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The Hollywood research library: visual knowledge in the Republic of Images

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The Hollywood research library: visual knowledge in the Republic of Images

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Content The Hollywood Research Library:
Visual Knowledge in the Republic of Images
by
Aaron Rich
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CINEMATIC ARTS (CRITICAL STUDIES))
August 2020
Copyright 2020 Aaron Rich
ii

Of course, the Encyclopedic image is always clear; but in a deeper region of
ourselves, beyond the intellect, or at least in its profile, certain questions are born
and exceed us.

—Roland Barthes, “The Plates of the Encyclopedia”

The function of the research department is to give a third dimension, that of depth,
to a two-dimensional world.

—Dr. James T. Shotwell, “Research Work in Motion Picture Production”

iii
Acknowledgments
Before I arrived in the Cinema and Media Studies division at the University of Southern
California I was somewhat directionless, though I was curious to investigate the connections
between Hollywood movies and material culture studies. Once I got to campus, a colleague
suggested that because of my interests, I might be interested in a course in the Visual Studies
Graduate Certificate program and that I should try to meet the program’s director, Vanessa
Schwartz. When I found the time to speak with her, she identified how many of my ideas were
worthwhile to pursue, despite my worries they were too unusual or insignificant. To say this
project would not have been successful without Vanessa would be typical of such an
acknowledgment, but would also miss the point of working with her. Vanessa has helped me see
how middlebrow visual and material culture that circulated through the world for the past two
centuries has never been less important than highbrow elements and, more importantly, these
popular details have actually been the heroes of the story. She has been a direct and careful
reader, a tireless guide, and has always pushed me to squeeze more detail out of every idea. I’m
grateful to have joined her intellectual family of scholars and advisees.
Beyond the Cinema department, the Visual Studies Research Institute has been my home
at USC. I’m proud that my dissertation is a classic VSRI/VSGC project that examines the way
people have historically encountered images and how the different media in which these pictures
have appeared was irrelevant to most viewers. I enjoyed and benefited from VSGC courses
taught by Steve Ross, Laura Isabel Serna, Akira Lippit, Amy Ogata, Megan Luke, and Daniela
Bleichmar; I’ve also learned so much from the visits by amazing scholars who came to school
discuss their work—while eating tacos. I’m most grateful to the summer course led by W.J.T.
Mitchell, who has been as generous an intellectual counsellor as he is a brilliant thinker and I feel
iv
lucky to have been able to work with him. I have also appreciated doctoral courses taught by
Tara McPherson, Michael Renov, Ellen Seiter in the USC Cinema and Media Studies division as
well as MA courses taught by Anna McCarthy, Dana Polan, and Bill Simon in the NYU Cinema
Studies department.
I am grateful for several summers of research funding from the VSGC, along with the
Harry Ransom Center Dissertation Fellowship for Research in the Humanities, which allowed
me time to explore their seemingly endless collections in Austin. The Mellon-Sawyer Graduate
Fellowship in Visual History offered me time to explore history on film and to collaborate with
many scholars, including the program’s post-doc Allan Doyle, who helped me understand the
importance of nineteenth-century art in twentieth-century popular culture. The Mellon-USC
Humanities in the Digital World Fellowship also allowed me a generous two years of funding to
finish my dissertation. This project would not have been possible without the generosity of
several Hollywood librarians who allowed me access to their research collections and explained
their work to me, including Lisa Jackson and Joel Parham of the Fox Research Library, Leighton
Bowers of the Western Costume Company Research Library, Barbara Hall of the Art Directors
Guild Archive, Debbie Fine and Miki Bulos of the George Lucas Research Library, Margaret
Ross formerly of the Universal Research Library, and Lillian Michelson.
My most important friends and colleagues from graduate school have been classmates
VSGC courses. I am grateful for the intellectual and emotional support of these friends and have
loved the many lunches, dinners, holidays, and weddings we have celebrated together. Steven
Samols, Simon Judkins, Jonathan Dentler, Grant Johnson, Frances Lazare, Isabel Wade, and
Francesca Piazzoni have been my most reliable cohort. I have also appreciated the support of the
small group of cinema scholars who met at various coffeeshops on the East Side, including Erin
v
Hill, Dawn Fratini, and Ross Melnick.
To list the many friends who have helped me get through this process would take too
many pages, so I will simply thank the three most significant. Michael Giltz has been a reliable
near-spouse for nearly two decades; his humor and endless interest in visual culture and the
weird stuff of the world has been invaluable. Carmela Manoli has been a professional and
emotional rock for me; her taste and knowledge is inspiring. Miranda Murray has been the most
important librarian I have known and has always been incredibly supportive of my decision to
return to grad school and find happiness in life. Thank you to all three.
My parents have always been amazingly supportive and loving. They have always
believed in me, even when others, including myself, did not. My graduate career was bookended
by two key interactions with them. First, my father, Harvey, got me thinking about graduate
work when he asked me what I loved to do and what I was good at. When I responded that I
liked and was “good at” watching movies, he said that was great and told me to think less
practically about getting a job when I was done. “It will all work out,” he told me. This small act
of privilege allowed me to see there was a possibility for happiness in changing my career after
more than a decade away from college. About nine years later, as I was finishing this
dissertation, my mother, Jane, became my proofreader. More than a clever way of seeing what I
had been working on, it was a massive help that brought me across the finish line. My brother,
Josh, has always been my best friend and has supported me immensely over the past six years in
Los Angeles. I relish our frequent texts and our dinners together. I look forward to more free
time that I can spend with Erica, Lucy, and you in the years to come.
Finally, and most importantly, I am grateful to my wife, Rachel. Before our first date, she
told me she had a doctorate in theater and asked me what I was studying in film history. I
vi
explained my project to her and she laughed and said, “you’re basically studying dramaturgs,” to
which I said, “yes, but that nobody in the world of Cinema knows what they are!” Of course she
did, as that had been her erstwhile career, and because her knowledge is endless and always
growing. Rachel has been the most important dramaturg of this project, and has been my most
important discussant, therapist, ally, defender, and reader. Spending time in our home and in our
travels around the world has been the greatest joy of my life. I know we will continue talking
about food, travel, design, and tile for many decades to come. Rachel, you make every second
worth a third. I love you endlessly.

vii
Table of Contents

Epigraphs ......................................................................................................................................... ii

Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................................... iii

List of Figures ............................................................................................................................... viii

Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... xiii

Introduction Picture Collections and the Cinematic Dispersion of Visual Knowledge .................. 1

Chapter One: Antiquarians, Artists, Librarians, and Art Historians: Picture Collections as
Dictionaries of the World .................................................................................................. 23
Photography and Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture ....................................................... 27
Public Libraries and Picture Collections ........................................................................... 36
Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne ................................................................................... 47

Chapter Two: ‘Pictures and Sketches of Everything Under the Sun’: Early Hollywood
Research, 1908-1928” ....................................................................................................... 52
Foundational Cinematic Research ..................................................................................... 56
A Research Library Moves West ...................................................................................... 62
Visual Research in Early Hollywood ................................................................................ 66
Library Science in Hollywood ........................................................................................... 85

Chapter Three: Pictures as Thoroughly Indexed Data: The Growth of Research in Classical
Hollywood, 1929-1969 .................................................................................................... 102
The Work of Research ..................................................................................................... 106
The Research Bible .......................................................................................................... 117
A Multitude of Research Sources .................................................................................... 124
Illustrated Magazines and Images Out of Context .......................................................... 133
The Quo Vadis Research Bible ....................................................................................... 145
The Afterlife of the Bible ................................................................................................ 151

Chapter Four: The Reconfiguration of Cinematic Knowledge: From the Research Network
to the Cinematic Image Archive, 1969-1974 .................................................................. 156
The Fabricated Cinematic Image Functions as Factual ................................................... 160
The Lot on the Block and a “Spectacular Grossness” ..................................................... 167
“Boy! Do We Need it Now!”: Archive and Compilation ................................................ 189

Epilogue: Collecting Treasure and Sharing Knowledge ............................................................. 205

Bibliography ................................................................................................................................ 212

Appendix A: Figures ................................................................................................................... 233

viii
List of Figures

0.1 Organizational Chart of Typical Hollywood Studio ............................................................. 233
0.2 Organizational Chart of Twentieth Century-Fox Studio, circa late-1930s ............................ 234
1.1 Vasari Portrait of Michelangelo ............................................................................................ 235
1.2 Vasari Portrait of Cimabue .................................................................................................... 236
1.3 Vasari Portrait of Giotto ........................................................................................................ 236
1.4 Strada Numismatic Blanks .................................................................................................... 237
1.5 Strada Numismatic Blanks .................................................................................................... 237
1.6 Études d’après nature ............................................................................................................ 238
1.7 “The Snake Charmer” by Jean-Léon Gérôme ....................................................................... 239
1.8 Photograph of Topkapi Palace by Abdullah Frères ............................................................... 239
1.9 “Ave, Imperator, morituri te salutant” by Jean-Léon Gérôme .............................................. 240
1.10 “Pollice Verso” by Jean-Léon Gérôme ............................................................................... 241
1.11 “Pollice Verso” in the Illustrated London News ................................................................. 242
1.12 Sunlight Detail in Gérôme Painting .................................................................................... 243
1.13 Sunlight Detail in ILN Print ................................................................................................. 243
1.14 Gladiator Chest Definition Detail in Gérôme Painting ....................................................... 243
1.15 Gladiator Chest Definition Detail in ILN Print ................................................................... 243
1.16 Picture Collection of Newark Public Library ...................................................................... 244
1.17 Newark Museum of Art Gallery on Top Floor of Newark Public Library .......................... 245
1.18 Warburg Mnemosyne Atlas Panel 48 .................................................................................. 246
1.19 Warburg Mnemosyne Atlas Panel 48 Detail ....................................................................... 247
1.20 Warburg Mnemosyne Atlas Panel 48 Detail ....................................................................... 247
1.21 Warburg Mnemosyne Atlas Panel 48 Detail ....................................................................... 248
1.22 Warburg Mnemosyne Atlas Panel 48 Detail ....................................................................... 248
2.1 Intolerance Scrapbook Cover ................................................................................................ 249
2.2 The Birth of a Nation “An Historical Facsimile” Appomattox Court House Title Card ...... 250
2.3 The Birth of a Nation “An Historical Facsimile” Lincoln Assassination Title Card ............ 250
2.4 Appomattox Court House Tableau Vivant in The Birth of a Nation ..................................... 251
2.5 Source Image of Appomattox Surrender from Porter’s Campaigning with Grant ............... 251
2.6 Ford’s Theater in The Birth of a Nation ................................................................................ 252
2.7 Source Image of Ford’s Theater from Nicolay and Hay’s Abraham Lincoln: A History ..... 252
2.8 John Wilkes Booth in The Birth of a Nation ......................................................................... 253
2.9 Carte de Visite of John Wilkes Booth ................................................................................... 253
2.10 Intolerance Scrapbook Page 3, Tables, Benches, Beds, and Footstools ............................. 254
2.11 Intolerance Scrapbook Page 9, Jewelry and Mirrors .......................................................... 254
2.12 Intolerance Scrapbook Page 11, Pottery Including Wine and Water Jugs .......................... 255
2.13 Intolerance Scrapbook Page 125, Palace of the Sargon II .................................................. 255
2.14 Cuneiform Illustration in Jastrow’s The Civilization of Babylon and Assyria .................... 256
2.15 Intolerance Scrapbook Page 69, Cuneiform and Printed Clay Tablets ............................... 256
2.16 Marriage at Cana Scene in Intolerance ............................................................................... 257
2.17 “Marriage at Cana” by James Tissot ................................................................................... 257
2.18 Marriage at Cana Detail in Intolerance ............................................................................... 258
2.19 Intolerance Scrapbook Page 11 Detail ................................................................................ 258
2.20 “Belshazzar’s Feast” by John Martin .................................................................................. 259
ix
2.21 “The Babylonian Marriage Market” by Edwin Long .......................................................... 260
2.22 “The Death of Babylon” by Georges Rochegrosse ............................................................. 261
2.23 “The Babylonian Marriage Market” by Edwin Long .......................................................... 262
2.24 Babylonian Marriage Market Re-Creation in Intolerance .................................................. 262
2.25 Babylonian Temple in Intolerance ...................................................................................... 263
2.26 “The Death of Babylon” Details .......................................................................................... 264
2.27 Babylonian Temple Details in Intolerance .......................................................................... 264
2.28 Winged Bull Image From the Palace of Sargon in Intolerance Scrapbook ........................ 265
2.29 Illustration from Bradley’s The Story of the Pony Express ................................................. 266
2.30 Illustration from Bradley’s The Story of the Pony Express ................................................. 266
2.31 Illustration from Morison’s The Maritime History of Massachusetts ................................. 267
2.32 Illustration from Robinson’s The Sailing Ships of New England ........................................ 267
2.33 Illustration from Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself ..................... 268
2.34 Illustration from Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself ..................... 268
2.35 Illustration from Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself ..................... 268
2.36 Illustration from Olmstead’s A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States ................................ 269
2.37 Illustration from Olmstead’s A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States ................................ 269
2.38 Illustration from Olmstead’s A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States ................................ 269
2.39 Beau Geste Scrapbook Cover .............................................................................................. 270
2.40 Beau Geste Scrapbook, French Foreign Legion Living Quarters, Horses, and Camels ...... 270
2.41 Beau Geste Scrapbook, Tuareg People of North Africa ...................................................... 271
2.42 Beau Geste Scrapbook, Senegalese People of West Africa Dressed as Foreign Legion .... 271
2.43 Beau Geste Scrapbook, “Medals Beaujolais May Wear” .................................................... 272
2.44 Beau Geste Scrapbook, Ladder Detail in Corner of Foreign Legion Fort ........................... 273
2.45 Ladder in Corner of Foreign Legion Fort in Beau Geste .................................................... 273
3.1 “Washington Crossing the Delaware” by Emanuel Leutze ................................................... 274
3.2 Grand Union Flag .................................................................................................................. 275
3.3 Grand Union Flag on Washington’s boat in Janice Meredith ............................................... 275
3.4 Briefcases Reference Card from Twentieth Century-Fox Research Library ........................ 276
3.5 A Briefcase in Picture Post, November 24, 1951, page 16 ................................................... 277
3.6 A Briefcase in Illustrated London News, April 26, 1958, page 712 ..................................... 277
3.7 Research Bible Check-Out Card ........................................................................................... 278
3.8 Illustration from Montfaucon’s L’Antiquité expliqué et representée en figures ................... 279
3.9 Illustration from Montfaucon’s L’Antiquité expliqué et representée en figures ................... 279
3.10 Illustration for David Copperfield by Phiz (Habolt K. Browne) ......................................... 280
3.11 Illustration for David Copperfield by Phiz (Habolt K. Browne) ......................................... 280
3.12 Illustration from Graham’s Magazine Used for Research for The Man with a Cloak ........ 281
3.13 Illustration from Graham’s Magazine Used for Research for The Man with a Cloak ........ 281
3.14 Costumes in The Man with a Cloak .................................................................................... 282
3.15 Costumes in The Man with a Cloak .................................................................................... 282
3.16 Errol Flynn in Adventures of Don Juan ............................................................................... 283
3.17 Image from Casellas Moncanut’s Arte y Decoración en España ........................................ 283
3.18 Image from Casellas Moncanut’s Arte y Decoración en España ........................................ 283
3.19 Photograph of 1937 Cleveland National Air Races from MGM Research Library ............ 284
3.20 Photograph of 1937 Cleveland National Air Races from MGM Research Library ............ 284
3.21 Skydiving Woman Lands with Billowing Parachute in The Tarnished Angels .................. 285
x
3.22 Photograph of Parachutist from 1937 Cleveland National Air Races ................................. 285
3.23 Postcard of “Amazone Tunisienne” from Paramount Research Library ............................. 286
3.24 Reverse of Postcard of “Amazone Tunisienne” from Paramount Research Library .......... 286
3.25 Exterior of Marrakech in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much .............................. 287
3.26 Exterior of Marrakech in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much .............................. 287
3.27 Album of Paris Train Station Postcards .............................................................................. 288
3.28 Album of Paris Historic Sites Postcards .............................................................................. 288
3.29 Fritz Goro Photograph in “What Science Learned at Bikini,” Life, August 11, 1947 ........ 289
3.30 Fritz Goro Photograph in “What Science Learned at Bikini,” Life, August 11, 1947 ........ 289
3.31 Raymond Klebor Photo in “The Mysterious Life of Ants,” Picture Post, June 5, 1948 .... 290
3.32 Raymond Klebor Photo in “The Mysterious Life of Ants,” Picture Post, June 5, 1948 .... 290
3.33 Ant Hole in Desert in Them! Inspired by Fritz Goro Photographs ...................................... 291
3.34 Gordon Parks Photograph in “Crime in the U.S.,” Life, September 9, 1957 ...................... 292
3.35 Gordon Parks Photograph in “Crime in the U.S.,” Life, September 9, 1957 ...................... 292
3.36 Gordon Parks Photograph in “Crime in the U.S.,” Life, September 9, 1957 ...................... 292
3.37 Image of “Exterior Doors and Windows” From Porgy and Bess Research Bible .............. 293
3.38 Image of “Exterior Doors and Windows” From Porgy and Bess Research Bible .............. 293
3.39 Image of “Exterior Doors and Windows” From Porgy and Bess Research Bible .............. 293
3.40 Set Exterior in Porgy and Bess ............................................................................................ 294
3.41 Image of “Exterior Doors and Windows” From Porgy and Bess Research Bible .............. 295
3.42 Photo Essay, “Charleston,” Holiday, May 1949 With Image from Porgy Research Bible . 295
3.43 Photo Essay, “Charleston,” Holiday, May 1949 ................................................................. 295
3.44 “North Africa—Modern” Board from Richard Day Picture Collection .............................. 296
3.45 “Italy, Ancient” Board from Richard Day Picture Collection ............................................. 296
3.46 “Italy, Ancient” Board from Richard Day Picture Collection ……………...…………… 296
3.47 Altare della Patria on “Italy, Ancient” Board from Richard Day Picture Collection .......... 297
3.48 Palazzo Senatorio on “Italy, Ancient” Board from Richard Day Picture Collection .......... 297
3.49 “A Complete Example of ‘Early American,’” International Studio, March 1931 .............. 298
3.50 “Colonial Fireplaces,” Research Book From the Fox Research Department ...................... 298
3.51 Living Room Interior in Unconquered ................................................................................ 299
3.52 Costume Still from The Last Days of Pompeii from Western Costume Company ............. 300
3.53 Costume Still from The Last Days of Pompeii from Western Costume Company ............. 300
3.54 “The Old Appian Way” in the Quo Vadis Research Bible .................................................. 301
3.55 “Slaves” in the Quo Vadis Research Bible .......................................................................... 301
3.56 “Roman Emperor” in the Quo Vadis Research Bible .......................................................... 301
3.57 Marcus Vinicius and his Lieutenant in Quo Vadis .............................................................. 302
3.58 Roman Soldier’s Armor and Weaponry in the Quo Vadis Research Bible ......................... 302
3.59 Roman Soldier’s Armor and Weaponry in the Quo Vadis Research Bible ......................... 302
3.60 Roman Soldier’s Armor and Weaponry in the Quo Vadis Research Bible ......................... 302
3.61 Roman Soldier’s Armor and Weaponry in the Quo Vadis Research Bible ......................... 302
3.62 Lygia with Ladies in Waiting at Nero’s Palace in Quo Vadis ............................................. 303
3.63 Roman Women’s Hairstyles in the Quo Vadis Research Bible .......................................... 303
3.64 Statuary Showing Roman Women’s Hairstyles in the Quo Vadis Research Bible ............. 303
3.65 Ursus Fighting a Gladiator in the Street in Quo Vadis ........................................................ 304
3.66 Illustration by Jan Styka from Le Figaro Illustré in the Quo Vadis Research Bible .......... 304
3.67 Reproduction of “Pollice Verso” by Jean-Léon Gérôme in Quo Vadis Research Bible ..... 305
xi
3.68 Reproduction of “Romans of the Decadence” by Thomas Couture in Research Bible ...... 305
3.69 Reproduction of “Spring” by Lawrence Alma-Tadema in the Quo Vadis Research Bible . 305
3.70 “Living Room-Petronius or Plautius/The House of Faunus Restoration” ........................... 306
3.71 Interior of House of Petronius in Quo Vadis ....................................................................... 306
3.72 Interior of House of Plautius in Quo Vadis ......................................................................... 306
3.73 Photographs of Entry Hall and Stairway from Kentucky for Gone With the Wind ............. 307
3.74 Photographs of Entry Hall and Stairway from Mississippi for Gone With the Wind .......... 307
3.75 Photographs of Entry Hall and Stairway from Mississippi for Gone With the Wind .......... 307
3.76 Costumes and Sets Inspired by Quo Vadis in The Robe ..................................................... 308
3.77 Costumes and Sets Inspired by Quo Vadis in The Robe ..................................................... 308
3.78 Costumes and Sets Inspired by Quo Vadis in Sign of the Pagan ........................................ 309
3.79 Costumes and Sets Inspired by Quo Vadis in Sign of the Pagan ........................................ 309
3.80 Costumes and Sets Inspired by Quo Vadis in Jupiter’s Darling ......................................... 310
3.81 Costumes and Sets Inspired by Quo Vadis in Jupiter’s Darling ......................................... 310
3.82 Costumes and Sets Inspired by Quo Vadis in Spartacus ..................................................... 311
3.83 Costumes and Sets Inspired by Quo Vadis in Spartacus ..................................................... 311
3.84 Costumes and Sets Inspired by Quo Vadis in Julius Caesar ............................................... 312
3.85 Costumes and Sets Inspired by Quo Vadis in Ben-Hur ....................................................... 313
3.86 Costumes and Sets Inspired by Quo Vadis in Ben-Hur ....................................................... 313
3.87 Costumes and Sets Inspired by Quo Vadis in Gladiator ..................................................... 314
3.88 Costumes and Sets Inspired by Quo Vadis in Gladiator ..................................................... 314
4.1 Fated Lovers on the Run from Police in Badlands ................................................................ 315
4.2 Fated Lovers on the Run from Police in They Live By Night ................................................ 315
4.3 Moe Green Gets Shot in the Eye in The Godfather ............................................................... 315
4.4 Woman Gets Shot in the Eye in The Battleship Potemkin .................................................... 315
4.5 Gangster in Pin-Striped Suit with Tommy Gun in Scarface ................................................. 316
4.6 Gangster in Pin-Striped Suit with Tommy Gun in Dillinger ................................................ 316
4.7 “West Coast ‘Okies’ Recall Depression,” New York Times, February 22, 1975 .................. 317
4.8 Still from Liza TV Special with Props Depicting MGM Auction, NBC, May 25, 1970 ...... 318
4.9 Advertisement for MGM Grand Hotel, Variety, November 28, 1973 .................................. 319
4.10 Poster for Ben-Hur .............................................................................................................. 320
4.11 Poster for King of Kings ...................................................................................................... 320
4.12 Still from The Merry Widow Used for Research in Hallelujah Hollywood! ....................... 321
4.13 Still from Rosalie Used for Research in Hallelujah Hollywood! ........................................ 321
4.14 Costumes and Sets in Hallelujah Hollywood! ..................................................................... 322
4.15 Costumes and Sets in Hallelujah Hollywood! ..................................................................... 322
4.16 Scrolling Title in Hollywood: The Golden Years ................................................................ 323
4.17 Scrolling Title in Gone With the Wind ................................................................................ 323
4.18 Visual pattern Used by Busby Berkeley .............................................................................. 324
4.19 Visual pattern Used in Esther Williams Film ...................................................................... 324
4.20 Overture Card in That’s Entertainment! .............................................................................. 325
4.21 Overture Card in Quo Vadis ................................................................................................ 326
4.22 Overture Card in Ben-Hur ................................................................................................... 326
4.23 Special Leo the Lion Logo “Beginning Our Next 50 Years…” .......................................... 327
4.24 Special Leo the Lion Logo “Beginning Our Next 50 Years…” .......................................... 327
4.25 Debbie Reynolds from the Dressing Room of a Broadway Musical .................................. 328
xii
4.26 Liza Minnelli on a Dilapidated Courtyard Set with Elsa Peretti-Tiffany Jewelry .............. 328
4.27 Peter Lawford on a Dilapidated Set ..................................................................................... 329
4.28 James Stewart on top of a Building Overlooking the MGM Lot ........................................ 329
4.29 Gene Kelly Walking Down the New York Street ............................................................... 330
4.30 Donald O’Connor Standing by a Drained and Dirty Swimming Pool ................................ 330
4.31 Fred Astaire Walking on Train Platform ............................................................................. 331
4.32 “What’s Entertainment?,” MAD magazine 175, June 1975 ................................................ 332
4.33 “What’s Entertainment?,” MAD magazine 175, June 1975 ................................................ 332
4.34 Cover of MAD magazine 175, June 1975 ............................................................................ 333
5.1 Interior of George Lucas Research Library on Skywalker Ranch ......................................... 334
5.2 Interior of Newark Public Library ......................................................................................... 335
5.3 Interior of Warburg Institute Library, Hamburg, Germany ................................................... 336

