It's not always about Oscar
Year-round activities indicate the Acad has other things on its mind
But the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences is a versatile operation, lending the considerable heft of its reputation and resources to all sorts of ventures and activities.
Inevitably, the focus is on movies and the people who make them, whether it's giving money for preserving vintage motion pictures, holding lectures on screenwriting or producing, sponsoring far-flung film festivals, or staging exhibits of movie memorabilia, photography, costumes or set decoration.
"We're trying to preserve the memory of this industry as well as provide information to help it continue to thrive," says Linda Mehr, director of the Academy's Margaret Herrick Library, the repository of at least 26,000 books, seven million photos and 21,000 posters going back to the first days of Hollywood. (See separate story.)
The Academy's Nest Egg
The Academy Foundation runs most of the activities. It gets its funding -- like almost everything the Academy does -- from the money paid by ABC Television for the rights to broadcast the Oscar show, $46 million this year alone.
The Academy also collects dues from its 6,300 members, sells tickets to special events, and rents out its two elegant theaters -- the largest seats 1,012 people -- for premieres, seminars and the like.
"We receive a large amount of money from ABC, and the feeling is that we should give some of it back to the film community," says Greg Beal, who supervises grant programs. These include the Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting, film festival sponsorships and the recently announced Academy Film Scholars program, under which two scholars are given $25,000 to pursue a project.
The Academy is also in publishing, putting out annual tomes including the Players' Directory and the 450-page Index of Motion Picture Credits, both driven by what Academy publicity coordinator Leslie Unger laughingly calls a "ridiculously obsessive sense of accuracy."
Founded in 1927 as a non-profit corporation with Douglas Fairbanks Sr. as its first president, the Academy held its inaugural awards show two years later. Over time, it began establishing its presence in other arenas of the industry.
Collecting with a Vengeance
One of the Academy's most important endeavors has been establishing a film archive that preserves the country's motion picture heritage. More than 15,000 films and videos have been collected, including works by D.W. Griffith, the Lumiere brothers, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, as well as the personal collections of Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Drew, Sam Fuller, John Huston and Sam Peckinpah.
The silent period is covered in the Blackhawk Collection, while the Academy War Film Collection has become a valuable historical resource.
The archive is trying to obtain prints of every film nominated for an Oscar, and is also seeking original negatives of certain movies to ensure their preservation.
Already, Best Picture winners "In the Heat of the Night" and "Oliver" have been restored, as have nine features by Indian director Satyajit Ray and Frank Capra's "The Matinee Idol," among others.
Much of the archive's work is being done in collaboration with the Intl. Federation of Film Archives, the Assn. of Moving Image Archivists and the National Film Preservation Foundation.
Once restored, the Academy often shows the results to the public. On Nov. 14, for example, the Academy's "Treasures of American Film Archives" included works held by the Library of Congress ("The Smoke Fairy," from 1909), the Smithsonian Institution (Groucho Marx's home movies, circa 1933), and the George Eastman House ("The Fall of the House of Usher," 1928).
To Preserve and Protect
The archive has responded to what it calls a crisis in the preservation of non-fiction film by teaming up with the Intl. Documentary Association to collect, preserve and study more than 2,000 documentaries On Dec. 5, the Academy and the UCLA Film and Television Archive, as part of their extensive Contemporary Documentary Series, screened "Keepers of the Frame," which examines the preservation of newsreels, experimental and ethnographic films and home movies.
The documentary also includes a striking sequence that captures the final seconds of decomposition of a nitrate print even as technicians try to save it.
But the Academy also has an eye to the future, in its support of indie film fests.
Some $250,000 is to be split among 14 festivals next year, including Sundance, Telluride, Taos, L.A. Independent, the Hot Springs (Ark.) Documentary Festival and the Pan African Film Festival.
"Clearly most festivals appreciate the connection with the Academy," says Beal, who recalls that Acad exec helmer Bruce Davis' visit to Telluride in 1998 prompted the organization's interest in festivals.
"It's in keeping with the general ideals of the Academy in supporting films and filmmakers to get in front of the public, where the public might not ordinarily be able to see them," Beal says.
Another attempt at encouragement is the Student Academy Awards, which look nothing like Oscars but which have launched many nascent Spielbergs over the past 27 years.
"It's done to encourage college filmmakers in the hopes that they'll go on to a career," says Richard Miller, who administers the awards.
A Forum for Players
In a similar vein but casting a wider net, the Academy invites the public to lectures and seminars by industry figures. This summer, Michael Mann, Katherine Bigelow, Gregory Nava, Steven Soderbergh and Jon Turteltaub made appearances as part of a five-week series focusing on directors.
In the past few weeks, a four-session seminar on executives drew Joe Roth, John Calley, Bill Mechanic, Chip Diggins, Tom Sherrick, Terry Press, Tom Bernard and Barbara Boyle.
On Dec. 7, writer-director Kevin Smith ("Clerks," "Dogma") delivered the Marvin Borowsky Lecture on Screenwriting, an annual event that has featured Billy Wilder, Robert Towne, Lawrence Kasdan, Richard Brooks, Bo Goldman and Ron Bass.
Alison Trope, program coordinator of education and special projects, says she and Ellen Herrington, who is in charge of exhibits and tributes, invite high-school students to the Academy twice a year "to talk to them about media literacy and how the media uses its message," with the emphasis, of course, on motion pictures.
The students sometimes get a special showbiz treat. In the last few years, Dustin Hoffman showed up to screen and discuss "Wag the Dog" and Warren Beatty did the same with "Bulworth."
The Academy is nothing if not connected.
