenport and selling equipment. And then they went—I think
it was early, about 1912—into 28mm, because they were having unfortunate experi-
ences, where 35mm films were blowing up in classrooms and churches.
ec: Not good for business!
ds: They wanted to come up with a safe nontheatrical gauge, and Pathé had introduced
their 28mm KOK system in France. Victor—I guess about 1917—had begun making
28mm equipment and prints in Davenport, based on new nontheatrical, nonflammable
film standards. They also were the very first to market a line of 16mm equipment
introduced in August of 1923, based on the Kodak reversal film, which Kodak had
begun developing about 1917. So, by 1935, which was when Eastin Pictures moved
to Davenport, the place had developed a considerable reputation among nontheatri-
cal users of films and slides as a 16mm town. And one of the reasons Eastin moved
there was to gain legitimacy by being in the same place as the Victor Animatograph
Corporation.
ec: Did you bring in new titles?
ds: Many. We went from about five new releases a month, before I got there, to about
eighteen a month after I had been there a while. I could make deals with Twentieth
Century-Fox for the release of films. Mr. Eastin, growing up in Galesburg, Illinois, had
no experience with foreign films. He wouldn’t have known Einstein from Eisenstein
[laughs]. Of course, a lot of the foreign films were not copyright protected at that time,
so I was able to get very good material. And that did a great deal to establish Blackhawk
as a source in film education, which was really kind of at its peak in the early 1970s.
ec: Were you given a free hand to go after things that interested you, or were you trying
to get things that you thought would be popular?
ds: They were willing to try anything that I wanted to try. But of course, we would track
sales. If things were completely unsuccessful, we would talk about whether to continue
them. But Mr. Eastin’s attitude was that we were all there to make a living and have
fun, but getting the last dime out of life was not our principal objective. For example,
in 1974, I restored fifty Biograph films, to be released in 1975, to celebrate the centen-
nial of the birth of D. W. Griffith. It was soon clear that they were not going to sell very

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many copies. We had a little meeting about it, and Mr. Eastin said, “I think these are
important. We can afford to do something for art every once in a while. Keep at it.”
ec: That’s kind of a running thread—the issue of “art versus commerce”—working with
Blackhawk, and the work you do now.
ds: Well, Mr. Phelan used to say, “If we don’t sell film, we don’t eat” [laughs]. Reduced
to that level, he was absolutely correct. If something came along that we knew would
be just tremendous—that we could get, for example, Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill,
Jr. [Charles Reisner, 1928], which hadn’t been available at all until I was able to land
it at Blackhawk—we were thrilled.
The other lesson that I learned at Blackhawk that I’ve tried to carry through the
rest of my life was—how to put this best?—to maintain a much higher standard of
personal ethics than I heretofore had done. Mr. Eastin and Mr. Phelan were not only
among the smartest men I had ever known but absolutely the most honest. And they
ran their business that way. They were honest with their employees, they were honest
with their suppliers, and above all else, they were honest with their customers. And
if that meant being victimized by customers who were less than honest, they were
happy to accept that penalty. There was nothing about their lives that cut corners or
was shabby. Whereas, in my own previous life, I had certainly done some things that
had cut corners and were shabby. I feel as though maybe the best thing I got out of my
experience at Blackhawk was learning to live to a higher personal standard. And that
particularly served me every day of my life since then. Professionally, it particularly
served me at the Directors Guild, where the people to whom I was responsible—largely
Robert Wise—would tolerate any number of sincere mistakes, but they wouldn’t toler-
ate anything that was cheap or in any way dishonest. So, yes, I learned a lot about
film at Blackhawk. I learned a lot about business.
ec: So, you were acquiring films for the collection.
ds: I was vice president of the company acquiring films for the collection. I was doing
a lot of the writing for the bulletin. I was providing a lot of customer service for spe-
cialized inquiries. I was overseeing the production operation—we had, at one point,
eight people preparing these eighteen films a month. And we were doing a weekly
series for public television out of the Fox Movietone News library called Lowell Thomas
Remembers. I was coproducer of that, along with Jim Jackson from South Carolina
Educational Television, which was the conduit into the PBS system.
ec: What year did Blackhawk come under new management?
ds: [In] 1976. Which was great for Mr. Eastin and Mr. Phelan. They had worked hard at
it for decades, and they were entitled to as much money as they could get. The new