xiii
Abstract

In the nineteenth century the circulation of printed images expanded through photography
and the illustrated press, which offered a tremendous amount of new visual knowledge to the
wide audience that consumed such media. This diffusion of visual media created a “Republic of
Images” in which modern viewers encountered a broad array of pictures depicting the world of
the past and present and built a common understanding of people and places that helped to build
the modern audience. As American film production companies developed in the early-twentieth
century, they assembled picture-based research libraries that collected, organized and distributed
such illustrated materials to filmmakers who reproduced or alluded to such images in their
movies. In so doing, cinema became a powerful vehicle of information dissemination via the
image, by allowing a global audience to encounter and learn from pictures of events they might
not have seen in person. As a result of the visual averages created in Hollywood films and the
way they recirculated iconic images from the mass media, American cinema looked familiar,
believable, and trustworthy to viewers. The screen worlds that studio research libraries helped
filmmakers create, which were tied to earlier knowledge traditions, allowed Hollywood to shore
up the sense of truthfulness in their cinematic representations, so much so that their own
creations eventually stood as the source of visual knowledge itself.

1
Introduction—Picture Collections and the
Cinematic Dispersion of Visual Knowledge

In an article for the American Library Association’s publication, Library Journal, Mary
Duncan Carter, the Director of the School of Library Science at the University of Southern
California, explained the duties of the peculiar institution of the Hollywood research library.
Since their first appearance on the West Coast around 1914, she explained, these departments
were:
patterned after the morgue, or library of a newspaper office, and contained the
usual paraphernalia of the special library, that is, clippings, pictures, magazines,
and books. You will notice that I mention books last, and I think that this is a
characteristic of any special library. The other materials which we sometimes
regard as ephemeral are, nevertheless, most essential tools of the special librarian
in any field in which she finds herself.
1

In writing to librarians, who mostly concerned themselves with reference books and works of
literature, Carter insisted the distinctive qualities of cinema research libraries consisted of
pictures and other visual media that circulated as print culture’s “ephemera.”
On the second page of the article, an organizational chart showed how research
departments typically related to other parts of a Hollywood studio (figure 0.1). In the top left of
the plan, the head of the studio appeared as the manager of all operations. Below him were direct
reports from the physical operations departments of the studio plant as well as creative
departments that produced films. In the middle of the diagram was another point of confluence in
the research department. According to the plan, the library did not supervise other offices but
worked with administrative and creative departments, including producers, writers, directors, and
craftworkers. This can be seen in a clearer fashion on a similar organizational chart made by

1
Mary Duncan Carter, “Film Research Libraries,” Library Journal 64, May 15, 1939: 405.
2
Twentieth Century-Fox in the late-1930s (figure 0.2).
2
In only two pages, Carter expressed two
essential elements regarding research in Hollywood: that the departments were primarily
concerned with visual materials and that studios organized these departments in order to share
images with every creative worker during the production of a film.
Hollywood researchers turned to a wide variety of visual sources that had been created
over the previous centuries to help their studios create believable films. More than just gathering,
organizing, and releasing images, however, research departments helped to impart information
and disseminate a view of the world to the audience by sharing pictures that had been created or
reproduced in print during the previous centuries with filmmakers who then re-presented them to
audiences in their movies. These collections guided craft departments and filmmakers in
constructing spaces that would seem familiar to viewers who presumed them to be illustrative of
the real world, partly because they repeated earlier images with which audiences may well have
been familiar. By collecting and redistributing images, Hollywood researchers strengthened the
resonance of cinema with spectators and connected movies to earlier forms of visual knowledge
that had been developed by antiquarians, artists, librarians, and even art historians.
3

This dissertation argues that the millions of images gathered by studio libraries amounted
to a global bildwissenschaft, or a scientific study of images and visual culture, that connected the
picture collecting of sixteenth-century antiquarians to the visual understandings of artistic,

2
This chart comes from the website www.infomercantile.com/-
/1940s_Studio_Organization%2C_20th_Century_Fox, The Infomercantile, accessed March 15, 2019. While the
precise source of these flow charts is unclear, the website explains they come from a book of such plans made by the
studio and subsequently acquired by the site.
3
Research Departments contained a research library of literary, reference, and illustrated books, picture collections,
and collections of other visual media, as well as photographers who would photograph books with overhead
cameras—for lack of inexpensive photocopying technology up through the late-1950s—and workers concerned with
legal research and clearances. Studio correspondence generally referred to “research departments” and “research
libraries” interchangeably. While some research workers had formal library training most did not, leading those in
the research department to be called “researchers” or, simply, “workers.” These linguistic guidelines are reflected in
this dissertation.
3
historical, art historical, and industrialized entertainment forms in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. The fact that certain similar collections, including those of book collector and art
historian Aby Warburg and the New York Public Library, continued to develop
contemporaneously with those of the Hollywood studios, shows how images have long been a
paramount source of understanding, despite the higher status frequently accorded to verbal
information by academics and cultural elites. Re-evaluating the role played by Hollywood
research libraries as sources of the creation of knowledge and understanding through images
connects early modern antiquarians and nineteenth-century artists to the history of American
cinema, which this project aims to do.
Hollywood researchers emerged from a tradition of visual examination and image-based
knowledge of previous eras, but most specifically a nineteenth-century movement to present
people with illustrated representations from the living world. This image culture was recognized
by many writers as an essential mode for the sharing of information in the modern world. Mason
Jackson, an early editor of the Illustrated London News (ILN) in the nineteenth century,
appreciated how his popular newspaper was invaluable to readers of his era, and also that
“[w]hen the history of our own age comes to be written, the pictorial newspapers will form an
inexhaustible storehouse for the historian.”
4
Progressive-Era library reformer John Cotton Dana
also advocated for the use of images, predicting the “picture-making processes […will soon be]
able to serve as the usual medium of communication in a very large part of the wide field of
human knowledge.”
5
In still another field, film critic André Bazin offered a similar explanation
for the value of visual media, arguing that “the image helps us to remember the subject and

4
Mason Jackson, The Pictorial Press: Its Origin and Progress, new edition (Detroit, 1968), 361.
5
John Cotton Dana, “The Age of Pictures,” The Call, August 10, 1902. Many thanks to Ezra Shales for his
assistance finding and sharing this article.
4
preserve him from a second spiritual death.”
6
Finally, art historian Francis Haskell noted that
“while it is true that many images of historical interest are devoid of artistic quality, it does not
follow that the reverse of this proposition is equally valid.”
7
He too believed there was valuable
information in art, regardless of the quality. Film producers did not originate many of the images
that appeared in their films, but rather marshalled the visual culture that had previously been
published and circulated, in which audiences already had faith. By recycling these images,
cinema was able to expand the “exactly repeatable pictorial statements” that had imparted
knowledge to a mass audience over the previous four centuries.
8
The “visual habit” of referring
to images for information developed in the centuries before the advent of motion pictures and
merely expanded in the twentieth century; film producers built research libraries in order to
gather printed images to continue that informational process and expand upon it.
9

Visual media in general and cinema in particular have been part of a much larger
“Republic of Images,” through which depictions of the world, its people, and its material culture
circulated among a wide audience of modern readers, viewers, collectors, and filmgoers. This
system was similar in structure and breadth to the Republic of Letters of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, within which ideas and essays were liberally shared among a “knowledge
community” of learned people around the globe.
10
That epistolary network allowed for similar

6
André Bazin, What Is Cinema? Vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 10. In
his argument, an image lasts longer than the subject it depicts; the first death is the actual loss of life for the subject,
or its physical destruction, while the second spiritual death is when a subject is forgotten by later generations.
7
Francis Haskell, History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1993), 3.
8
William Ivins, Jr., Prints and Visual Communication (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), 3.
9
Ibid 2.
10
Peter Burke, “The Republic of Letters as a Communication System: An Essay in Periodization,” Media History
18, No. 3–4 (2012): 396. It is important to note how Burke has argued that the Republic of Letters, which is
frequently believed to have ended around the beginning of the nineteenth century, continued into the twenty-first
century though horse power, steam power, jet power, and the digital in the form of the internet. He has never
specified, however, the centrality of visual media through these periods and how much knowledge that was
previously written became embedded in images.
5
concepts of freedom and humanity to arrive on multiple continents during the same period based
on common philosophical and social understandings at the dawn of the modern era. One
important theme of the many writings and speeches of its members, several of whom also
worked to frame the American Constitution and build the institutions of the United States, was
the importance of education and the circulation of information that would give citizens of the
new nation a common interest in being involved in their communities and country. James
Madison explained that “a people who mean to be their own Governors [sic], must arm
themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”
11
John Adams wrote that, “[l]aws for the
liberal education of youth, especially of the lower class of people, are so extremely wise and
useful, that to a humane and generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought
extravagant.”
12
Certainly these statesmen were primarily concerned with traditional education in
schools, however these views could easily expand into other modes of obtaining vernacular
knowledge, including through images that circulated in print in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries.
While public education took diverse forms, the “graphic revolution,” as American
historian Daniel J. Boorstin called the rise of printed images and their distribution in illustrated
media in the nineteenth century, “suddenly gave us, among other things, the means of fabricating
well-knownness.”
13
That is, because of the wide distribution of mass media, repeated encounters
with images of people, places, historical scenes, and reproduced works of art, viewers came to
know historical figures and events, as well as everyday elements of life in the modern age.