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owners thought to recoup their huge investment. And then, they kind of changed
our basic philosophy. Although we did some films where we knew we weren’t going
to make any money—for the sake of art, as I already said—our general practice was
that we could make anything we wanted if we would recover from gross profits in one
year, the cost of production. And they cut that one year down, first to six months,
then to three months, then to two months. Which radically limited the kinds of things
that we could do. They would rather put out two new releases a month that would be
highly successful than eighteen that would appeal to the broad range of our buyers.
And that took away a great deal of the appeal for me, so I was happy to leave when
I was offered the job at the Directors Guild of America. They came to me; I didn’t go
looking for a job. I probably could have stayed in Davenport longer, or until they
actually canned me.
THE DIRECTORS GUILD OF AMERICA
ds: I came to the guild by sort of a fluke. When I was with the AFI, there was a woman
director named Francine Parker [1925–2007] who had directed a feature documen-
tary film, F.T.A. [1972], with Jane Fonda. Francine was very active in the guild, and
in particular, she was active in trying to promote recognition for Dorothy Arzner
[1897–1979]. I went in there saying, “Well, here I am, and I’m gainfully employed
now, and I have other possibilities as well. But I would really like to work for you, if I
could have these kinds of chances—do this, this, this, this, and this. But if this isn’t
the kind of thing you are interested in, then I’m glad we met, but I’m the wrong guy.”
Well, they had interviewed several other people and every one of them came in saying
“what do you need to have done?” And the committee members said, “Oh, we can do
that?” They were directors, you know; they were used to—at the very least, in their
profession—appearing to know what they wanted [laughs]. So, they were impressed
with the idea that I came in with knowing what I wanted, and that I would take the
job if this is what they wanted too. And that’s how I came to go to work for the guild,
which was a wonderful, wonderful opportunity. And I was there for eleven years,
until I burned out on it and just couldn’t face it anymore. Then, after my successor
was discharged, they offered me basically any deal I wanted if I would come back. I
did that, and I knew by the end of the first week it was a mistake. I just stayed long
enough for them to hire my successor, but I’ve remained active on the committee
that has oversight of the program.
The Directors Guild decided to undertake the kind of educational and cultural

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work that distinguished, say, a medieval craft guild from a labor union. Elia Kazan
[1909–2003] was the architect of the idea. He had written a very long, idealistic letter
about all the things the guild should do, that it wasn’t doing, and that it could accom-
plish. He was on the National Board of Directors—a terrific man. I really respected him
and got to know him very well. Robert Aldrich [1918–83], who was then the president
of the guild, liked the idea, brought it to the board, and the board agreed to do it. But
there was considerable resistance to the idea from Joseph Youngerman [1906–95],
who had been national executive secretary since about 1953. It was really his guild,
in a way. He had run it as a personal fiefdom—all for the benefit of the members,
of course. It was a small operation then; I think there are about 150 staff members
there now. When I was hired, I was number thirteen. Mr. Youngerman was not sup-
portive of the idea of the Special Projects program. Well, the guild had as an adjunct
an Educational and Benevolent Foundation, which functioned essentially to extend
benevolences and gifts here and there. [The beneficiaries] were talented people, but
they couldn’t get work. I lived in Nichols Canyon, and I remember one day there was
a knock at the door, and there was a man selling Neutrogena soap, door to door. He
didn’t know that I knew who he was, but he was Tay Garnett [1894–1977]. I invited
him in for some tea and explained how I’d been just looking for this Neutrogena soap
and hadn’t found it anywhere, and could I buy the whole case?
Robert Wise [1914–2005] saw the value of what Kazan wanted to do and made it
possible by allocating funds to pay my salary through the Educational and Benevolent
Foundation. He believed in me, and he let me design the thing and go with it with
minimal oversight from a very distinguished committee of directors. But the money
was his, even though it was never publicly announced to be such.
We decided on, among our initial projects, an oral history program—which was
done, and which I believe is still carried on today, after twenty-nine years. We also
would send members out to colleges and universities as speakers; we started a
program of educational seminars for members; we organized retrospectives of the
work of distinguished members. We had eight sessions with Orson Welles [1915–85].
He was a very nice man. He had his eccentricities.
ec: What year was this?
ds: Oh, gosh, it must have been about, maybe 1982, or thereabouts. We offered Mr.
Welles—which he accepted—honorary life membership in the Directors Guild. He
was a little wary about it because he didn’t want to be a guild member, in the sense
of being obliged, if he were fortunate enough to get to make another film, to have to
work under union rules. But we assured him that that would not be the case [laughs].

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He’s, of course, a very large man. And to transport him, it required a very large ve-
hicle. But it took two of them because he used to make money by going to Las Vegas
and doing magic shows, and once, the car in which he was riding broke down in the
desert on the way to Las Vegas. He had visions—he couldn’t walk very far—of being
bleached bones out there . . . [laughs] in the desert. So, afterward he insisted that
there always had to be two cars: one in which he would ride and a spare, running
along right behind just in case something went wrong. But he was most affable.
ec: You were in the former Directors Guild of America [DGA] headquarters?
ds: Yes. I left the guild for the first time in 1987, and then came back again in 1989—
and in between that period, somewhere, the new building was built. Before, it was
directly across the street at 7950 Sunset Boulevard; it’s now a parking lot. That
building was built in 1955 and must just have been the bee’s knees architecturally.
To pay for the construction of that building, they had persuaded some of their top
members to direct half-hour television shows, which were sponsored by Kodak. This
was still the days of live television, and Kodak was trying to prove the advantage
of filmed television, which of course was essentially that the programs could be
repeated with no loss of quality, in contrast to kinescopes, where loss of quality
was substantial. So, they did Screen Directors Playhouse. But the guild could not
be both the labor organization representing its members and the producer. So
they were done through Hal Roach Studios. But the guild delivered the directors,
and the directors, in turn, delivered the stars. It’s a very interesting series. For ex-
ample, John Ford did one called “Rookie of the Year,” written by Frank Nugent [aired
December 7, 1955]. John Wayne was happy to star as an opportunity to showcase
his son, Michael Wayne [1934–2003], who at that point was considering a career as
an actor. And along with John Wayne came most of the rest of the John Ford stock
company. It’s this amazing little half-hour John Ford film. Frank Borzage directed
some, Lewis Milestone, I believe; Ida Lupino. That’s how they put up that building.
ec: So, talk about the oral history program.
ds: The program initially focused on directors who were born in 1900 or earlier. There
were about fifty—director members only. We ended up doing some assistant direc-
tors also. They were almost all done by freelance interviewers, who were paid a flat
fee to do the job. Occasionally I would do the interviews, if the member insisted—as
was the case, say, with [H.] Bruce Humberstone [1901–84]—that they only wanted
to talk to me. Many of the best ones were done by Irene Kahn Atkins [1922–83], who
is the daughter of Gus Kahn, the famous songwriter. She grew up in Hollywood and
knew lots of these people for her whole life. I did Henry King myself. Nancy Dowd,

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who wrote Slap Shot [George Roy Hill, 1977] and had worked for King Vidor as a sort
of secretarial assistant when she was in film school, did most of the interview with
Vidor. I finished it up.
ec: How long were the interviews?
ds: Book length. Well, if the people had enough recollection. . . . They had encyclopedia-
sized careers, all of them. But some of them had book-length memories, and some of
them had “short story” memories. The trick in doing these things, we found, was that
these people . . . most of them had been “dining out” on certain particularly outstand-
ing stories for years. So, the interviewer would show up, and of course the subject
wanted to be helpful, or they wouldn’t have agreed. For the first two and a half hours
or so, they would tell all their wonderful “dining out” stories. And then, when the in-
terviewer didn’t get up to leave [laughs], you could start to get at some of the real stuff.
ec: Were there some interviews that didn’t go so well, or you didn’t feel like you really
got past the standard stories?
ds: There were some. I tried very hard to talk Richard Talmadge [1892–1981] into doing
an oral history. And gosh, he’d have had a lot to say. He was extremely nice to me.
He kept taking me to good lunches and saying no [laughs]. And we never recorded a
word with Richard Talmadge. And Humberstone was sort of like Michigan J. Frog in One
Froggy Evening [Chuck Jones, 1955]: I’d go over to his house and he’d have a wonderful
meal prepared, and we would sit, and he would just tell—regale me—with fantastic
stories. And the microphone would come out, and it would be just, “Ribbit” [laughs].
We did one with Wendell Franklin [1916–94], who directed one movie. Wendell
was African American and was working as a parking lot attendant at NBC when
somehow or other George Stevens Sr. [1904–75] took an interest in him and hired
him as an assistant on The Greatest Story Ever Told [1965]. He finally got to direct
one of the first black-cast films, The Bus Is Coming [1971]. He turned out to be a most
interesting man and became a good friend of mine. His parents had managed the
Dunbar Hotel on Central Avenue, which was the best hotel in Los Angeles that would
accommodate people of color. Many, many prominent people stayed there. He grew
up working in the hotel and got to know them. So, he had had an interesting life. I
was always concerned with—what I suppose, to use a word that has become slightly
repugnant to me—“diversity” in the oral history program: to represent all classes of
members, genders.
ec: Do you have any sense of the number of interviews done during your tenure?
ds: Round figure? Forty-five to fifty. But the program certainly carried on after I left. I
was particularly interested in people who went back the furthest and who were lucid.