11
Letter from James Madison to W. T. Barry, August 4, 1822, Manuscript/Mixed Material, Library of Congress.
https://www.loc.gov/item/mjm018999/, accessed May 7, 2020.
12
John Adams, “III. Thoughts on Government, April 1776,” in The Adams Papers: The Papers of John Adams, Vol.
4, February–August 1776, ed. Robert J. Taylor, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979): 92.
13
Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America [1961] (New York: Vintage Books, 2012),
47.
6
American philosopher Nelson Goodman interrogated this, noting that expressing how “a picture
looks like nature often means only that it looks the way nature is usually painted.”
14
W.J.T.
Mitchell later refined this notion, explaining that “‘realism’ cannot simply be equated with the
familiar standard of depiction but must also be understood as a special project within a tradition
of representation, a project that has ideological ties with certain modes of literary, historical, and
scientific representation.”
15
Just as the Republic of Letters became an intellectual community, the
“Republic of Images” reflected a worldview in which the circulation of images carried as much
information as verbal discourse. Not only did this visual knowledge community include fine art,
but also reproductions of paintings and other visual depictions of people and places in illustrated
journals, as well as advertising images that would not have been admired for their artistic merit.
All of these printed images reappeared in many different formats, including photographic
and print reproductions, as they circulated through Western Europe, North America, and
ultimately around the globe.
16
The mass diffusion of visual information through print media
became a central, consistent mode of informing a broad audience of readers and viewers “a
privileged relationship to an otherwise unknowable world” that included details, stories, and
visual material from around the world as well as an implied cultural ideal of those represented
characters and situations.
17
The “Republic of Images” presented viewers with a common
understanding of people and places that helped to build a specific base of understanding in the
modern world. As William M. Ivins, Jr. explained, due to their ability to be indefinitely

14
Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis, 1976), 39.
15
W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago, 1986), 73.
16
While the “Republic of Images” encompassed all types of pictures, from paintings and prints to advertising
imagery, one of the most powerful forms of communication through images were news pictures in illustrated
magazines and newspapers. For a thorough examination of the role of such images in the creation of the modern
world, see Jason E. Hill and Vanessa R. Schwartz, Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News (New York:
Bloomsbury, 2015).
17
Ibid 2.
7
reproduced and circulated, “prints are among the most important and powerful tools of modern
life and thought.”
18
This made image culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries one of the
most important engines of education and public uplift, following the hopes of early American
thinkers, as it helped build an informed citizenry.
Following the advent of motion pictures in the late-nineteenth century, the “Republic of
Images” again expanded as the audience for cinema was even larger than that of print media.
This audience became a new knowledge community as it encountered and learned visual
information in entertaining spectacles they might have only seen on the printed page. Hollywood
established a visual lexicon of common references that allowed an expansive audience, from
wealthy city dwellers to poor, rural farmhands, to share a visual understanding of the world.
Because cinema generally recirculated images from the popular press and illustrated books, this
view was dominated by an admiration for Western cultural narratives and tenets.
As a result of the consistent look of Hollywood films and the way they recirculated what
became iconic images, American cinema gave its audience an understanding of the world that
made the subjects of movies seem familiar, believable, and trustworthy to viewers. This was
particularly important to those in the audience who had never encountered certain settings and
characters from other times and places. As Steven J. Ross has succinctly argued, “movies matter
most about the things people know the least.”
19
The “repetition of similar images” that originated
in printed sources and subsequently reappeared in Hollywood movies, created “a way of seeing
the world […] that appear[ed] as the dominant reality” for many viewers.
20
Goodman also
referred to the way “inculcation” in repeated representations led to a belief in the realism those

18
Ivins 3.
19
Steven J. Ross, “American Workers, American Movies: Historiography and Methodology,” International Labor
and Working-Class History 59 (April 2001): 82.
20
Ibid.
8
images generated.
21
Hollywood cinema spread a trust in the visual understandings of print media
from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as it imbedded those images in its own visual
presentations. Because of this, every movie contained both an archaeology of illustrated
information and a new image-based discourse.
In order to construct films filled with visual details from print media, early American film
production companies accessed or built picture-based research libraries in order to collect,
organize, and distribute illustrated materials to filmmakers who reproduced and quoted a panoply
of images in their movies. Cecil B. DeMille advocated for the ability of these departments to add
a sense of believability to movies through their repetition of familiar images. “[I]f the element of
authenticity—an honest feeling for the historic era to be portrayed—has been absorbed and
applied by the writers, the artists, and the many craftsmen, it will add that much more conviction
to the final work,” he wrote. “It will influence the audience into the belief that it is watching
reality unroll itself on the screen.”
22
Not only did he admit that authenticity was merely a
“feeling,” rather than an essential mode of presentation, but he acknowledged the centrality of
research to spread visual information to the many film workers on a production. The image-
based vocabulary circulated by the research libraries of Hollywood consolidated and amplified a
familiar set of referents from nineteenth century print culture by employing antiquarian research
methods that had emerged in the West in earlier centuries.
During the “research era” of American filmmaking—which began around 1908 and ran
until 1970—nearly every Hollywood production company engaged in visual research as they
believed in the ability of movies to participate in the “Republic of Images,” and in the power of

21
Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co.,
1976), 38.
22
Cecil B. DeMille, “The Values of Research,” Variety, January 5, 1955.
9
images to inform viewers. They hired large staffs to build collections of pictures using illustrated
books, magazines, and newspapers, as well as photographs, postcards, cartes de visites, stereo-
view slides, maps, building blueprints, technical manuals, prints of paintings, and drawings.
Studios supported the work of researchers to find these images by subscribing to hundreds of
magazines and trade journals, to collect books on hundreds of topics, and to gather other visual
print ephemera. Researchers had the freedom to scour picture collections in the public libraries
of Los Angeles, New York, and London, the Huntington Library in Southern California, the
libraries of the major universities of Los Angeles, many public and private historical societies,
and the collections of other film-related services.
Studio library workers carefully indexed images by subject matter and organized them
into topical files. They circulated these images to filmmakers and craftworkers who referred to
them when designing and building sets, costumes, and interior decorations. Research
departments guided the overall look of each film through their collections and helped to visually
control creative excesses in cinematic representation. There was no hierarchy of individual forms
of media in these collections, which meant a photograph of a photograph of a painting located in
a book was as valuable to researchers and creative workers as the original work itself; a cartoon
that was set in a location was as useful as a snapshot of that location. Technique and historical
point-of-view of the artist who created the images were irrelevant considering that researchers
concerned themselves primarily with finding images that contained useful visual information.
This formal practicality allowed Hollywood studios to realize what artists and art
historians had already learned: viewers would trust movies more if they recognized images on
the screen. In one example, certain members of the audience of the film Janice Meredith (1924)
wrote letters of correction to MGM when they believed they saw a mistake in a visual reference
10
to Emanuel Leutze’s iconic painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware” (1851).
23
The error
was not that of the studio, however, but of Leutze who originally executed the blunder. This
event shows how the audience understood stories they could have never witnessed in person—
such as a scene from the American Revolution—from images that were frequently repeated in
visual culture, and that their belief in that knowledge would not be dampened by such depictions
containing errors or inventions. The familiarity of image brought with it a belief in its veracity.
Taking this a step further, John Cotton Dana, an advocate for the communicative power
of images, believed that the “emotions which go with the act of recognition are so generally
agreeable that we greet [familiar art] with considerable warmth of feeling […] if we [see such
works again] after long separation or at a distance from the scenes where we once knew them.”
24

While his writings were unlikely known in Hollywood, his view was confirmed by the fact that
viewers enjoyed recognizing references to images that had previously circulated in print,
including the Leutze painting, and proved to studios that their recycling of familiar pictures in
movies was valuable. As a result of this realization, studios infused their films with visual
citations of details viewers would recognize from printed media and thus enjoy.
25
In certain
cases, studios simply promoted the number of books and pictures creative workers consulted in
order to prove a film’s truthfulness and presumptive appeal to the audience.
26

23
Sara Colton and Hawley Jones, “What’s Right About the Movies,” Harper’s Magazine, July 1943, and
Sara Colton, “Veracity Seekers of Hollywood,” Magazine Digest, October 1943.
24
John Cotton Dana, “Some of the Extra-Artistic Elements of Aesthetic Emotion,” Popular Science Monthly 58
(1903): 413.
25
Art Historian William Ivins argued that, beyond their artistic merit, prints and photographs were valuable for their
ability to make earlier works of art available to a wide audience, as well as historians and art historians. See William
Ivins, Jr., Prints and Visual Communication (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), 2.
26
In one example, the marketing materials for MGM’s romantic melodrama Marie Antoinette (1938) specifically
mentioned how researchers consulted “1,538 books and 10,615 images,” suggesting the film was accurate because
of that. See, “Marie Antoinette in the Making,” Marie Antoinette Campaign Book, MGM, 1938; and, Douglas W.
Churchill, “Hollywood Cake: ‘Marie Antoinette Spreads Largess—But What About Marie Wilson,” New York
Times, May 22, 1938.
11
The ability of Hollywood studios to make films that were inspired by and contained
references to familiar images relied on the ability of research departments to efficiently find and
circulate visual materials to craftworkers. In order to do this, studio libraries would freely share
books, images, and other image-based sources with other libraries. While cinema scholarship has
mostly viewed Hollywood studios as individual firms that were protective of their talent, staff,
and physical or intellectual properties, the research departments of the film industry represent an
alternative relationship of collaboration between individual below-the-line departments.
27
The
standard practice in the research system involved a librarian ethos where researchers from rival
companies actively collaborated with their peers to locate and share material in order to fill gaps
in their respective collections.
28
The research network they created functioned like a library
system containing regional branches, rather than as specialized departments in rival studios.
Research libraries freely searched for materials in the collections of other studios,
borrowed them, and copied them for later use. Virtually no other area of Hollywood film
production allowed for such a decentralized exchange of materials free of contracts during this
era, which was dominated by a competitive, corporate, and legalistic ethos. This had a visual
impact as well. By sharing materials, research departments imposed a common look on screen
spaces as the craftworkers who designed and designed sets and costumes accessed a common

27
For more on the contractual lending of talent and staff, see Janet Staiger, “The Hollywood Mode of Production,
1930-1960,” in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style
and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 323. Staiger explains how in the
Classical Era, studios would lend a star or director to another studio in exchange for money or some other form of
capital; she never notes how research departments of competitive studios would freely share visual information in
order to help one another.
28
Timothy Morton has referred to a network of connected beliefs or nonphysical systems that control human
experience as “hyperobjects.” Whereas vibrant matter could describe the way a group of images produced a visual
understanding of place in time, hyperobjects shows how the network of research libraries in Hollywood studios
strengthened and supported any filmmaker who might needed information on arcane topics. For more, see Timothy
Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2013).
12
visual field as they shared materials. This is part of the reason why many viewers might have
sensed a similar look among all Hollywood movies in the research era. As a result of the
movement of research materials through the town, most craftworkers, directors, and producers
examined the same or similar images during the production of their films. These pictures built
what could be considered as a visual average of how a character, place or object should look.
The understanding about a place or period that emerged from these collections created a system
of knowledge that was more than the sum of its parts. Each picture helped guide craftworkers to
build film worlds the audience would recognize from print media. Cinematic recreations were
idealized, simplified, cleaned up, and ultimately built what became familiar to audiences as
“Hollywood realism;” yet, this style emerged from groups of creative workers guided by their
consultation of a common set of visual media.
Art historian Stephen Bann has referred to this presentational mode as “historical
poetics,” describing it as a practice that combines some accurate details with invented
entertainment and spectacle elements to interest, amuse, and educate the audience with a
presentation that seems valid or nearly truthful.
29
This activation of heterogeneous sources also
became the structural format of history museums, dioramas, panoramas, historical literature,
historical painting, and other spectacles including historical plays and pageants. Through its
many forms, such admixtures of accuracy and invention have been the dominant mode of
historical narrative in the modern era.
The way studios were able to spread visual knowledge through movies followed this

29
Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and
France (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 3. Bann borrowed the notion of historical poetics from
Hayden White, who wrote in his influential book Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century
Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), about the literary foundation of history writing. Bann
has brought this concept out of the theoretical and historiographic and into the practical world of nineteenth-century
culture. See the introduction to Metahistory, “The Poetics of History,” 1–42.
13
tradition of presenting historical figures and situations in entertaining ways that could teach
viewers about the world. This presentational form has come to be known in scholarship as
“edutainment.”
30
In such historical poetic representations, fact mixes with fiction and spectacle
to focus an audience, hold their attention, and show them details about the past. Bann has
examined such didactic formats and found they dominated popular depictions of history from
1750 through the late-nineteenth century, explaining that “[t]he critical preoccupation with
authenticity and the transgressive wish to simulate authenticity are, in a certain sense, two sides
of the same coin.”
31
This mode of narrative presentation continued into twentieth-century
Hollywood productions for which craftworkers considered all visual materials related to a film’s
subject, time period, characters, and material culture, regardless of their accuracy; the notion of
authenticity became a marketing flourish used to sell films to an audience interested in the
appearance of historical truth.
In this way, the question of whether or not a film presented an accurate historical
narrative misses the point; Hollywood filmmakers were much more interested in presenting
familiar images that the audience would recognize from earlier depictions, regardless of their
historical validity, in order to capture the attention of spectators and present a story from which
they could learn and take with them when they left the theater. For instance, craftworkers made
the ancient Rome of peplum films look like earlier peplum films, which had the effect of

30
The term “edutainment” is a portmanteau of “education” and “entertainment,” and is best seen in history museums
or the American pageantry movement. While none of them define the specific term, examples and examinations of
such spaces and modes of narrative presentation appear in Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio, 77-137; David
Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill
(N.C.): University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 71-101; Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory,
Politics (New York: Routledge, 1995), 80-87; Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in
Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 89-148; Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses
of Images as Historical Evidence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), 162-164.
31
Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio, 2.
14
“reaffirm[ing] the correctness of the ‘look’ through repetition in a hall of mirrors….”
32
As with
such a fun-house space, the multiple reflections actually created distortions and disorientations
for the viewer. The ancient world seen in movies looked different from the actual places of the
past, considering it followed the dominant vision presented in printed media and the film
industry. These films showed entirely Caucasian casts moving through white marble spaces,
rather than groups of multi-ethnic people in the disorganized and colorful settings of ancient
Greece or Rome. Audiences tolerated Hollywood’s historical “inaccuracies” not because they
were happy to accept false history but because such cinematic images invoked other pictures that
viewers may have known from past visual representations; the repetition of the images that
included invented and inaccurate elements created a truth in the minds of viewers through
familiarity.
This dissertation does not seek to interrogate the accuracy of cinematic images, but rather
seeks to investigate how visual representations that were previously made and circulated by
artists and publishers led to modern understandings of the world that would be perceived as
accurate because they were familiar. It suggests that by borrowing past representations, cinema’s
image culture ultimately became self-referential. American theorist Fredric Jameson has
explained how:
our awareness of the preexistence of other versions […] is now a constitutive and
essential part of the film’s structure: we are now, in other words, in
“intertextuality” as a deliberate, built-in feature of the aesthetic effect and as the
operator of a new connotation of “pastness” and pseudohistorical depth, in which
the history of aesthetic styles displaces “real” history.
33

In this appraisal of postmodernism, Jameson ignored the fact that Hollywood movies have

32
Charles Tashiro, “When History Films (Try to) Become Paintings,” Cinema Journal 35, no. 3 (Spring 1996): 19.
33
Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 1991), 20.
15
always referred to older visual material and that film production has always required the
acknowledgement of past portrayals of events and people. This dissertation provides a history of
the visual materials to which cinema referred, before it referred to itself.
Furthermore, Jameson has explained that the “approach to the present by way of the art
language of the simulacrum, or of the pastiche of the stereotypical past, endows present reality
and the openness of present history with the spell and distance of a glossy mirage.”
34
This
assessment fails to recognize how cinematic presentations of the past and present, since around
1914, have consistently looked to older images from other media and eventually from films
themselves to create “the art language of the simulacrum,” and the “pastiche of the stereotypical
past.” Such recycling of past images was also the backbone of nineteenth-century history
painting and other historical poetic representations in the visual and performing arts. The interest
in the “stereotypical past,” and the recycling of older media for use in new movies has not been a
development of the late-twentieth century or of “late-capitalism,” as Jameson refers to the
period, but a change in the way filmmakers have highlighted their references to past media rather
than taking those sources for granted as part of their creative process. Nostalgia, or the longing
for the past, was not a new development of the 1970s and 1980s, but a modern sentiment “in
correspondence with the emergence of the historical age” in the early nineteenth century.
35
To
borrow from Bruno Latour, we have never been postmodern.
36

Meanwhile, tracing the occurrences of images through different media remains a key
aspect of the field of visual studies. Hayden White has argued that through “historiophoty,” or

34
Ibid 21.
35
Peter Fritzsche, “Specters of History: On Nostalgia, Exile, and Modernity,” The American Historical Review 106,
no. 5 (2001): 1592.
36
See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1993).
16
the study of “the representation of history and our thought about it in visual images and filmic
discourse,” viewers can see the many ways the world has been depicted in images, which has
been as valuable a mode of pedagogy and understanding as using written sources.
37
Studio-
centered visual research for film production was a form of historiophoty in practice. Images from
mass media sources helped create believable cinematic recreations of those pictures that
enlightened or reconfirmed knowledge about the world for the audience. In discussing the
historical epic, Vivian Sobchack has argued that “although academic history enjoys an
institutional legitimation that the Hollywood epic doesn't, neither mode of historicizing […] is
‘truer’ than the other.”
38
In this way, watching movies that include thousands of details taken
from images of the past can teach viewers about history in a way similar to books. This project
interrogates how film studios believed they could expand the nineteenth-century interest in the
pedagogical aspects of printed images and teach audiences through visual information that had
previously circulated in the modern world. Movies continued the antiquarian goal of gathering
representations to understand the world more completely, and in so doing spread visual
knowledge to a vast audience. This view of using pictures as forms of information ultimately
came to researchers from their antiquarian antecedents as far back as the sixteenth century. As a
result of those origins, this dissertation begins with the roots of picture collections and visual
understanding in the early-modern period.
Chapter one begins by examining the work of antiquarians who gathered images of the
ancient world in order to understand both its banal and its seemingly exotic details. Collections
of images such as these helped give a visual understanding of the modern world to public and

37
Hayden White, “Historiography and Historiophoty,” The American Historical Review 93, no. 5 (1988): 1193.
38
Vivian Sobchack, “‘Surge and Splendor’: A Phenomenology of the Hollywood Historical Epic,” Representations
0, no. 29 (Winter 1990): 26.
17
private audiences. This chapter shows how historians, artists, art historians, picture librarians,
and entertainers all approached and organized visual knowledge in a similar way with
comparable goals of breaking the modern world into fractional parts in order to understand its
individual elements. These artists, scholars, and civil servants believed that images could help
spread a general visual knowledge of the past and present to viewers, which would help them
comprehend elements of their lives better. While this chapter covers a wide span of time from
the sixteenth-century through the 1930s, it focuses on the growth of picture collections as modes
of visual understanding, which would become a foundation for the research work in film
production that emerged in the early-twentieth century.
Nineteenth-century artists, including French painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, took some of
these images to help reconstruct antiquity. American public libraries ultimately created picture
collections from which patrons could find images that included many details of the world. John
Cotton Dana advocated for the use of images as educational tools that could teach children and
adults about complicated or obscure facts. These lessons were subsequently amplified by the
expansion of the public library picture collection of the New York Public Library under the
leadership of Romana Javitz. Also in the early twentieth century, but in a different register,
German art historian Aby Warburg drew upon lessons from antiquarians to curate a picture
collection he organized into his Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, which connected images across time
and cultures and showed relationships between them that were otherwise obscure.
Chapter two turns to the birth of the movies and the rise of cinema research and how it
emerged from earlier methods of picture collecting and visual research of artists and theater
producers. This chapter focuses on film production from 1908 to 1928, beginning at a moment
when filmmakers were transitioning from a “cinema of attractions” format that foregrounded
18
spectacular sights to a narrative mode of “self-enclosed diegetic universe[s].”
39
It investigates
how early Hollywood producers hired researchers who began creating relationships through
which they could borrow and share materials as they built picture collections inside studios and
accessed materials from other regional libraries in Los Angeles and around the country. By
examining some of the images and visual media found by early filmmakers, this chapter looks at
how pictures guided creative workers in the production of some of early cinema’s biggest films.
Through visual research, Hollywood recycled and amplified a visual knowledge of local,
national, and global spaces that were contained in past representations while it also created new
cinematic understandings of the world; through the recycling of images borrowed from fine art
sources, cinema helped to uplift this mass audience. Period trade press accounts as well as
articles written by studio researchers in library journals show the dawning of a library ethos that
would pervade these departments for the following four decades.
Chapter three considers how film research in Hollywood studios from 1929 to 1969
helped cinema build a visual understanding of the world of the past and present for viewers. This
broader base of knowledge emerged out of the expanded research network that developed in the
film industry, which led to more diverse information being shared and to a magnification of the
materials audiences could encounter in movie theaters. As photographic magazines and other
print media forms boosted the dissemination of visual information during the mid-twentieth
century, research libraries also increased the amount of images they presented to craftworkers
and filmmakers. This adjustment ultimately helped to increase the information viewers
encountered in a film, which made spectators even more aware and critical of the changing world
in which they lived.

39
Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde,” Wide Angle 8, No. 3–
4 (1986): 68.
19
Research departments used a broad set of methods to grow their book and picture
collections, gathering any image they could find that might be useful for future productions. This
library growth also required a more malleable mode of sharing images within a studio and
between companies, which led to the creation of what came to be known as “research bibles,” in
which researchers would thematically organize images by type in order to increase the amount of
visual sources they could show film workers. These flexible scrapbooks would help craftworkers
and filmmakers see a wider variety of material culture from different time periods and would
help them create scenes the audience could believe, as they recognized images from past
depictions in older media. While studio heads and journalists understood this work as essential to
creating accurate screen depictions, the actual goal of researchers in this era was to help build
familiar spaces the audience could trust, even as they reused images that had originally been
invented by artists. This is to say, movies informed the audience about the world through
recreations of earlier images and many of those representations had been executed within a
historical poetic mode; modern understandings of the details of history and the present-day were
important for viewers, however that knowledge had always been a mixture of fact and fiction.
Through a case study of the MGM peplum romance Quo Vadis (1951) and the specific
research materials consulted for the film, this chapter links earlier proto-cinematic antiquarian
and artistic practices to Hollywood filmmaking, showing not just the artistry in prestige
productions but also the long-term influence of art historical methods in their creation. When
each studio was producing two or three feature films every month, research became a larger
undertaking with big staffs that sought an efficient process to generate such knowledge. The
work evolved from being a reactive practice of finding images to illustrate specific narrative
elements to becoming a broader search for visual information about a film’s period and place
20
that presented a more expansive vision of the setting and its characters. This change allowed
filmmakers and craft departments to see a wider material cultural context for the costumes,
props, and sets they designed and built.
Chapter four focuses on the end of the research network in Hollywood from 1970 to
1974, and examines how as such work wound down due to many industrial changes in the
period, Hollywood films themselves became their own standard of visual information. The visual
and material culture that Hollywood had created over the previous sixty years became sources of
knowledge based on movies rather than printed pictures. The objects and images built by the
movie industry became their own visual archive from which later filmmakers and exhibitors
could tell compelling stories to viewers. As the old studios lumbered into the 1970s, they turned
to shooting films on location rather than on sets that needed to be constructed in stages. Many
new studio owners came from non-entertainment businesses hoping to refine the practices of
these companies in order to profit from future productions. They saw the idiosyncratic work of
research as an extraneous expense that was neither creative nor administrative. This new
ideology led many studios to partially or entirely eliminate these departments as a way to control
or lower costs. At the same time, the material culture from the previous fifty years of Hollywood
movies, was reclassified in the minds of many viewers as memorabilia, or relics of a cinematic
past as meaningful as historical or sacred objects.
This chapter examines the origin of this new understanding in the auction of MGM props
and costumes in 1970. It also investigates how the archive of Hollywood movies, with which
film audiences were familiar, became a picture collection of sorts and the source images for the
MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, which opened with its stage spectacular Hallelujah
Hollywood! in 1973, and the musical compilation film That’s Entertainment! in 1974. These
21
events suggest how connected viewers had become to the ersatz culture of cinema that had been
created through the research and craft departments that were coming to an end, but were now
essentially preserved on film.
The epilogue examines the period following the reconfiguration of Hollywood in the
1970s, when studios either closed, dispersed, or so limited the duties of their research libraries
that they no longer functioned as an industry-wide resource. Their collections of images were not
entirely lost, however, as they retained a certain value to some studios and several filmmaker-
connoisseurs who maintained or purchased them. In the case of Disney, the visual knowledge
their animators and craftworkers accessed mostly related to the illustrated archives of the
company and the drawings of its past artists. For Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, the
research libraries they bought had talismanic qualities that connected them to past filmmakers
and studios. The recent announcement of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Arts, however,
suggests the producer-director may well be a latter-day Aby Warburg as he fulfills the scholar’s
ambitions of using images from fine art, cinema, mass media, and vernacular sources to tell
stories and history through pictures.
All of the millions of pictures previously gathered and shared by research departments
from 1914 to 1970 connected cinema to a longer tradition of visual knowledge practiced by
antiquarians, historians, and artists who had approached the world in a similar fashion since the
sixteenth century. Seeing how the research network functioned as a fundamental part of
American cinema production is important for understanding how Hollywood studios helped to
spread visual knowledge to a wide audience building a modern understanding of the world for
viewers who would otherwise never encounter such information. Cinema spread a consistent
view by recycling and circulating familiar images to viewers. Rather than filmmakers inventing
22
new images and new ways of approaching their creative work, Hollywood reiterated the power
of printed media into each movie. Not only did movies have access to the creative abilities of the
craftworkers and filmmakers on any production, but also to all the artists and illustrators from
centuries before. More than a dream factory, Hollywood became a key molder of informed
viewers through visual research, which helped to achieve the goals that the early antiquarians
and image advocates such as John Cotton Dana and Aby Warburg promoted: that pictures would
be the key source of knowledge formation in the modern world. Hollywood heard their call, not
just by making films but by building research libraries filled with pictures that could help make
those movies. This dissertation explains how that system worked and why it was important.
23
Chapter One—Antiquarians, Artists, Librarians, and Art Historians:
Picture Collections as Dictionaries of the World

In 1550, Italian artist and chronicler Giorgio Vasari created one of the most significant
books of art history, The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, which
was also one of the first art historical projects of the early modern era.
1
The first edition of Lives
included only biographical information, detailing each subject’s influences, patrons, and
associates taken from “artists’ tomb sites, anecdotes, references to artists’ portraits, epigrams,
and epitaphs.”
2
In the second edition of the book, published in 1568, Vasari added printed
portraits of each artist (figure 1.1), largely based on the portrait collection of his mentor, Paolo
Giovio. The book became a foundational text in the field of art history, and the portraits in the
second edition became a portable picture collection that contained information about the
appearances of these men, showing their facial hair, along with clothing and hats typical of their
respective eras. For the portraits of thirteenth-century artists Cimabue and Giotto (figures 1.2 and
1.3), Vasari represented them in the style of the sixteenth century painting with more shading
and depth than any paintings of their own era. In making these minor presentational adjustments,
Vasari embellished certain details in the depictions of his subjects.
3
Three years later, Italian antiquarian and polymath Jacopo Strada published a numismatic
book showing coins dating from the reign of Julius Caesar to that of the Holy Roman Emperor

1
For more, see Philip Jacks, “Introduction,” in Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors,
and Architects [1550], ed. Philip Jacks, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere (New York: Modern Library, 2007), ix-x; and
Patricia Lee Rubin, Giorgio Vasari: Art and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 107.
2
Maia W. Gahtan, “Introduction,” in Maia Wellington Gahtan ed., Giorgio Vasari and the Birth of the Museum
(Farnham, Surrey, England: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2014), 2.
3
Following Vasari, many similar books of portraits of great men of various regions were published throughout
Western Europe. These would also become valuable and portable picture collections for later readers and scholars.
For instance, Randall Meissen has examined one similar example, a book by Francisco Pacheco, a Spanish artist and
art theorist in Seville in the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries, who created his Book of Description of True
Portraits of Illustrious and Memorable Men, which he compiled from 1599 until his death in 1644. See Randall
Meissen, “Francisco Pacheco’s Book of True Portraits: Humanism, Art, and the Practice of ‘Visual History,’”
Representations 145 (Winter 2019): 32-54.
24
Charles V in the sixteenth century. Strada found a way to gather images and represent them
without needing to invent visual elements he had not seen. When he knew a coin had been made
in a certain time and place but could not find an adequately detailed example to copy, he simply
included a blank place holder ring in that spot on the page (figures 1.4 and 1.5) rather than
concoct an image based on generic types of men.
4
The empty spaces inside these rims announced
on the page that there was a gap in the collection and that information in the book was
incomplete. Acknowledging these lacunae was as significant an act as organizing and publishing
the book itself. The belief that more visual information existed in the world beyond what
appeared in one’s collection and that missing pictures could be added later would continue to be
an important element of picture collections in the following centuries.
Antiquarians like Strada published books on coins, medals, sculpture, and architectural
fragments in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They listed, described, and frequently
traced or drew such objects before reproducing them in words or images. Aside from gathering
relics and other material culture from the past, they collected pictures of distant and ancient sites
and representations of great men and other assorted details of the world, including clothing and
jewelry, vernacular architecture, weaponry, and decorations. Through these physical and visual
collections, antiquarians tried to understand ancient cultures, their own eras, and any possible
relationships between the two periods.
Tracing the differences between historians and antiquarians, historiographer Arnaldo
Momigliano explained how “historians write in a chronological order; antiquaries [sic] write in a
systematic order,” and that “historians produce those facts which serve to illustrate or explain a
certain situation; antiquaries [sic] collect all the items that are connected with a certain subject,

4
Francis Haskell, History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1993), 14-15.
25
whether they help to solve a problem or not.”
5
He went on to examine how historians viewed the
nonlinear and non-narrative practices of antiquarians as merely executing a “systematic
collection of all the relics of the past.”
6
Despite their dismissal by those who believed in a more
analytical approach to the examination of history, antiquarian collections, and the methods used
to create them, have been valuable resources for artists and scholars since the seventeenth
century. The material culture that was constituted by these “things—objects, matter” have
offered visual outlines of past people and the “building blocks of history.”
7
For example, the
archive of images and descriptions of the past people of Southern France that seventeenth-
century French antiquarian Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc, one of the most important antiquarians of
his era, created is an important example of a process of understanding the world through the
collection of as much information on a certain place and period as possible. Additionally, his
familiarity with the physical location of sites, materials, and images in archives and libraries
throughout France, Italy, and Germany was one of his greatest skills and would become a
requirement for antiquarians and scholars in the following years.
8

A serious examination of antiquarian practices reveals how a similar interest in the visual
and material world continued into the twentieth century in the picture collections of American
public libraries, many private and institutional art historical collections, and later as the bedrock

5
Arnaldo Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 13,
no. 3/4 (1950): 286.
6
Ibid 287 and 289. For more on the narrative nature of historical writing and the way narrative becomes the primary
form of the discipline of History see Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century
Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). This view was greatly influenced by the writing of
nineteenth-century German historian Leopold von Ranke who believed that historians should record what actually
happened in the past through a careful study of documents in archives. For more on Ranke and positivism, see
Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and
France (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 8-31; and, Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob,
Telling the Truth about History (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994), 72-74.
7
Peter N. Miller and François Louis, eds., Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500–1800
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 37.
8
Peter N. Miller, Peiresc’s Mediterranean World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 15.
26
upon which American filmmakers produced movies. These picture collections share a common
belief in the power of images to inform viewers. Artists, libraries, museums, art historians, and
Hollywood studios assembled materials from the pictorial press, illustrated books, and other
visual ephemera, including postcards and photographic stereoview slides of people, objects, and
locations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Identifying the value of details and history in
such picture collections and individual images shows how visual media has been a significant
tool for the circulation of information in the modern era. When historians began analyzing
images as primary sources and conveyers of information in the “pictorial turn” at the end of the
twentieth century, they were centuries behind antiquarians, artists, art historians, and other “past-
lovers” who had already been practicing bildwissenschaft.
9

Exploring the history and practices of picture collectors from the nineteenth and early-
twentieth century shows how invaluable images have been to communication and scholarship in
the modern world, and how they laid a foundation for visual research in the film industry of the
twentieth century. In order to better understand the value and purpose of the research libraries
that emerged in Hollywood for the production of films in the twentieth century, this chapter
examines picture collections from earlier eras to see how they organized and used materials for
information about the world. Once gathered and organized, these large groups of images guided
antiquarians, artists, filmmakers and the wider general public in understanding the past and
present as they highlighting important cultural themes and repeated imagery and offered viewers
a fundamental base of knowledge that presented events and spaces they would never otherwise
be able to encounter in their lives.

9
Peter Miller, “Antiquarianism and Its Images,” USC Mellon Sawyer Seminar, “Visual History: The Past in
Pictures,” Workshop Two, “The 16th and 17th Centuries,” February 6, 2017. W.J.T. Mitchell has written about the
pictorial turn in the humanities at the end of the twentieth century. See Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1994), 15.
27
Photography and Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture
Collections of diverse materials like those of Vasari and Peiresc were a model for later artists and
art historians who collected visual materials for references for their depictions of the world. The
advent of photography in 1839 was a major change to the type of information contained in these
assemblages as it offered viewers a greater amount of visual detail than they had before. In 1844,
only five years after the creation of the medium, photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot
wrote about the advantages of the form and advocated for its many positive qualities:
It frequently happens […] that the [photographer] discovers on examination […]
that he has depicted many things he had no notion of at the time. Sometimes
inscriptions and dates are found upon the buildings, or printed placards most
irrelevant, are discovered upon their walls: sometimes a distant dial-plate is seen,
and upon it—unconsciously recorded—the hour of the day at which the view was
taken.
10

This extremely early view of photography shows how in its first years of use there was already
an understanding of the unique communicative power of the medium and its capacity for
capturing precision that would be missed by other media. Talbot explained how one advantage of
photography was that it could “introduce into our pictures a multitude of minute details which
add to the truth and reality of the representation, but which no artist would take the trouble to
copy faithfully from nature.”
11
Painters and artists of other media who had long used antiquarian
visual materials as referential sources when working on depictions of historical, foreign, or
natural subjects, began using photography for inspiration and guidance by the mid-nineteenth
century. They saw photographic images as being useful due to their “completeness of detail and
correctness of perspective,” as Talbot explained.
12

10
William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature [1844] (New York: Da Capo Press, 1969), n.p. [Plate XIII,
Queen’s College, Oxford, Entrance Gateway].
11
Ibid n.p. [Plate X, “The Haystack”].
12
Ibid n.p. [“Introduction”].
28
This appreciation of photography for its precision and ability to capture everything
present in a scene was later echoed by the French painter Eugène Delacroix who saw the medium
as capable of capturing lighting nuance in the world that was superior to images created by the
hands of artists. He extolled the value of daguerreotypes to research his paintings, explaining that
photography functioned as “an advisor, [or] a sort of dictionary” and how the new medium could
reveal elements “almost always neglected in the drawings from nature and thus introduce the
artist into the complete knowledge of the construction; the shadows and the lights are found there
with their true character.”
13
Photographs would help many artists naturally represent light and
shadows, and would help others find seemingly insignificant elements that might have been
overlooked by artists in other media. One example of this was the rise of stock images of natural
scenes, such as trees, landscapes, or cliffs called études d’après nature upon which artists could
borrow visual information. These pictures, which emerged from a longer lineage of realism in
painting, generally featured a single natural subject centered in the frame that could show artists
how light and texture should appear in their paintings (figure 1.6).
14

Beyond the natural world, many artists in the mid-nineteenth century also organized
collections of photographs depicting human-made elements, including many sites from antiquity,
and locations in the Middle East and North Africa, which would be helpful to them in recreating
the world in historical paintings and Orientalist fantasy subjects, which were popular in the era.
Antiquarian images of architecture, monuments, and material culture from the Mediterranean rim
that had been created, sorted, and published over the previous three centuries helped many artists