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Henry King [1886–1982] was amazing. He had begun in films in 1912 and had had
a long stage career before that. He was a viable director into the 1960s. Sharp as a
pin and a great storyteller. I used to meet him for lunch once a week; he lived about
a block away. We would get together and just run movies and talk in between. When
Henry died, his wife said she wanted me to have a keepsake of him, and I could take
any one thing I wanted. I took the Photoplay Gold Medal for Tol’able David as best
film of 1921, which is here in the apartment. I can show it to you.
Oh, and then another thing we did started in 1979 and went on for ten or twelve
years. I had come to the easily verified observation that most people teaching film had
very little practical experience—at least with respect to the industrialized manufacture
of entertainment. We set up what we called the Directors Guild Workshop for Teachers.
The first year, [cinematographer] Lee Garmes [1898–1978] and I did it together. Lee
died in the middle of the workshop, which we did not disclose to the students, the
participants, until the last night. But anyway, we would take in about two dozen film
educators from around the country, schedule special workshops and seminars—a lot
of observations on sets. And a lot of opportunities for them to interact socially with
members of the guild. It went about twelve hours a day for the two weeks. And it was
really a very valuable experience. We would have a well-known director take a scene
from a play and put it up on its feet so that they could see the different approaches to
directing that could be suggested by a text. We would have publicists and distributors
come in to speak to them. We’d run an unreleased film and have several members
of the production team there to discuss it. I know that it had a lot of impact on those
teachers, because a surprising number are still in touch with me, even though I’ve
been gone from the guild for all these years. In general, the Special Projects program
was passing on knowledge from one generation to another: making guild members
accessible to the interested community of people, inspiring pride in the work that
members did, and providing upgrades in skills. There were a lot of very conservative
members of the guild who didn’t understand that a Special Projects program would
do them any good; they thought it was just going to cost them money.
I’d already committed to leave the DGA. It must have been in May or June of 1987,
and I started teaching at USC that fall. I had been teaching at USC occasionally since
1982, when they implored me to come in at very short notice to cover for Arthur Knight
[1916–91], who had had a heart attack and was in the hospital. And I really loved
it. I had to be talked into it. I didn’t want to do it. But once I actually did it, it was a
wonderful experience. I liked the students so much that I was sorry when Knight got
better and came back to work [laughs]. And that kind of led to my continuing to do it

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until I became 80 percent time at USC, in 1987, which was also the year that I started
Film Preservation Associates.
FILM PRESERVATION ASSOCIATES
ec: You mentioned John Griggs screening Orphans of the Storm for the Gishes.
ds: Yes, I also saw Way Down East [D. W. Griffith, 1920]. It was [cameraman] Billy Bitzer’s
original tinted print, which turned out to be one of the sources for the Museum of
Modern Art’s preservation.
ec: Just in passing, you mentioned the one time you met Keaton.
ds: Yes. I met Keaton once, Chaplin once, and Lloyd once.
ec: Why don’t you talk a little bit about each one of those.
ds: Well, Keaton was appearing in New York in a play, I believe it might have been Three
Men on a Horse. Of course, he had been through a great deal of adversity since his
silent film halcyon days. Mr. Griggs was also in the play. He invited Keaton out to
see some of his films and asked me to be the projectionist, in return for which, of
course, I could mingle and be part of the event. He ran The Navigator for Keaton, who
[laughs], as you would expect, didn’t laugh at all! Although I think he thought that it
was quite good. But he was on the whole quite a dour fellow.
ec: What year was this?
ds: This would have been about 1954. Since he said very little, I don’t have much to say
about that [laughs]. Chaplin: I was in school in France and read in the newspaper—this
would have been 1964—that he was vacationing with friends at Cagnes-sur-Mer. I
was twenty-three, and I thought, “Well, how could I be on the Earth together with
Charlie Chaplin [1889–1977] for twenty-three years and not even try to meet him?” So,
I wrote a letter to the people who were his hosts and explained that I was an American
student, I loved his work, I was there in the area, and if it would be at all possible, I
would love the opportunity to meet Mr. Chaplin. Naïveté sometimes gets you a long
way. I got a note back saying that if I was available on such and such a date—I don’t
remember the exact date—Mr. Chaplin would be very happy to take me to breakfast
at the Hotel Carlton in Nice. I consulted my social secretary and decided I could be
available [laughs]. I showed up, and indeed, he was there. I think the reason he was
willing to meet me was simply because he’d been away from the States for a long
time by then and he wanted to find out what young American people were thinking
of. And he foolishly assumed [laughs] . . .
ec, laughs: . . . that you were representative of that!

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ds: Exactly! That I was typical. And of course, I was anything but typical. I later found
out that the way he behaved with me was the way he behaved with other people. He
could carry on a brilliant conversation about any subject whatsoever for about fifteen
minutes, and then that would exhaust what he knew about that subject, and he’d
move on to some other. He discovered that I was a philosophy major, so naturally,
he wanted to talk about philosophy. And we talked about Rousseau for a little while
until we had mutually used that up! [laughs]. And then moved on to other things, but
I couldn’t get him to talk about films at all. The thing that I remember about him was
that he was dressed in a linen suit with a matching, sort of floppy, hat, that covered
most of his face. He was wearing sunglasses and had a paisley cravat so you really
couldn’t see much of his face. What you could really see were his hands. Everything
he said, he paralleled with his hands. He pantomimed all of his speech. So, what
I can really remember about meeting Chaplin was that the conversation in the end
was completely inconsequential insofar as I was concerned, because I wanted to talk
about his movies, and he wanted to talk about . . .
ec: . . . anything but.
ds: Right [laughs]. Later, I got to know the family and his children, and it turned out
that he was not tired of talking about his movies. He used to run them for his kids all
the time and talk about them. And he would laugh at them harder than anyone else
[laughs]. Unlike Buster Keaton.
Then, I met Harold Lloyd [1893–1971] when I was working at the AFI, and [Sam
Kula and] I went up to his house. We wanted him to be sort of a figurehead for a public
relations effort that we were trying to organize in Hollywood about film preservation.
Lloyd took us on tour of his house, which was sort of like Miss Havisham’s in Great
Expectations. At that point, I don’t think it had even been dusted since 1960. The
Christmas tree was permanently set up in the library, with all its ornaments. And he
had a pipe organ in there. He was not, in any sense, a male Norma Desmond, but
the house would have done Norma Desmond credit. He received us very courteously
but declined to be part of the campaign. I found out a week or so later that he had
just been told that day that he had advanced cancer. So that wouldn’t have been a
typical day for him. But we did get along, and he invited me to contact him again
when I came to LA.
ec: How about the Gishes?
ds: Oh, I met Lillian [1893–1993] several times, Dorothy [1898–1968] that once only.
Lillian—she was always, of course, used to being asked questions about her experi-
ences, particularly with Griffith and Victor Sjöström. But she didn’t really remember