13
Eugène Delacroix, “De l’enseignement du dessin,” in Oeuvres littéraires, vol. 1, Études esthétiques (Paris, 1923),
17 (translation by the author).
14
For more on the use of photographs by artists as aides mémoires, see Ulrich Pohlmann, “Another Nature; or,
Arsenals of Memory: Photography as Study Aid, 1850–1900,” in The Artist and the Camera: Degas to Picasso, ed.
Dorothy Kosinski (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 1999), 43–57; and Ken Jacobson, Étude d’Après Nature:
Nineteenth Century Photographs in Relation to Art (Petches Bridge, UK: K. & J. Jacobson, 1996), 7–18.
29
interpret and depict these regions in their work. Not only were artists interested in recreating
famous sites and monuments, such as the Roman Forum and Senate, they interpolated invented
details into familiar images in order to convince viewers these elements were also historical.
That is to say, an artist who needed to “define” the look of a tree or an ancient monument might
consult a collection of photographs, for an encyclopedic compendium of the world’s visual and
material culture. Roland Barthes explained how the illustrations in Diderot’s Encyclopédie,
created between 1751 and 1772, produced “at once an inventory and a definition” of the
materials in the images.
15
This is also how nineteenth-century artists used picture collections to
know the possible objects to include in their works and to know how those items should appear.
A well-organized picture collection could function as a visual encyclopedia offering a
tremendous amount of information for recreation in various arts.
French painter Jean-Léon Gérôme was one of the first painters to use photographs of
ancient and foreign sites to help him recreate the material culture of the past and of distant
locations.
16
Throughout his career, he travelled extensively throughout the Middle-East and built
a collection of photographs and other images that guided him on the inclusion of small and
seemingly insignificant details in his paintings, much like the minutiae Talbot had described. In
one example, Gérôme’s painting “The Snake Charmer” (1879–80), included blue Arabic script
and elaborate floral motifs directly inspired by a photograph of the Topkapi Palace in
Constantinople that was taken by the commercial firm Abdullah Frères (figures 1.7 and 1.8).
17

Gérôme’s visual research also included pre-photographic antiquarian images of Roman

15
Roland Barthes, “The Plates of the Encyclopedia,” [1964] in A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag, trans. Richard
Howard (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2009), 185.
16
Ken Jacobson, Odalisques and Arabesques: Orientalist Photography, 1839–1925 (London: Quaritch, 2007), 69–
70.
17
Ibid.
30
material culture, including military uniforms, gladiator armor, and other household elements that
originated in print in antiquarian books and typologies. Rather than only looking to earlier
paintings of Rome that might have simplified these elements, Gérôme appreciated the precision
of such carefully drawn sources based on surviving material culture or ancient depictions of such
objects in sculpture, mosaic, or ceramics. He would later admit that after studying such
representations, he realized some of his earlier paintings, which he had executed with fewer
sources, were actually insufficiently faithful to his contemporary notion of antiquity. For
instance, he had depicted the group of gladiators in “Ave, Imperator, morituri te salutant,” (1859)
(“Hail, Caesar! We Who Are About to Die Salute You”) (figure 1.9) with simple uniforms
including helmets, tridents, and shields as if they were similar to soldiers. They lacked the details
typical of triumphant gladiators, including ornate bronze helmets, fish-scale pattern mail, short
swords, and leather shin guards that he would paint in “Pollice Verso” (1872) (figure 1.10) after
studying antiquarian images of such armor.
18
In his view, the later painting was superior to the
earlier one because the furnishings of the gladiators were more precise and the depiction offered
a more realistic view of the “exceptional human beings” he understood gladiators to have been.
19

Gérôme’s accumulation of many visual elements helped to create what he referred to as
the “accent of truth” through which the audience would believe in the veracity of this image.
20

He believed that by collecting and recreating a large amount of material elements, viewers would
believe an image as true, regardless of the fact that he had invented many of its visual elements.
This gathering of information was also the basis for historical poetics; the more visual

18
In fact, Gérôme’s depictions of the gladiators are easily identifiable, with a mirmillo, or “fish-man,” known for
their fish-scale armor, resting his foot on the neck of a retiarius, or “fisherman,” who fought with a net and a trident
spear. Such details were helpful in building a narrative—in which a fish-man defeated two fisherman gladiators.
19
Fanny Field Hering, Gérôme: The Life and Works of Jean-Léon Gérôme (New York: Cassell Publishing
Company, 1892), 88.
20
Ibid.
31
information of ancient Rome that Gérôme gathered, the more detail he could borrow from these
sources, the more believable and compelling his paintings could be for viewers.
21
The specific
visual elements Gérôme showed in “Pollice Verso” helped viewers understand how a gladiator
fought and how one could have been revered by fans of the ancient era. The metal surfaces of the
helmet, the mail on the arm, and the sword’s hilt and guard suggest the fighter was successful
enough to afford expensive armor or was good enough to have received such items as gifts or
awards. His aggregation of so many details helped to tell viewers a more complete story about
the characters he painted and the world in which they lived.
Gérôme knew most viewers of his paintings were less concerned with absolute accuracy
in this painting than with encountering a spectacular scene set in a familiar presentation of
antiquity. He was no doubt aware that viewers would neither notice nor care about the difference
between a painting that showed how the past seemed to him rather than how it actually was.
After all, it is unlikely that many viewers of “Ave, Imperator” would have realized the gladiators
wore inaccurate armor considering there were enough other familiar details to convince most that
they were seeing something historically accurate. His use of the word “accent” suggested a
somewhat ephemeral or less significant gesture, but one that would still make an impression on
the audience. This is to say that images have had the power to make their subjects seem
authentic, or as art historian Francis Haskell explained that the advent of photography had a
“paradoxical effect of strengthening the authority of all images, including those made long
before its invention.”
22
This meant that by the middle of the nineteenth century, as paintings and

21
For more on historical poetics, see Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio, 1-7, and the introduction of this
dissertation.
22
Francis Haskell, History and Its Images, 4. William M. Ivins, Jr. also examined the “faith” put in the photographic
image by modern audiences, explaining that the “nineteenth century began by believing that what was reasonable
was true and it wound up by believing that what it saw a photograph of was true.” See William M. Ivins, Jr., Prints
And Visual Communication (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1953), 94.
32
photographs or prints of those works circulated through the world in books and the pictorial
press, readers saw images that included many details gleaned from earlier images as well as
invented details they could understand as accurate depictions, regardless of their basis in fact.
The massive change in the ability of printmakers and publishers to reproduce images
through photographic and half-tone prints in the nineteenth century made this possible, as art
historian William M. Ivins, Jr. examined. He explained that, despite the objections of some “old
fashioned” American curators of the first half of the twentieth century who disliked new printing
techniques, these “new pictorial processes filled the pictorially informative needs far more
accurately, far faster, and far more cheaply, than was possible with other, older, techniques.”
23

Considering many nineteenth-century artists circulated their works through reproductions in
books and the illustrated press or as commercial prints, window cards, cartes de visites, or other
photographic forms, it follows that many of the images they created came to be widely known
through these media.
24
Reproductions of Gérôme’s Roman paintings appeared widely and were
used by later artists, particularly illustrators of the pictorial press, which valued and frequently
reprinted images of antiquity. As one example, an illustrated supplement to the April 11, 1874
issue of the ILN included a print of “Pollice Verso” (figure 1.11).
This print was made by the British artist William Biscombe Gardner, who worked
extensively for the ILN, and was based on a photograph of the painting taken and circulated by
Gérôme’s father-in-law, Adolphe Goupil, a wealthy and powerful Parisian art dealer who

23
Ivins, Jr., 130.
24
For many examples of print and photographic reproductions of nineteenth-century paintings see Stephen Bann,
Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters and Photographers in Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2001). In particular, Bann examines the circulation of great paintings through photographic
reproduction, see 158-168. Furthermore, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists frequently reproduced certain
major paintings by painting later versions of great works. This has allowed for more viewers to see such works in
collections in different cities. For more on this practice, see Stephen Bann, “Reassessing Repetition in Nineteenth-
Century Academic Painting: Delaroche, Gérôme, Ingres,” in Eik Kahng, ed., The Repeating Image: Multiples in
French Painting from David to Matisse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 27-47.
33
marketed photographic reproductions of great works by painters he represented.
25
The print
appeared in the supplement in a horizontal orientation as a two-page spread. It was subtitled
“The Gladiators: ‘Pollice Verso’ by M. Gerome” [sic]. An enthusiastic and explicit description
of the painting:
The picture is built up so scrupulously in accordance with classical authorities and
antique remains that, without any dubious hesitation and with little effort of
imagination, one may fancy a section of the old Roman Colosseum brought
bodily before the eye—one may fancy oneself in the very arena, standing on the
trampled blood-stained sand, close to the gladiatorial slaves butchering their
fellow slaves, or being butcher’d to make a Roman holiday.
26

The description explained how the painting was “built up scrupulously in accordance with
classical authorities and antique remains,” suggesting the writer might have known the artist
looked to older images including those of antiquarians. Yet the article later explained how there
were “many points of dramatic invention in the picture which intensify the horror of the incident
depicted and show the brutalizing influence of such exhibitions….” More important than the fact
the painting contained invented elements was that it incorporated many details that looked like
those in previous representations of the period, including the Circus Maximus, its grandstand,
and the gowns of the spectators. These elements helped to convince the reader that this was how
the space looked at that time. The writer’s admission that “upon these [inventions] we have not
space to dwell” alludes to the fact that readers would not worry about such imagined elements
because the painting served its function of showing an exciting scene.
The fact this detailed print was based on a photograph rather than created from sketches
made in front of the painting itself was significant in that it shows how distant the image a reader
saw in a newspaper was from the original piece. This print was three generations removed from

25
“The Extra Supplement: Pollice Verso,” Illustrated London News, April 11, 1874, 342. See Bann Parallel Lines,
158-159.
26
Ibid.
34
the painting, which meant that certain details had already been lost, changed, or emphasized
differently from Gérôme’s work. For example, the print mostly lost lines of sunlight, created
from the awnings above the stands, visible in the painting on the right side against the wall
(figures 1.12 and 1.13); the chest of the victorious gladiator appeared more defined with black
outlines in the print than in the painting (figures 1.14 and 1.15). These differences did not matter
for an understanding of the image, however; the distortion that occurred from the original to the
printed version in the newspaper was only significant for questions of style of the painter and the
printmaker, and mostly noticeable when looking at the two next to one another. The exceptional
technique and careful hand of Gérôme was not the reason this image was included in the
newspaper. Rather, this image allowed the ILN to publish an amazing work of art that had
become popular around the globe that would thrill readers and possibly sell more issues.
The inclusion of this image in a newspaper that covered many spots of conflict and
achievement around the globe showed how the pictorial press treated historical subjects and
contemporary ones on a similar level as compelling narratives. Along with this visual insert, this
issue also included images of Queen Victoria reviewing troops at Windsor and meeting with
invalids there, sketches of poor and working people in St. Petersburg, images of the Cape Coast
in Africa, a missionary with two Ashanti children in Africa, and two Japanese dancers. That is to
say, this issue—and every issue—of the ILN functioned as a picture collection that included both
contemporary subjects and historical ones.
With many illustrated newspapers in Great Britain, the United States, France, and other
countries in Western European, South and East Asia, and throughout the Americas, images like
this one were certainly reprinted many times, leading readers around the globe to become
familiar with them, regardless of the “dramatic invention” Gérôme included when painting it.
35
This created a consensus understanding of the look of the different spaces and periods, many of
which remain in the twenty-first century. That is, the images that circulated in the illustrated
press and other inexpensive visual media forms, including postcards, and cartes-de-visites,
created a wide understanding of the past and present that was the basis for cinema and a
twentieth-century view of the world.
The acceleration of the “Republic of Images” in the mid-nineteenth century, arising from
the proliferation of inexpensive newspapers, magazines, books, and other ephemeral visual
media, changed how the modern world understood information in visual terms. Leading the
charge were major illustrated newspapers and magazines from Great Britain, France, and the
United States, including the Illustrated London News, L’Illustration, Harper’s, and Collier’s.
Such publications

functioned as picture collections that could give contemporary readers or later
scholars a clear understanding of the world. Regarding the illustrated press as simply a modern
medium for distributing information to a mass audience in an inexpensive way is insufficient;
these newspapers and journals functioned in a similar way to more traditional picture collections
from which an understanding of the world emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Their pages certainly included gaps caused by commercial and editorial interests, including
many cultural biases in favor of development that eliminated many points of view, however
compilations of images from thousands of sources frequently resolved many of these omissions.
Illustrated journals of the nineteenth century were fundamental to building up the power of visual
media in the modern world, with such newspapers being published throughout Eastern, Central,
and Western Europe, as well as North and South America.
27

27
Jennifer Tucker, “‘Famished for News Pictures’: Mason Jackson, the Illustrated London News, and the Pictorial
Spirit,” in Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News, ed. Jason Hill and Vanessa R. Schwartz (New York:
Bloomsbury, 2015), 213.
36
As the nineteenth century drew to an end, images that appeared in the pictorial press
showed readers mundane scenes from outside their doors and exotic sights from distant parts of
the world from the past and the present. This audience also learned the material culture of these
places through the many details they saw in these pictures. The massive amount of illustrated
media in the nineteenth century led artists to believe there could be pictures of any person or
place they might need for visual research. As their collections grew, many people believed that
studying images could lead to a new type of cultural improvement through visual literacy. One of
the most important places where picture collections grew around the turn of the twentieth century
in the United States were public libraries. John Cotton Dana wrote strong arguments for the
cultural amelioration that would result from library patrons and educators browsing files of
indexed and sorted images that circulated throughout the “Republic of Images.”

Public Libraries and Picture Collections
With the creation of the American Library Association (ALA) in 1876, public libraries began to
move from idiosyncratic depositories for books and materials to standardized centers of the
community that sought to offer reading materials to people of all classes at no cost.
28
Before the
turn of the twentieth century, few libraries had open-stack shelving and their holdings frequently
contained less-approachable texts similar to the collections of university or private research
libraries of the time, rather than the popular literature and reference materials that would develop
in the decades to come. It was rare to find collections of children’s books or books in languages
other than English.

From the last decade of the nineteenth century through the 1920s, John

28
For more on the rise of public lending libraries in the American Northeast in the late-nineteenth-century and early-
twentieth century, see Thomas Augst, “Faith in Reading: Public Libraries, Liberalism, and the Civil Religion,” in
Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States, ed. Augst and Carpenter (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 148-83.
37
Cotton Dana and his reformer peer, Melvil Dewey, led a movement to increase the study of
library science in universities and counselled American public libraries on becoming reliable
local institutions that gave patrons from all social classes and backgrounds access to more verbal
and visual knowledge in an effort to help build an increasingly informed citizenry.
29

Dewey was an idiosyncratic man singularly focused on efficiency in every area of his
life. He was such an advocate for the simplification of the English language that he changed the
spelling of his first name from “Melville” to “Melvil.”
30
His developments with the decimal
classification system for library books that would bear his name were significant in the late-
nineteenth century and would become the model organizational form for both public and
specialist libraries in the twentieth century. Considering he was mostly concerned with
organizing and simplifying patrons’ access to books, he wrote very little about images. In one
article, however, he explained the value of an education “that comes from reading natural
language: scenery, pictures, scientific specimens, and all we lern [sic] by studying a thing or a
picture instead of printed words about it.”
31
This echoed writers of the nineteenth century who
found value in pictures as conveyors of information with the term “natural language” connecting
to Delacroix’s interest in photography instructing him about the appearance of light and shadow.
Dana, on the other hand, wrote extensively about images and advocated strongly for the
inclusion of visual materials and picture collections in standard public library services. He was a
populist who believed in the potential for all people to improve their lives through access to

29
For more on John Cotton Dana’s innovations and his peers in public library development, see Carl A. Hanson,
“Access and Utility: John Cotton Dana and the Antecedents of Information Science, 1889-1929,” Libraries &
Culture 29, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 186–204; for a further examination of John Cotton Dana’s career and achievements
within the context of the American Progressive Era, see Kevin Mattson, “The Librarian as Secular Minister to
Democracy: The Life and Ideas of John Cotton Dana,” Libraries & Culture 35, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 514–34.
30
Wayne A Wiegand, Irrepressible Reformer: A Biography of Melvil Dewey (Chicago: American Library
Association, 1996), 27.
31
Melvil Dewey, “Decimal Classification Beginnings,” Library Journal, February 15, 1920, 152. Dewey’s spelling
of “learn,” removing the diphthong, is another example of his view of a simpler English spelling system.
38
visual and verbal information. His beliefs were quite similar to those of the founding American
thinkers and politicians of the eighteenth century who believed in the benefits of education for
the creation of an informed and active citizenry. Born in Vermont in 1856 and a graduate of
Dartmouth College in 1878, Dana was a patrician who believed poorer citizens, including
immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe as well as African Americans and Latin
Americans, would benefit from public education and acculturation in order to work in modern
America and that a public “library [could be] a tool to address a deficiency in civic literacy.”
32

These views could easily be criticized for their lack of perspective of social class structures or
how they rejected people retaining cultural legacies, however, for the purposes of understanding
Dana’s views on picture collections, his writing is best understood as being well-intended and
rather typical of the Progressive Era’s views of social uplift. He was shortsightedly interested in
creating library practices that could help educate a maximum number of people.
After a brief career as a lawyer, Dana became the librarian of the Central Library of
Denver in 1889, which was located inside the city’s central public high school. There he realized
the pedagogic potential of images to help students learn traditional narrative lessons, including
great works of literature and biblical stories, historical events, and complex scientific topics that
required diagrams or models.
33
He believed libraries that merely gathered and lent books and
private collections that limited access to their materials were insufficient to the needs of the era;
he thought public libraries should offer patrons the most diverse books possible as well as
collections of other media.
34
He saw picture collections as an ideal way to foster a relationship