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much, and she sort of had potted answers researched for her by [William K.] Bill
Everson [1929–96]. Or she would refresh her memory by rereading Life and Lillian
Gish [1932] by Albert Bigelow Paine. I can remember, for example, when we ran Or-
phans of the Storm, [she asked], “Is that 35 or 36mm film, Mr. Griggs?” Lillian Gish!
Who was practically there when movies were invented! And she would say, “You
know, Mr. Griffith always used to let us edit our own films.” And there may be indeed
some truth to it, because Mr. Griffith did indeed have her direct a film, and he was
supervising the work of others. She wasn’t in any sense dotty, but she would say
what she thought you wanted her to say, what you wanted to hear. I can remember
being with her on several occasions when films were being run that I knew she had
seen three weeks ago, and she’d say, “Oh, this is the first time I’ve seen this since
1919” [laughs]. She was an actress, and even if her audience consisted of one, she
wanted very much to please them.
The idea for Film Preservation Associates came to me as a phone call from [Theo-
dore B.] Ted Ewing, who was the president of Blackhawk Films after I left. I didn’t like
him much, and he didn’t much like me, either, but we maintained a certain level of
professional cordiality. Anyway, he rang up one day when I was working at DGA and
said, “We’ve sold the business to Republic Pictures. We’re going to close the building.
Do you want the equipment?” When I tell this story, I always say that now I know how
teenagers get pregnant: it’s so easy to say yes [laughs]. So, I said yes. And he said,
“Well, we’re just going to sell it for scrap; you can have it.” And I said, “Well, I’ll pay
you what the scrap dealer would have paid.” We found a little building at 8307–8309
San Fernando Road [in Sun Valley, California]. I subsequently bought from Richard
Dayton at YCM 35mm and 16mm Bell & Howell continuous contact printers for mak-
ing release prints. So, we had all this equipment and this big debt from the building
[laughs], and modifying the building, and modifying the optical printer, so that it
would do more than 8mm.
At that point, I went into a sort of a moonlighting business doing film restoration
work. Dick May was kind enough to feed me work from Turner. I was able to pay off
the building, after which I stopped doing work for outside clients. We also had, by the
way, a six-plate 35/16mm [Intercine Universale] which was the Italian version of the
Steenbeck—more suitable for working with old film than the Steenbeck, because one
can thread it many ways, to deal with shrunken film. The Directors Guild had some
nitrate film storage cabinets, which they were happy to give to me, so that I could
keep nitrate under approved conditions. This was in mid-1986.
I was doing this a little bit at a time, when I could spring some time during my

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last year with the guild and my first couple of years at USC. Then Phil Kromnick from
Republic called and said, “We have this library of Blackhawk films. It’s no use to
us. Would you like to buy it?” And I said, “Well, yes, I’d like to buy it, but I’m sure
that its value is far beyond my means.” Fortunately for me, they had already moved
everything, at their expense, to California. It was stored somewhere out in the [San
Fernando] Valley, all boxed up just the way we had it in Davenport, so I could find my
way around it effortlessly. I looked at what they had and added up in my mind what
I thought it was worth, and of course it came out just as I suspected—far beyond my
means. So, I didn’t do anything about it. And Phil called again about two months later
and said, “What’s the matter, you don’t want our films?” [laughs]. And I said, “Well,
yes, but . . .” and explained the situation. I said, “Maybe I could lease the films, with
an option to buy them.” I had a couple of meetings with an extremely unpleasant lady
attorney at Republic and decided that no films were worth continuing dealing with
her. So, I dropped it. And then Phil called again and said, “What’s gonna happen?”
So, I explained. He said, “Well, make an offer. You might be surprised.” I said, “Well,
alright, I’ll get back to you.” And I sort of looked over what kind of money I could get
my hands on and I called up and made an offer. He said, “Well, that’s an awfully low
offer!” [laughs]. I said, “Well, I understand, but this is the money that I have.” He
said, “Can you come up with another twenty-five thousand dollars?” And I said, “I
could come up with another twenty-five thousand dollars, if that would do it.” So I
said, “Well, then, you have a deal.” And we did it: a one-page bill of sale.
Republic didn’t know what they had. They had been apparently told by many
people that the only person who really knew his way around the stuff, enough to do
anything with it, was me. And that’s why they kept coming back to me. They were very
nice to me, I must say, except for this lawyer, whom I never had to deal with again.
Anyway, that’s how I got the library.
I called it Film Preservation Associates because we were well into the video revolu-
tion in April of 1989. I felt that film would always best be seen on a screen. People who
wanted to get archival film to show on a screen deserved the opportunity to do so. So
we decided we would keep selling 16mm prints. Which we still do, if anybody wants
any. But, of course, what I really wanted to do was to go into the business of produc-
ing nice editions of silent films for video using the Blackhawk library as the basis.
I went to Don Krim [1945–2011] in New York, who owns Kino International, and who
had been a friend of mine since he was heading the nontheatrical division of UA. Don
knew the Blackhawk library because we had talked about doing some distribution
together, although it never happened. And when Don got the rights to the Chaplin

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feature films and wanted to do a tour of them—which he called “Chaplin: Lost and
Found”—he wanted to include the Mutuals. This was about 1983. Blackhawk had the
Mutual material, which I had bought for them from Teleprompter, which had taken
over Commonwealth Pictures, which had kept itself alive on those films for decades.
But Blackhawk wouldn’t deal with Don. They were very nice, Midwestern people, but
they were essentially suspicious of anyone they didn’t already know, afraid they were
going to be “sharp” people who would take advantage of them. But they would deal
with me, because they knew me. I went to Blackhawk, made the deal, licensed the
Mutual films, and Don guaranteed the money.
When I had the chance to get to the rest of the library, I went and saw Don in New
York and asked him whether he thought he could guarantee, over a certain number
of years, a certain amount of money if we did video editions that were distributed
through Kino. And he said yes. I found somebody in Denmark who was interested
in handling the films in Europe. He agreed to put up seventy-five thousand dollars
toward the purchase. Anyway, between putting various things together, we came up
with the money. It was essentially by following the Joseph E. Levine pattern of . . .
ec and ds: Preselling!
ds: Preselling the territory [laughs]. That’s what got it going. Of course, it turned out to
be a wonderful investment—a business investment in terms of getting these films
into people’s hands and, ultimately, into the public-benefit institution of the Academy
Film Archive. Had Republic not sold the films to me—the company soon after that was
sold to Aaron Spelling Productions, and that became part of Viacom, and that became
part of Paramount. So, I suppose those films today, if they still existed at all, would be
somewhere inside Paramount, where nobody would even know that they had them.
ec: Do you have a specific idea of how many titles, or how many items, you acquired
[for FPA]?
ds: Oh, yes. I think there were, in the end, maybe twenty-three hundred films. But sub-
sequently, we added a lot of individual films. For example, I took over the rights to
about twenty British documentaries from Radim Films in Chicago. In recent years, I
bought Murray Glass’s negatives—another eighteen hundred films. The Essex Film
Club/Bob Lee negatives added about 420 films. It’s now up to five thousand or so
films. It was culturally worthwhile. I probably believed in it more than any of the things
I had done since my early days gathering films for the Library of Congress on behalf
of the AFI. I don’t know how long those films are going to stay in distribution, and I
certainly don’t have the appetite to do everything all over again in high definition, but
at least I know that those films are going to be preserved at the Academy Film Archive.

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ec: Now, of course there’s no “typical” project, but how does a project begin, how does
it develop?
ds: Pick one.
ec: The Phantom of the Opera [Rupert Julian, 1925].
ds: Well, The Phantom of the Opera is one of those warhorse films that they used to call
“mortgage lifters” in the days of stock company theater. And like the Chaplin Mutuals,
we’ve kept upgrading it and doing it over. When Blackhawk first put out The Phantom
of the Opera, it was from 16mm material that came from Paul Killiam. Later, we got
35mm material—as you know, it’s in your archive—a very nice fine-grain master of it.
We then recorded that with Gaylord Carter, but it was done, essentially for film sales,
which meant 24 fps, which is too fast. But 18 fps is way too slow.
Then the opportunity came along to work with the Cinémathèque Québécoise,
which commissioned a score from Gabriel Thibaudeau for orchestra and voice. His
wife, Claudine Côté, is a soprano, and since the film includes operatic arias which are
seen on the stage, he put in some parts for Claudine. And I must say, it turned this
corny old melodrama into something of real operatic grandeur; his score is superb.
I am so pleased with that version of the film that I can’t imagine that I’ll be revisiting
The Phantom of the Opera.
Now one interesting story is the color sequence. We had the whole film in black
and white. There originally had been two or three sequences in color. When I was at
Blackhawk, we got a letter from this man in Buffalo, New York. He wrote that he had
this piece of color film from The Phantom of the Opera, 35mm nitrate—no use to him,
but would we be interested in it? Maybe we could send him a couple of comedies
that he could show for free to children. Well, it turned out to be an unused imbibition
print of the bal masqué sequence. It had never been cut into a print of the feature. So
that’s where we got the color sequence, which we’ve used and lots and lots of people
have copied. No sagacity behind it at all; it was just blind luck.
ec: Are there things you would want to do, personally, but you don’t think they would
sell very well?
ds: I do films that I know are going to lose money—say, Tol’able David. It was one of the
earliest silent films I saw and it has a huge emotional impact on everyone who opens
themselves up to it. I also became good friends with Henry King.
ec: And you have the Photoplay Gold Medal!
ds: And I have the Gold Medal. I had most of an original nitrate print, the one tinted
sequence, and a 35mm dupe negative of the entire film. The rest of it was black and
white. I knew I could put good film material together and get the speed right.