32
Ezra Shales, Made in Newark: Cultivating Industrial Arts and Civic Identity in the Progressive Era (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rivergate Books, 2010), 49.
33
John Cotton Dana, “Some of the Extra-Artistic Elements of Aesthetic Emotion,” Popular Science Monthly 58
(1903): 411-417, reprinted in Carl A. Hanson, ed, Librarian at Large: Selected Writings of John Cotton Dana
(Washington, D.C.: Special Libraries Association, 1991), 217-221.
34
One example of the private library collection that limited access to its materials in a way Dana rejected was the
Boston Athanæum. For an excellent examination of how women were originally barred from membership, see
39
between a library and schools, teachers, artisans, scientists, laborers, and other curious patrons
who could use such resources.
After spending several years around the turn-of-the-century in the public library of
Springfield, Massachusetts he moved to the Free Public Library of Newark—later renamed the
Newark Public Library—in 1902. There he began to expand his vision for broader access to
books, including allowing patrons to browse open-stack shelves, establishing a collection of
books and materials for children, creating specialty collections for the many trades in the city,
and building collections of books in languages that could serve Newark’s immigrant populations.
He also built a picture collection to help the educators and artists of the city. In a 1902 column
for the NPL’s newsletter, Dana listed the many places librarians could find the images in a public
library’s picture collection:
They are in books, which have passed their usefulness, in magazines and weekly
journals not worth binding and a place on the shelves, when they have become a
little out of date. They come in circulars and advertisements of all kinds. They are
in odd numbers of subscription books and art journals which friends of the library
send in, They are in literary journals, technical journals, architectural journals,
trade journals.
35

Following Dana’s outline, a picture collection would be any ordered compilation of images,
gathered by connoisseurs, curators, or clerks, that were clipped and organized into filing cabinets
and later examined by library patrons, teachers, artists, and graphic designers of the city in a
search for visual information about the world.
As his career continued, Dana rose to leadership circles of the ALA where he continued
to promote picture collections as an important part of a public library through articles in the
Library Journal. From these pieces he shared his views for the growing library field, including

Abigail A. van Slyck, “The Lady and the Library Loafer: Gender and Public Space in Victorian America,”
Winterthur Portfolio 31, no. 4, “Gendered Spaces and Aesthetics” (Winter, 1996): 221-242.
35
John Cotton Dana, “The Age of Pictures,” The Call, August 10, 1902, Newark Public Library scrapbook.
40
his strong opinions regarding how the lives of common people could be improved through a
consistent engagement with literary and visual culture. In 1909 he helped create the Special
Libraries Association (SLA), which supported the creation and maintenance of libraries
dedicated to specific themes or media, such as corporate and industrial archives and libraries
dedicated to non-literary materials.
36
This naturally followed from his interest in non-literary
materials.
For the NPL’s picture collection, clerks would find images in books, illustrated
magazines, newspapers, or other media sources such as post cards, prints, or photographs, then
clip them and paste them to heavy-stock boards that could be sorted into bins devoted to certain
themes or subjects. Much like Strada and Peiresc before him, Dana understood how
representations of people and places could come from great distances and a variety of sources
and would help give information on those subjects to viewers. Patrons could search for images
by flipping through the bins before checking out the heavy-stock boards as they would with
books (figure 1.16). The library attempted to create an encyclopedic collection of images that
represented as many objects, places, and people as possible. The files for dogs, for instance,
would include images of as many breeds as they could find from the previous centuries of
illustrated material and art. A patron could find images of dogs sitting in living rooms, dogs
running in fields, dogs playing cards, work dogs, and advertisements for dog food. For artists,
such a variety of subjects and images would help to inspire any number of other images of dogs
they might create; for educators and other users, these images could help show the animals in a

36
For more on the creation of the Special Libraries Association and Dana’s role in its creation, see Guy St. Clair,
SLA at 100: From ‘Putting Knowledge to Work,’ to Building the Knowledge Culture (Alexandria, Virginia: Special
Libraries Association, 2009), 1-19. Many thanks to David Cappoli, Director of Web Operations for the UCLA
School of Law, former Digital Resources Librarian of the UCLA School of Law, and former librarian at the Los
Angeles Times, for assistance on this section.
41
variety of contexts. Organizing these pictures into groups related to image content allowed the
collection to grow without limitations and acknowledged, in a way not dissimilar from Strada’s
incomplete numismatic book, that there were always more pictures in the world than could be
gathered.
The ability of patrons to view every image in a collection increased the amount of visual
information a patron could encounter when compared to the more limited view of a gallery
exhibition of pictures on a wall. Only a decade before, in the late-1890s, art historian Heinrich
Wölfflin standardized the art historical pedagogical practice of projecting two slides on a screen
next to one another in order to compare and contrast images or draw connections between them.
He viewed this mode of education as superior to a lesson in an illustrated book because it was
more linear, it could help build a clear argument, and it could allow for improvisation by the
instructor to make ancillary points along the way.
37
The physical act of flipping through images
was superior to viewing two images together in the slide lecture of an art history class and more
like browsing open-stack shelves because other discoveries could serendipitously present
themselves to the researcher. A picture collection could also allow a user to examine dozens of
images in a short timeframe. While it lacked a discursive structure, the act of flipping allowed
patrons to see related images that helped to highlight salient themes of analysis. Whereas
Wölfflin’s presentation of two images made a connection between them, a picture library could
show hundreds of images from which more connections could appear.
Dana believed pictures were the most significant tool for helping modern people learn
about the world. He explained:
The casual traveler, the geologist, the promoter of immigration, the mechanic, the
inventor, the naturalist, the reporter, the biographer and the historian, all these and

37
Robert S. Nelson, “The Slide Lecture, or the Work of Art ‘History’ in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”
Critical Inquiry 26, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 430.
42
many others find that each year they need fewer words to express their thoughts,
to convey their information because pictures, easily found or easily made, cover
the subject in hand more and more fully. […]By pictures we are going to increase
man’s ability to grasp the life that surrounds him, and make education more
common and in the end run more thorough.
38

While he never argued that one obvious demographic for picture collections would be illiterate
patrons—a surprising silence considering how he embraced the diverse citizens of Newark
without negative judgment—he assumed pictures could address viewers in a more universal way
that disregarded issues of class, race, national origin, and language of individuals.
39
His view that
pictures could express subjects more completely recalled Talbot’s observations about how
photography could capture details overlooked by written descriptions. Furthermore, in explaining
how pictures showed the world “more and more fully,” he did not use the word “completely,”
again invoking a similar understanding to Strada’s antiquarian efforts to confront how a picture
collection could never be perfectly finished and would always be growing with new images.
In 1909, Dana opened the Newark Museum on the top floor of the public library as a way
to further expose his patrons to the work of great artists from around the world. In examining the
image of art gallery (figure 1.17), it becomes clear how many of its patrons were women; for
Dana, offering visual information to Newarkers who might not have had access to education
beyond primary school was an important impetus for the creation of the museum. He did not
approach the curation of this collection as an art historian or a connoisseur, however, and was not
interested in searching for the best examples of works by a certain pantheon of great artists so his
patrons could behold the beauty of specific creative geniuses. Rather, he saw more value in

38
Ibid.
39
It seems as if Dana did not adequately appreciate the power of images and how they could easily manipulate
viewers and believe the dominant cultural ideology that created them. In the case of the many working-class and
immigrant users of such images, he failed to see how exposure to pictures from the dominant press organs might
have instilled in a patron a worldview that contradicted their best interests. That is to say, in his effort to expose
Newarkers to more information to help them better engage in the world, Dana might have presenting them with
imagery from the dominant business culture that did not value their work or minority culture.
43
museum-goers understanding the “knowledge” contained in representations of masterpiece
paintings rather than in the “esthetic [sic] habit” of appreciating the technique artists used to
make them.
40
For Dana, an understanding of the stories and themes depicted in the works was a
higher goal than growing a new class of art critics who could recognize whether a painting was
well executed or not. He built a collection that featured fine art, such as painting and sculpture,
reproductions of great works from other museums, and applied arts that came from the Newark
region, including commercial works in metal and glass.
41
He believed well-executed copies of
important paintings would show patrons the images of great artists and give them a broader
understanding of artistic and visual culture. Considering both the museum and the library’s
picture collection contained copied images, the organizational logic that “objects distinguish
museums” meant that initially images from books and popular media would go into the library’s
picture collection, while craft objects, paintings, sculpture, and other three-dimensional materials
would become part of the museum’s collection.
42

Dana believed the collection of the museum would work in conjunction with the library’s
picture collection and that images would soon “serve as the usual medium of communication in a
very large part of the wide field of human knowledge.”
43
Under his leadership of both
institutions, the library’s picture collection and the art of the museum were tied together through

40
John Cotton Dana, “Relation of Art to American Life,” Address before the Eastern Art Teacher’s Association,
Brooklyn, June 1906, reprinted in Carl A. Hanson, ed, Librarian at Large: Selected Writings of John Cotton Dana
(Washington, D.C.: Special Libraries Association, 1991), 225.
41
In an article from 1971, Duncan F. Cameron, the curator of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, explained how in the
late-nineteenth century communities “created great art museums that reflected the heritage of bourgeois and
aristocratic culture to the exclusion of popular or folk culture”(Duncan F. Cameron, “The Museum: A Temple or a
Forum?,” Curator 14 (1971): 17). Considering how Dana focused the collection on applied art and did not promote
bourgeois and aristocratic culture as superior to his working class patrons, it would appear as if the Newark
Museum’s collection was rather unusual in its era.
42
Karen A Rader and Victoria E. M. Cain, Life on Display: Revolutionizing U.S. Museums of Science and Natural
History in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 2.
43
John Cotton Dana, “The Age of Pictures,” The Call, August 10, 1902, Newark Public Library scrapbook. For
more on John Cotton Dana’s work in the Newark Public Library, see Shales, 44-55.
44
pedagogy and public uplift. He saw them as equally valuable and as a single interrelated solution
to the problem of knowledge acquisition. He explained that “[I]f you go to Newark's Museum for
designs of any kind and in any field, or for pictures of anything that was ever made or ever
conceived of, you will be told to step into the city’s library and find what you want!
44
Such a
connection between the two collections was possible because the image and the information
contained within it were of paramount importance to Dana.
Following Dana’s enthusiastic writing, many public libraries in major American cities
began to build their own picture collections in the years that followed. Most significantly, the
New York Public Library (NYPL) created its own in 1915—only four years after the opening of
the Main Branch—initially housed in the Children’s Department, which betrayed its pedagogical
orientation. During its first decades, the collection contained fewer than 18,000 images, mostly
made up of pictures from books and periodicals the library was discarding.
45
This number would
greatly increase in the following decades by Romana Javitz, an innovative librarian who also
appreciated the ability of pictures to directly communicate information.
In 1929, the same year John Cotton Dana died in Newark, Javitz became the
superintendent of the NYPL’s Picture Collection. She worked to make it larger than its Newark
counterpart, growing to more than 6 million images by the time she retired in 1968.
46
Just like
the picture collection across the Hudson river, each image was pasted to a heavy-stock sheet and
contained only one image, which was tagged for indexing allowing patrons to check them out for

44
John Cotton Dana, “The Museum and Library Combination in Newark [1909],” John Cotton Dana Papers, Box
13, Charles F. Cummings New Jersey Information Center, Newark Public Library. By 1908, the library loaned three
hundred pictures each month, and by 1912 the collection had as many as 360,000 images in it, according to two
articles cited in Ezra Shales, Made in Newark, 50. See, “A Progressive Library,” New York Tribune, November 8,
1908; and “The Library’s Collection of 360,000 Pictures,” Newarker 1, No. 10 (August 1912): 171.
45
Mary Panzer, “Pictures at Work: Romana Javitz and the New York Public Library Picture Collection,” in The
“Public” Life of Photographs, ed. Thierry Gervais (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016), 131.
46
Ibid 130.
45
reference. One innovation Javitz made was to use the elite status of the NYPL to her advantage
in building relationships with the photograph departments of the New York Times and Newsweek
magazine who would give the collection copies of its images. She also worked to secure
photographs from the federal government’s Resettlement Administration—later renamed the
Farm Security Administration (FSA)—which was a bureau in the 1930s and early-1940s that
hired professional photographers to travel the country to take pictures of Americans working in
their New Deal-era jobs. These relationships with news media and the FSA meant that a
tremendous number of detailed photographs of people, places, and industries became part of the
NYPL’s collection and that these images were of relatively recent vintage. Aside from simply
gathering visual information, with these additions of photojournalism and images from a
documentary mode of photography, the NYPL Picture Collection became an important clearing
house for images of the twentieth century.
Not all institutional picture collections were meant to be free and open to the public,
however; some were created for profit and commerce in addition to the mission of spreading
knowledge. One such collections was gathered by Otto Bettmann, a German émigré who created
the Bettmann Archive that would sell the use of images to marketing agencies, magazines, and
newspapers to illustrate articles or advertisements. In 1935, he moved to New York with
somewhere between 10,000 and 25,000 images he had gathered in Germany.
47
Once in the
United States, he continued to photograph countless images from historical and scientific books,
as well as prints and other media, many of which he would find in antiquarian libraries and
private collections in the city. Due to the specific nature of the archive featuring so many images

47
Bettmann was fired from his job in Berlin’s Staatliche Kunstbibliothek (the National Art Library) in 1933 due to
Nazi restrictions on Jews working in the government, Estelle Blaschke, Banking on Images: The Bettmann Archive
and Corbis (Leipzig: Spector Books, 2016), 51-57.
46
from arcane sources, the Bettmann Archive “oscillated between an institutional […] and an
efficient commercial [image] distribution service….”
48
He gathered images from rare sources
and also allowed access to those willing to pay for the service.
49

The NYPL and the Bettmann Archive were by no means unique in New York in their
drive to gather images and put them in searchable collections. The first three decades of the
twentieth century witnessed the creation of picture collections in most of the city’s major art and
history museums. These archives were mostly built as visual records of the thematic arts and
culture examined in the respective institutions. For instance, the Museum of the City of New
York, which was created in the 1920s to document and preserve the art, architecture, and design
of the metropolis, similar in mission to the Parisian Musée Carnavalet, built an important picture
collection that documented the diversity of the streets, buildings, parks, and people of the five
boroughs of the city. Most of the images gathered for the collection were photographic, including
several collections of pictures by photojournalists who took candid shots of people on the trains,
sidewalks, and restaurants of the city. It also contained prints from the firm of Currier & Ives,
who created thousands of images including many that showed the surrounding region.
The Museum of Modern Art created a picture collection around its opening in 1929 that
contained representations of great works of art and craft from around the world.
50
The
Metropolitan Museum of Art also had a photographic reference collection, which at its peak in

48
Ibid 75.
49
Bettmann believed the creation of a new negative and the geographic distance from any potential European
copyright holder to the United States entitled him to the copyright on images he duplicated. Because photography
fell into a liminal status between the written word and the production of an original object, and because lawyers and
scholars held it in a relatively low regard, there were doubts that the judicial system would defend the ownership of
such images. Furthermore, considering there had not yet been significant caselaw explaining how to treat the
copyright on photographic images, Bettmann’s not asking permission to use the images became the de facto
approval that he could. For more on Bettmann’s views on copyright, see Blaschke 69-73.
50
Diana Kamin, “Mid-Century Visions, Programmed Affinities: The Enduring Challenges of Image Classification,”
Journal of Visual Culture 16, no. 3 (December 1, 2017): 317.
47
the 1930s housed more than 800,000 images, staffed by twenty clerks, that helped museum
workers and scholars see images of works of art in the collection, including pieces in storage, as
well as those in outside institutions.
51
The rise of picture collections in the early-twentieth
century was certainly related to the rise of the pictorial press and illustrated books in the
nineteenth century. When institutions clipped pictures from their original sources, pasted them to
board, and organized them in files along with images of similar types, they functioned as an ad
hoc visual dictionary of the world.

Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne
Perhaps no person saw a clearer value to the orderly and systematic sorting of such visual
materials or had a larger impact on the way twentieth-century art historians have traced the
archaeology of icons and symbols through pictures than German intellectual Aby Warburg.
Fascinated by the origins and historiophoty of individual images that appeared in art, he began
creating his Mnemosyne Bilderatlas—an image archive named for the Greek muse of memory—
in 1924 upon his release from a sanitarium where he had spent the previous three years. Working
with two associates, Fritz Saxl and Ilse Bing, he gathered tens of thousands of images of great
and minor artworks and vernacular visual and material culture from collections in Germany,
France, Italy, and Greece, as well as many he photographed on visits to sites through those
countries. He put these into a picture collection from which he was able to create his “atlas” that
connected iconic images across time and cultures to show how certain forms and themes
circulated in the Western world from antiquity to his present era, or “the forces that had

51
Valentina Branchini, “The Photographic Study Collection of the Museum of Modern Art: A Change of
Reference,” in Costanza Caraffa, ed., Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History (Munich:
Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2011), 389-394.
48
determined the development of the Western mind.”
52
His use of the word “atlas” was significant
as it invoked the notion of a book of maps and recalled Atlas, the Titan who carried the heavens
on his shoulders and whose name became a metonym for the universe. The name for this picture
collection suggested an expansive view of the way interconnected images could form an
encyclopedic memory palace that could preserve an understanding of the world through artistic
representation. It was both a set of images that detailed the visual culture of the West, as well as
being the entire visual universe available in Western art and thought.
Warburg grouped images by thematic or iconic details and tacked them to muslin-
covered frames; these displays showed how certain visual details from an ancient culture had
been influenced by images that came from different cultures. He referred to this process as
showing an “after-life of antiquity.”
53
For example, Panel 48 (figure 1.18) showed a visual
exegesis of the physical manifestation of good fortune. It included a sixteenth-century
antiquarian depiction of the front and back of a Roman coin that featured the goddess Fortuna
steering a ship on rough seas (figure 1.19) and a twentieth-century photograph of the fifteenth-
century palazzo of a wealthy Italian family whose success related to their good fortune with
markets and banking (figure 1.20). The panel displays many different forms of representation,
beyond numismatics and architecture, including a photograph of a 1515 portrait of Emperor
Maximilian I with his family painted by German artist Bernhard Strigel in which Fortuna appears
as a brooch on a young man’s hat at the center of the image (figure 1.21), as well as a copy of a
page from a fifteenth-century manuscript depicting the Wheel of Fortune (figure 1.22). Not only
did these images show a mixture of media, from photography to painting and printmaking, but

52
Stephanie Buck and Andreas Stolzenburg, “Foreword,” in Antiquity Unleashed: Aby Warburg, Dürer and
Mantegna (London: The Courtauld Gallery, 2013), 8.
53
Georges Didi-Huberman, “The Surviving Image: Aby Warburg and Tylorian Anthropology,” Oxford Art Journal
25, no. 1 (2002): 61.
49
they cover nearly two millennia of visual and material culture, showing that images have been
reproduced for many centuries and revealing different modes of recreation. The thousands of
images Warburg and his associates gathered from museums and private archives throughout
Western Europe were similar in scope to the picture collections of American public libraries of
the same era. Whereas Wölfflin believed comparing two images next to one another helped to
better understand both, Warburg expanded the ability for such comprehension by engaging many
similar images that had been created in different locations over a wide span of time.
Warburg’s methods were similar to those of antiquarians in how he gathered and then
categorized his materials for later use; however, the connections he made between pictures went
a step further than the early modern work. His atlas showed how many artists from antiquity, the
Renaissance, and the modern era relied on older images and cultural topoi to guide them in their
own image-making. It is not sufficient to simply see how and when Fortuna appeared throughout
visual media from ancient Rome to the present; an appreciation for the way artists and
craftworkers looked to older representations of the goddess when creating their own works
became clear when a viewer recognized how so many of these images related to one another.
This is not a revelation in terms of understanding the history of art, however the way Warburg
was able to trace iterations of such visual themes through an examination of thousands of images
shows how much more information viewers could learn through an examination of many images
together. Additionally, by highlighting connections between images based on small details seen
in them, such as a brooch on a hat, he showed how important individual visual and material
elements could be to a larger understanding of the world.
Warburg was unable to complete the atlas project or write a specific explanation of his
concepts and goals before his death in 1929, however it is clear that each of the sixty-three
50
panels was organized to highlight and investigate a single theme. There was no reason to believe
his project was complete in the way he organized the images; had he lived longer he might have
continued the project further refining it and creating more panels to investigate other themes and
relationships between images. As scholar Georges Didi-Huberman explained, “the fact that the
configuration of images [could] always be changed [… was] a sign in itself of heuristic fecundity
and the intrinsic madness of such a project.”
54
This same possibility of growth is reminiscent of
Dana’s vision for a picture collection that could be indefinitely expanded and also Strada’s
incomplete book of coins. In each of these cases, collectors believed that knowledge did not
come from a fixed set of known pictures and materials, but that visual understanding was always
incomplete and that such collections could contribute to further expanding visual understanding.
Beyond being a juxtaposition of images, Warburg’s atlas—in many ways the apotheosis
of picture collections—showed how such an accumulation of images could be used to build
knowledge and revealed the process by which ancient icons and imagery were reused by and
interpolated into subsequent cultures.
55
Being able to see images next to one another revealed
how visual forms changed over time, likely due to movements in culture; identifying these
evolutions of meaning helped to better understand a longer history of pictorial motifs. These
methods were somewhat similar in practice to those of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
antiquarians who examined details of the built world of the past in order to better comprehend
their own time. For instance, in the case of Panel 48, the abstract notion of good fortune became
a goddess in the form of a woman steering a ship, which later became abstracted again as an
image of a wealthy family’s house built by the riches they earned thanks to that good fortune.

54
Georges Didi-Huberman, Atlas, or The Anxious Gay Science, trans. Shane B Lillis (Chicago: University Of
Chicago Press, 2018), 12.
55
For more on the distortion of visual culture from antiquity see Christopher D. Johnson, Memory, Metaphor, and
Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2012), 12.
51
Such a pivot away from the material to the conceptual universalized the visual argument.
Through the use of picture collections, artists, librarians, and scholars in the nineteenth
and early-twentieth centuries were able to build on Wölflin’s concept of creating an “art history
without names” that focused on the contents of pictures and the connections of those images to
each other. Wölflin would later comment that this mode of inquiry was not intended to entirely
remove individual artists from art history but merely to “attempt to look at things from another
angle.”
56
Picture collections have led artists and scholars to build history without names, or,
more specifically to examine history through images. The scale and reach of the circulation of
images through illustrated journals and other printed media before the advent of cinema shows
how important pictures were to the spread of knowledge in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. These modes of visual understanding brought together fine art, commercial
advertising, journalism, and entertainment for modern viewers.
Hollywood filmmakers inherited this picture collecting tradition in the early-twentieth
century as they produced movies that recirculated images from the popular press. Like Arnaldo
Momigliano’s description of antiquarian work, they systematically collected all the images of
relics from the past connected to certain subjects. Their methods were also similar to those of
nineteenth-century artists, American public libraries, and twentieth-century art historians as they
used pictures as sources of visual understanding of the world they would then recreate on screen.
The creation, distribution, collection, organization, and study of such images through their
inclusion in picture collections was one of the most important and underexamined aspects of
communication since the sixteenth century, and would become a central tenant of Hollywood
filmmaking through the first half-century of its history.

56
Heinrich Wölfflin, “Introduction to the Fourth and Fifth Editions,” in Principles of Art History; the Problem of the
Development of Style in Later Art, trans. Mary Hottinger (New York: Holt, 1920 and 1921).
52
Chapter Two—‘Pictures and Sketches of Everything Under the Sun’:
Early Hollywood Research, 1908-1928”

In advance of the production of D.W. Griffith’s 1916 historical feature Intolerance, the
director engaged researchers to gather images of the ancient world and put them into a
scrapbook. By creating this picture collection, he and his craft departments would be able to
examine visual materials in order to see how the ancient world might have looked. The
repurposed ledger (figure 2.1) presented thousands of images from illustrated books that showed
pictures of classical and archaeological sites, including several antiquarian volumes that
catalogued ancient home furnishings, weaponry and armor, horse bridles, ship prows, seals, and
other assorted fragments from Mesopotamian cultures.
1
Griffith’s research team photographed
all of these images, organized them by subject, and pasted them to the pages of the scrapbook.
Griffith and his associates constructed Intolerance through the use of illustrations from these
books, newspapers, and magazines, prints, photographs, and drawings of the world to help
production workers recreate historical characters, costumes, sets, and set dressing.
Much like antiquarians and artists of the preceding centuries, Griffith and his production
team used images of the material culture of the past to shape the look of the film. This
compendium was one of the earliest examples of a centralized research scrapbook into which
visual materials were gathered for filmmakers to study during production. This simple and
logical solution, which borrowed lessons from the scrapbooking practice popular in the era,
continued antiquarian methods of collecting and studying pictures. While the film is widely
considered a technical step forward in terms of editing and cross-cutting different non-
coterminous narrative threads, it was also an achievement of finding and organizing disparate
images of the ancient world to help filmmakers create a spectacle in which the audience would

1
“Scrapbook of ‘Intolerance,’” D.W. Griffith Archive, Film Department, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
53
see such spaces and possibly recognize them from older visual media.
2

Setting aside any historical inaccuracies and inventions Intolerance might have
presented, it showed millions of viewers around the globe details of the material culture of
Babylon in the sixth century B.C.E., ancient Judea in the first century C.E., France in the
sixteenth century C.E. and the United States of the 1910s, including the clothing, home
furnishings, modes of transportation, and architecture of each period. Rather than examining the
political history or the successes and failures of great figures of the past, the researchers who
created the scrapbook approached the film’s Babylonian section as antiquarians, primarily
concerned with fragmentary visual and physical details of the ancient world in order to
understand a belief of how it should look, based on past representations of the setting. Cinematic
researchers understood the world as an accretion of details from which individual items could be
removed and recreated on screen. This led them to employ research as a way of finding visual
data rather than as historians trying to offer an accurate analytical narrative about the world.
When reproduced in cinematic form, these moving pictures, which were inspired by mass media
images that previously circulated in illustrated newspapers and books, showed spectators these
settings and time periods, greatly influencing how a wide audience understood the appearance of
the ancient or modern world. The accuracy of the source pictures and film images was less
important than the fact that global viewers could see a setting based on past representations that
would become a near-universal understanding of the past or present.
The research and reuse of images from earlier visual sources by production companies
began around 1908, with the first formal research departments organized between 1912 and 1916

2
David Bordwell has argued that Iris Barry of the Museum of Modern Art’s Film Library was instrumental in
recognizing Griffith’s editing achievements in Intolerance and that the film “laid a foundation for Soviet Montage a
decade later” (David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997],
26.).
54
in several studios including the World Film studio and the Solax Studios in Fort Lee, New
Jersey, and the David Ward Griffith Corp., Universal Film Manufacturing Corp., and Famous
Players-Lasky Corp. in Hollywood.
3
These departments exposed filmmakers to millions of
pictures, from the mundane to the exotic, gathered from a wide variety of sources to help
produce movies the audience would believe and recognize from their daily experience in the
“Republic of Images.”
The ways cinema research related to, used, and adapted work methods from older art
forms, including painting and theater, as well as library science and art history, has been
overlooked by film, history and art history scholars, yet such a comparison is important for
understanding how cinema has related to the wider world of visual art. It is not sufficient to
conclude that Hollywood was merely interested in finding details of the world to recreate on
screen, or that studios were interested in doing this efficiently to save time and money as has
been a major belief by scholars examining production innovation in this era.
4
Hollywood studios
used visual research practices developed by antiquarians, art historians, theater producers, and
librarians to better understand the broader visual context in which their films took place and a

3
See, William Uricchio and Roberta E. Pearson, Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 3-16; “The Making of a Feature,” Moving Picture World, January-
March 1913, 873; Helen Gladys Percey, “The Problems of a Motion Picture Research Library,” Journal of the
Society of Motion Picture Engineers, March 1936, 253-158; “New World Picture Department—Mrs. Eugenie
Ingleton is Librarian of the Reference Department of the Fort Lee Studio,” The Moving Picture World, January 30,
1915, 662; “The Universal Librarian,” The New York Dramatic Mirror, August 5, 1916, 32;
4
There are two main views of accuracy in film research, those who see accuracy as the main goal, such as Janet
Staiger (see “The Division and Order of Production: The Subdivision of the Work from the First Years Through the
1920s,” in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and
Mode of Production to 1960 [New York: Columbia University Press, 1985], 147) and those who see accuracy as a
flexible culturally-inflected notion that relates to popular understandings and visual or material culture, such as
Natalie Zemon Davis (see, “‘Any Resemblance to Persons Living or Dead’: Film and The Challenge of
Authenticity,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 8, no. 3 [1988]: 269–83 and Philip Rosen, Change
Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). For an examination of
the relationship between accuracy and visual culture through the case study of nineteenth-century San Francisco, see
Amy K. DeFalco Lippert, Consuming Identities: Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2018).
55
visual history of their subjects they could imbed in films. Cinema was able to expose millions of
viewers around the world to the same images in a more expansive way than art or illustrated
print media previously could; American filmmakers generated a consensus visual understanding
of the appearance of places and people for their viewers.
This chapter investigates the origins of research libraries in Hollywood and how visual
materials were important to their development and function. It also examines the work of several
pioneers of visual research in cinema, including D.W. Griffith and his West Coast production
team, Herbert Brenon, Cecil B. DeMille, Eugenie Magnus and George Ingleton, Bessie
McGaffey, Frances Richardson, and Helen Gladys Percey, all of whom worked to build effective
studio libraries. This cohort laid the technical foundation upon which the research era of
Hollywood and the greater film industry would thrive in the following decades. For studios, the
employment of these workers and the creation of research departments was initially spurred by
both creative and business efficiency purposes; the techniques they created would last for the
next fifty years and help Hollywood filmmakers plausibly recreate familiar, believable scenes.
The research methods created in the early, idiosyncratic years of the film industry show
how producers, directors, and craftworkers were thinking with pictures and other visual media
and how their work was similar in creative and business practice to other visual and performing
artists. The way this research work developed throughout the United States in the 1910s and
1920s shows how it was not invented by a small group of industrial geniuses, but rather emerged
from a set of practices and habits of visual thinking from scholarly and artistic work of past
centuries. The visual research methods used to acquire knowledge by antiquarians beginning in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and then artists and librarians in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, was later systematized in the context of Hollywood in the twentieth
56
century. That studios used these practices shows how nineteenth-century visual understandings
of people and places became part of the lexicon of Hollywood films. Examining the connections
between visual research in early cinema and other creative forms reveals how important the
medium was to a democratization of visual culture in the early twentieth century. Investigating
how American filmmakers recirculated printed images in their movies shows how early cinema
interpolated industrial efficiencies, distinction, and intermediality into the new artistic form to
make it an important source of visual understanding for audiences. While the press and
production companies frequently claimed an interest in the accuracy of their films, that related to
marketing of the movie and promotion of the medium; the reproduction of familiar older images
from many print forms that viewers could recognize and believe was actually the most essential
aspect that research brought to early cinema and the element that helped it become the dominant
communication and entertainment medium of the twentieth century.

Foundational Cinematic Research
By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, several production companies and
filmmakers across the United States had turned to older visual media to guide complicated
elements in their productions. The practices they created would develop into formal research
work by the end of the following decade. One of the earliest adopters of the use of images for
research was the New York-based Vitagraph Studios, which around 1908 began relying on visual
sources in order to raise the caliber of their productions from the typical “cinema of attractions,”
including trick films and visual jokes, to short narratives based on canonical texts and characters.
The production company hoped to be considered a peer of more established and esteemed media,
including the legitimate theater, and believed such an elevation of subject matter would
57
differentiate their films from other amusements that flooded the media market.
5
These quality
films included adaptations of Shakespeare and Dante, biographical stories of George Washington
and Napoleon Bonaparte, and biblical narratives of Moses and Jesus Christ. As cinema borrowed
a focus on legitimacy and respectability from other cultural sources, it relied on visual research
methods that emerged from those arts in the previous centuries.
6

J. Stuart Blackton, one of the two producer-director founders of Vitagraph, gathered and
studied the visual media and material culture of a period to better understand the world of a
film’s setting. Unlike many of his contemporaries in early cinema, Blackton had worked as a
journalist and illustrator where he also would have learned the importance of borrowing visual
details from older sources.
7
He “steeped himself in the atmosphere of whatever ‘period piece’ he
planned to produce…,” according to one account.
8
In advance of making his film Napoleon and
the Empress Josephine (1909), he filled his office with written and visual representations of the
Emperor, along with decorative objects, including:
[…]beautifully bound volumes dealing with every phase of Bonaparte’s life, […]
a glass-topped table of the period, […] a priceless group of authentic miniatures
of Napoleon and Josephine, […] a bronze bust, […and] a series of enormously
enlarged photographs of Bill Humphrey [who starred in the film] made up as
Napoleon the solder and later as the Emperor.
9

Blackton examined material culture from the Napoleonic era in order to make a cinematic
reproduction of the characters and the period not unlike the French painter Jean-Léon Gérôme,
who had studied images of objects from antiquity for his paintings of Rome and the Middle-East.