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In 2000, when I turned sixty, I sold—but the deal was that I essentially gave—the
films [deposited at the Academy] to Lobster Films in Paris: Serge Bromberg and Eric
Lange. I continue to be paid for the films out of earnings from the library, and I will
continue to receive money until I’m seventy-five, if I live that long. But ownership of
the films passed to them. And one of the conditions of the sale was that the films do
not leave the country, except for temporary loans. The idea in my mind was always
that the films would stay at the Academy.
But we now have become, instead of a sort of manufacturing and film sales opera-
tion, a kind of video production and licensing operation under the name. And “the
Associates” have changed from “employees” to “my alter ego” to “my colleagues in
Paris.” Film Preservation Associates is now a California corporation, but the officers
are Bromberg and Lange, who are in Paris. I’m the secretary, so I can sign contracts.
And the treasurer is a certified public accountant in Burbank, who handles all the
money. Of course, it was originally owned by my wife and me, and we divorced. One
of the conditions we agreed upon was that I would retain anything to do with film.
ec: Why don’t you just talk a little bit about Unseen Cinema?
ds: Unseen Cinema is largely the work of Bruce Posner, who has many years of passion
for, and experience in, avant-garde film—as a filmmaker and as a presenter of film. He
came up with the idea of gathering the early history of avant-garde film as a touring
series of programs that he and Brian Taves had brought to the Pordenone Silent Film
Festival. I believe it was in 1999. We went out to dinner and I started talking about
all these films that I thought should have been in this program, that he didn’t even
know existed. And I said, “You know, this would make a fabulous DVD” [laughs].
Bruce worked through Anthology Film Archives and had the curatorial responsibility.
He was the cook, and I simply brought some of the ingredients. But we did have an
agreement that it would then go to DVD and that I would have the final say over it. I
began to gradually appreciate that we had done something which was unique as well
as enormous. But Image Entertainment thought this was going to be charity, that they
were doing this to amuse me [laughs]. And I didn’t think that there was ever going to
be a chance of making a dime out of it, and I’m not sure yet that there will ever be a
dime made from it. But I do know that it’s an accomplishment that I’m very proud of
having been part of, because it has restored to view—and cheap access—a hundred
films that people never thought existed. I’m assured repeatedly by the reviews that
it has completely rewritten the history of experimental film in the United States.
ec: Certainly the award that the LA Film Critics gave, and . . .
ds: . . . many others: the National Society of Film Critics gave it an award. It was on virtu-

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ally every ten best list you can think of. That happened before, with The Art of Buster
Keaton in 1995, because those films had been almost unseen. Raymond Rohauer
[1924–87] owned them and kept them on quite a short leash. And only after Rohauer
died did it suddenly become possible to do something with the Keaton films. They had
a huge splash. And the other things that I’ve done that have surprised people, have
made a big splash: some Soviet films that are not well known. But Unseen Cinema
has made the biggest splash [laughs].
Ed Carter has been the documentary curator of the Academy Film Archive
since 1994. He curated the Academy’s first complete retrospective of Oscar-
winning documentaries, Oscar’s Docs, from 2005 to 2010. He has organized
the acquisition of hundreds of “orphaned” original negatives of independent
films from DuArt Film Labs in New York and collaborated on a similar proj-
ect from Deluxe Labs in Los Angeles.

71.45.78.194 on Wed, 05 Apr 2023 16:44:20 UTC

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David Shepard: Excerpts from an Oral History

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Excerpts from an Oral History

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COLLEGE AND COLLECTING

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ec: Were you still collecting films on your own?

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LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART

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THE AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE

ec: So, how long did you teach at Penn State?

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ec: Did the AFI’s mission sort of change in midstream?

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Figure 1. David Shepard at

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But Davenport had a reputation as a 16mm town because of a manufacturing concern

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THE DIRECTORS GUILD OF AMERICA

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FILM PRESERVATION ASSOCIATES

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