5
Uricchio and Pearson. While this entire book serves as an excellent examination of this section of Vitagraph
productions, the Introduction, 3-16, makes a clear point about the role of quality films in the broader space of public
amusements of the period.
6
Ibid 44.
7
Blackton first encountered moving pictures when he interviewed Thomas Edison for a newspaper article. For more
see, “Blackton, Pioneer in Movies, Dies, 66,” New York Times, August 14, 1941.
8
Marian Blackton Trimble, J. Stuart Blackton: A Personal Biography by his Daughter (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow
Press, 1985), 51.
9
Ibid.
58
Items like the portrait miniatures could have inspired costume, hair and makeup choices for the
portrayals of the couple; the furniture could have been reused on the sets. When considering the
biographical books—which likely contained illustrations—the table, and the photograph of the
costumed film star, it would seem like Blackton worked more like a collector and connoisseur of
Napoleonia than an artist looking for inspiration and guidance in images and objects. Still, seeing
as this was such an extremely early example of visual research, it is most important to recognize
these antiquarian and artistic methods from earlier centuries being used in cinema. The notion
that movies were important enough that they would require the time and money to undertake
such antiquarian work previously done by painters and legitimate theater producers, was just
dawning on American filmmakers.
Blackton and Vitagraph continued to rely on visual media to guide their recreations of
historical and biblical spaces in the following years. In one case, the studio’s house organ
explained how the producers looked at images of Ancient Rome and the Middle East when
making their series of short films, The Life of Moses, between 1909 and 1910:
Among the many great artists whose works have been consulted in preparing the
appropriate scenic backgrounds for this great Biblical series are the following:
[James] Tissot, [Jean-Léon] Gerome, Gustave Dore, Edwin Austin Abbey, Briton
Riviere, Sir Laurence Alma-Tadema, R A. Joseph Israel [Jozef Israëls] and
Benjamin Constant [all sic].
10

While many visual references were likely clear in this film series, the mere act of mentioning
such artists in promotional material for these movies was also an important effort to raise the
cultural status of cinema. More important than the actual citation of paintings in the series was
the fact that Vitagraph took for granted that readers and the audience might know the oeuvres of
such artists and could have recognized references to their works. Furthermore, assuming this was

10
Vitagraph Bulletin 204 (January 15-31, 1910): n.p.
59
not pure marketing and that filmmakers did, in fact, consult such paintings, it is likely they
examined prints from the illustrated press or reproductions of paintings, considering such images
of historical subjects frequently appeared in the newspapers and magazines of the turn-of-the
century, rather than seeing original works in museums.
A review of the fourth part of the series recognized the attention the filmmakers put into
this work and specifically commented that:
the research which must have been required to secure the information necessary to
reproduce the ancient scenes and have them approximate the best modern
knowledge of Egypt and Israel, is well worthy [sic] the consideration of scholars
and others interested in accurate work of this type.
11

The mention of the “accurate work” of the film suggests the writer of the article had an
understanding of the appearance of Egypt and Israel—most likely through repeatedly seeing such
places in the pictorial press, illustrated books, prints, and other visual media. Accuracy had little
to do with any first-person experience of the critic but with an inculcation with similar imagery
of the ancient world. In other words, this review confirmed that this film looked like past
depictions of the region and acknowledged that the production team would have consulted some
of those pictures to match the world they showed. The author suggested the film was tantamount
to scholarship on the topic and could be valuable to academics and viewers, a confirmation of
John Cotton Dana’s view of images—or, movies in this case—helping to uplift the audience
through education. Considering that films like this Moses series were made from pictures that
circulated elsewhere and that companies sent movies to theaters around the globe, they too
became part of a broader understanding of Egypt and Israel and would later influence subsequent
productions and other visual media.
The practice of the legitimate theater producers looking at older sources for information

11
“The Life of Moses, IV,” Moving Picture World, February 26, 1910, 299.
60
on costumes, sets, props, and historical context served as another important model for early
filmmakers. In the early-1820s, authentically staged plays became a popular movement in
London, particularly with Shakespearean productions. Two important innovators in this area
were star producer-performer Charles Kemble and the costume designer James Robinson
Planché. For their 1823 production of King John, they worked with antiquarians to research
period-appropriate costumes. Planché studied effigies of the historical figures in several churches
around England and illuminated manuscripts in the British Museum and the Bodleian Library of
Oxford. These men knew this work would be seen as significant to the audience and critics, so
they published a list of their sources in the show’s playbill, which equated it to an academic
examination of medieval England.
12
In productions that followed, Planché and his antiquarian
associates studied relevant visual materials to help understand the proper appearance of the
costumes for As You Like It, Othello, and Henry IV, Part I. These costumes were so popular that
sketches of them were published in books, which would have been a source for later costume
designers.
13
Appropriately, this movement came to be known as “antiquarian theater.”
14

By end of the nineteenth century, major stage productions hired dramaturgs to understand
and manage the cultural and historical details of their plays by researching the material culture of
the setting in collections and sites throughout Great Britain and abroad.
15
In the early-twentieth
century, such antiquarian practices were still being used in American theater where several future
filmmakers encountered them while working on productions in New York and for traveling
companies. Cecil B. DeMille, for example, worked on David Belasco’s 1911 production of The

12
For a brief and detailed examination of this performance, see Nancy J. Doran Hazelton, Historical Consciousness
in Nineteenth-Century Shakespearean Staging (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987), 36-37.
13
Paul Reinhardt, “The Costume Designs of James Robinson Planché (1796-1880),” Educational Theatre Journal
20, No. 4 (1968): 525.
14
For more on antiquarian in theater, see Bruce McConachie, ed., Theatre Histories: An Introduction, Second
edition (New York: Routledge, 2009), 274.
15
Mary Luckhurst, Dramaturgy: A Revolution In Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 58.
61
Return of Peter Grimm and clipped several illustrated articles from the newspaper that contained
artistic depictions of ghosts.
16
Another early filmmaker, Herbert Brenon, who would later make
cinematic adaptations of Ivanhoe (1913), Peter Pan (1924), and Beau Geste (1926), also learned
to use images of places and people for research while working in legitimate theater and
vaudeville productions. He would gather visual materials, including postcards and news picture
clippings, when researching early-nineteenth century British and French settings and characters
for plays.
17
Once his film career began in the early 1910s, he became known for his historical
films, including his 1913 Robespierre short, for which one critic highlighted the “scenic effects”
which were "of a high order,” likely due to his consultation of images of late-eighteenth-century
France.
18

While such inconsistent examinations of visual sources was important for the growth of
cinematic research, it lacked a concerted effort to gather more than the piecemeal images
filmmakers could find themselves. Such methods would become more formalized when
maverick writer-director-producer Alice Guy Blaché made Dick Whittington and His Cat (1913).
One article that examined her Solax Studio plant in Fort Lee, New Jersey highlighted the
research work she undertook for the film. It explained how “[t]o make these sets, study and
research were called for. Before she began the production, Madame Blache [sic] spent a good

16
“The Return of Peter Grimm, 1911” Cecil B. DeMille Archives, Box 235 folder 4, L. Tom Perry Special
Collections Library, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. In his memoir of early
Hollywood, Samuel Goldwyn mentioned this production and how it was a significant show that made him aware of
DeMille as being a “playwright of considerable skill” (Samuel Goldwyn, Behind the Screen [New York: George H.
Doran Company, 1923], 20).
17
“Research Material,” Herbert Brenon Collection, No. 126, Box 1, Special Collections, Frances Howard Goldwyn-
Hollywood Regional Branch Library, Los Angeles Public Library.
18
“Robespierre Three-Reel French Revolutionary IMP Drama,” Moving Picture News, August 16, 1913, 20. For
more on Brenon, see Richard Koszarski, Hollywood Directors: 1914-1940 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1976),123-127; James Card, Seductive Cinema: The Art of Silent Film (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 81-98;
and, Ian Graham, Herbert Brenon: An American Cinema Odyssey (Dublin: Ian Graham, 2017).
62
many days looking up old prints and studying the time [period].”
19
Her visual research appears to
have involved more than simply immersing herself in objects of the period of the film, as
Blackton had done. Similar in nature to the work of nineteenth-century artists like Gérôme, she
looked at many images related to the narrative as well as the wider world of the time period
outside the story. While her system of research is unknown and might have been as piecemeal as
other researchers of the era, the fact that her visual study took many days suggests her work was
careful and could have involved photographs and materials from the pictorial press.
It is particularly significant that her new studio was less than twenty miles from the
Newark Public Library where she could have visited the picture collection as part of her
research. The fact that this article highlighted her research further legitimized cinema as an art
form and connected Blaché’s work to the daily practice of film audiences and newspaper readers
who navigated the abundance of visual media in their daily lives. It is also noteworthy that
Herbert Brenon’s first jobs in film were also in the film studios of Fort Lee, including those of
Fox Films and Independent Moving Pictures (IMP). Brenon would have come into contact with
other filmmakers, including Blaché, with whom he could have exchanged visual research
practices from his experience with legitimate theater and theirs with movies.

A Research Library Moves West
This growth and amplification of research that was taking place in Fort Lee continued apace as a
major innovation arrived in 1914: the creation of an in-house research library. Eugenie Magnus
Ingleton, known and credited as E.M. or Magnus Ingleton, and her husband George Ingleton,
along with their collection of books and other visual media, were hired by theater and film

19
“The Making of a Feature,” Moving Picture World, January-March 1913, 873.
63
producer William A. Brady at World Pictures, another Fort Lee production company. Brady
viewed the use of a private collection of illustrated books and sorted pictures as one solution to
the growing desire by audiences for an improvement in films. An article written several years
later explained how “Mr. Ingleton heard directors express a need of an authoritative research
library for the Motion Picture Industry [sic], saying that for the want of the proper and correct
information there was great lack of detail in the screenplay.”
20
Magnus Ingleton explained in a
first-person account in a trade publication how she had created:
what I hope will prove a valuable, though never completed, Library of Reference
Department. Pictures and sketches of everything under the sun, at all periods, and
at all times, I am collecting and classifying, so that directors wanting helpful
ideas, for scenes, costumes, locations, historic dates or detail, will find several
sketches or pictures of whatever they seek.
21

This optimistic and exuberant statement suggested that movies could be both entertaining and
intelligent and that any film setting could be carefully recreated with details that helped them
look like the world they represented. The library she described had originally been created by
George, who had gathered materials during the previous decades while producing and acting in
plays throughout Britain and America.
22
She continued to grow the collection in New Jersey and
would have likely used materials from the Newark Public Library’s picture collection,
considering her proximity to it.

20
Florence Porter Parks, “The Ingletons At Home,” Camera!, June 8, 1919. It seems both George and Magnus
worked in research for World Film; she also wrote scenarios for the company and George acted in two films.
21
“New World Film Department” Moving Picture World.
22
There is not much biographical information on George Ingleton available before he worked in film production, so
the origin of his library remains unknown. He was mentioned in many press reports in Britain and the United States
as a touring stage actor, producer, and stage manager from 1902 through 1910. For a few of these, see “Sheffield
Notes and Jottings,” Yorkshire Telegraph and Star, March 22, 1902; “This Week’s Amusements in Leeds,”
Yorkshire Evening Post, June 16, 1903; and, “Mrs. Tree Was Departing, Will Return to Play Here,” New York
Evening World, February 22, 1908. A small amount of information on his background appeared later when he sold
his library to Fox and then died in a gruesome car accident, see “George Ingleton Research Library Acquired By
Fox for Coast Plant,” Moving Picture World, February 6, 1926; “George Ingleton Dead.” Film Daily 36, no. 49
(May 27, 1926): 2; and “George Ingleton,” Variety, May 26, 1926; “Founder of Great Fox Technical Library
Killed,” Fox Folks, July 1926.
64
In examining the description of her department, there are three elements that would
continue to be significant to researchers for the next fifty years. First, she explicitly connected
the search for knowledge and her ability to find such details to images rather than words. Similar
to the work of antiquarians, nineteenth-century artists, photographers, and Progressive-Era
reformers including John Cotton Dana, she understood how pictures gave viewers facts above
and beyond what verbal sources could offer. Having worked in legitimate theater production on
both sides of the Atlantic, she and her husband would have known how to use pictures to find
information on period-appropriate costumes, set design, and script details. Second, she
mentioned that her library would never be complete. Not only did this comment connect her to
earlier antiquarians, librarians, and managers of picture collection, but this idea would continue
to echo through the research era as a general understanding of the tremendous number of images
available in the world. The notion of gathering materials of “everything under the sun” was an
important sentiment that researchers would repeat for the next fifty years. Finally, she indicated
that a part of her work was to classify the visual material she gathered, highlighting, even in this
early moment, how the materials she found for one production could be reused for later projects.
While she had no specific education in library science, such a level of rational order made her
collection easier to navigate and more valuable to filmmakers who would use it.
The fact that World Film was interested in having such a collection at the studio shows a
belief at the management level of the company that the costs of illustrated books, magazines and
other materials were worth the expense because they would lead to films that included more
recognizable details and, as a result, would be seen by critics and viewers as more truthful. Also,
by 1914 Brady and his associates would have seen how filmmakers working in other Fort Lee
film companies, including Blaché and Brenon, were having success with research and they
65
would have also seen how building a library in the studio would cut the time required to travel to
public libraries in Newark or Manhattan. Furthermore, as companies were looking for ways to
differentiate their work from that of other production houses, World Film had faith that
promoting an in-house research library would imply to critics and viewers that the firm was
making more refined movies. The suggestion of care and seriousness that emerged from the fact
that the company used such a collection was just as valuable as the information that emerged
from it.
This sense of improvement through differentiation, systemization, and research also
caught the attention of Carl Laemmle. He had been another filmmaker based in Fort Lee when he
created IMP in 1909 and later absorbed it into his Universal Films Manufacturing Company in
1912. Like Brady at World Film, Laemmle’s management team at Universal, including H.O.
Davis, the West Coast general manager, saw how such visual study could improve their films.
They also believed that having it centrally located on the lot, managed by a dedicated staff
member, was more efficient than requiring craftworkers and scenarists to venture around the
region looking for source materials. Shortly after moving the production side of the company to
Los Angeles around 1913, the studio briefly employed Ethel Weber Howland, a sister of writer-
director Lois Weber, as a researcher. Her work, however, was tied to her sister’s productions
rather than to the greater needs of the studio.
23
In the summer of 1916 Universal hired Magnus
and George Ingleton to work in their Universal City plant, where she became co-head of the
scenario department and he became the director of research.
24
The library George brought from

23
“All Aboard for Universal City,” The Universal Weekly, January 17, 1914, 5. Many thanks to Shelley Stamp for
confirming this detail.
24
“More Laboratories Are Planned for Universal City, Transferring of Eastern Producing Companies Makes the
Addition Necessary-Building Will Also Be Erected to House an Extensive Library,” Motion Picture News, July 15,
1916, 224; “Sifted from the Studios—Pacific Coast Notes,” Motography, August 16, 1916, 512.
66
New Jersey along with his experience at World Film and his past work in legitimate theater made
him an ideal manager to bring greater efficiencies to Universal’s prestige films.
On the West Coast, George managed the library in a stand-alone building into which he
set up his “large private collection which [would] serve as the nucleus [… to which he would
add] all books of reference pertaining to photography, costumes, architecture, art, literature, and
such books as have been published pertaining to the cinema art.”
25
It is interesting to note that it
was George and not Magnus who was hired in this capacity, considering Davis hired and
promoted so many women into management roles at the studio and considering research and
library work would quickly become associated with women’s work.
26
This decision makes more
sense, however, when accounting for George’s legitimate theater experience and the fact that he
was married to Magnus, whom Davis was hiring in a head role of a more prestigious department.
It seems that George was actually the spousal hire in this case. Their tenure at Universal only
lasted two years and they left the studio and took their collection of books and visual materials in
1918.
27

Visual Research in Early Hollywood
Around 1904, The Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL) began a picture collection in its
Reference Department. The library’s annual report explained that the “intelligent use of the

25
“More Laboratories are Planned for Universal City,” Motion Picture News, July 15, 1916, 224.
26
For more on H.O. Davis and his views of gender in the workplace, see Mark Garrett Cooper, Universal Women:
Filmmaking and Institutional Change in Early Hollywood (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2010) 25-43; for
more on the gendering of labor in early Hollywood, see Karen Ward Mahar, Women Filmmakers in Early
Hollywood (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). LeRoy Armstrong, the researcher who replaced
Ingleton at Universal later wrote about how he took his library when he left the studio. See, LeRoy Armstrong,
“Building a Library,” Universal City News, August 1922.
27
The Ingletons left Universal a few months after H.O. Davis left the firm. It is possible but unclear that the general
manager’s departure had anything to do with their exit. For more on Davis’ departure from Universal, see Cooper
32-44.
67
nearly 8,000 selected photographs, covering nearly every branch of human activity, which can be
graphically reproduced, is a highly important function of the reference work and is now being
given due attention.”
28
Angelenos were quick to use this collection, borrowing thousands of
these images for use in the arts and architecture. By 1909, the library proudly noted the
importance of its picture collection and how useful it was to its patrons:
While all progressive libraries now make use of photographic and other
reproductions of the greatest paintings and sculpture, and of the world's
foremost architecture, not only for Reference but for circulation — this library
was one of the first and is one of the foremost in this activity. It is also recognized
as the leader in this respect in the whole West. It has a collection of over 8,000
such illustrations of art and architecture […] with an enormous public use.
29

Within five years, the nascent West Coast film industry, which was just beginning to relocate
from the East Coast and Midwest to the Los Angeles region, would become a major patron of the
library’s photographs and other pictures for research on film productions.
By the middle of the 1910s, there were several people working in research positions at a
handful of Hollywood studios, many of whom would use the LAPL picture collection. Many
trade and scholarly sources have referred to Elizabeth “Bessie” McGaffey as the first researcher
in Hollywood when DeMille enlisted her in 1914 from the Famous Players-Lasky scenario
department to assist him with his own productions.
30
This could have been technically true, as
she was perhaps the first person in the town officially given such a title, but there were many

28
Los Angeles Public Library Annual Report, 1905, 49.
29
Los Angeles Public Library Annual Report, 1909, 65.
30
McGaffey’s early role helping DeMille has been mentioned extensively in the trade and popular press, as well as
several scholarly sources. For several examples see, Hellen Gladys Percey, “The Motion Picture Library,” Special
Libraries 21, No. 7 (September 1930): 256; Helen Gladys Percey, “The Problems of a Motion Picture Research
Library,” Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (March 1936): 253-158; “Research Work in Motion
Picture Production—Notes on a Luncheon Meeting in Honor of Dr. J.T. Shotwell of Columbia University and
Studio Research Directors,” January 27, 1939, General Research Department File, Academy of Motion Picture Arts
and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, California; “Motion Picture Research,” What’s Happening in
Hollywood brochure, 1939, General Research Department File, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,
Margaret Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, California; Cecil B. DeMille, The Autobiography of Cecil B. DeMille
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1959), 115-116; David Eldridge, Hollywood’s History Films (New York:
I.B. Taurus, 2006), 130-131.
68
others who had been practicing research work in other studios before her, and there was truly no
single pioneer. Once the press reported she had been the first researcher, the title followed her
without any further investigation of the claim. The fact that she worked for DeMille in 1914 and
that the director was respected for his historical films seemed to be sufficient confirmation for
most writers. Interestingly, DeMille claimed that he had instructed McGaffey to visit the LAPL
and bring him “books on costume, architecture, gunnery, or whatever subject [he] was dealing
with in planning a picture;” this seems like autobiographical boasting, as there is no reason to
doubt that McGaffey already knew she could access the library for visual sources considering
she had previously worked in both legitimate theater and film production and could have learned
such research practices before working with him.
31

Another major force in the business of filmmaking and the standardization of production
methods was D.W. Griffith, who began his cinematic career in New York for the Biograph
Company in 1908. He likely learned about research practices on the East Coast before expanding
them for his feature productions of the mid-1910s after moving to Los Angeles to set up his own
production company. In 1914 and 1915, his independent company, the D.W. Griffith
Corporation, produced the revisionist Civil War epic The Birth of a Nation (1915), which
explicitly highlighted the research undertaken for the production in the screen. Title cards in a
few scenes (figure 2.2 and 2.3) mentioned their respective visual sources, including the
Appomattox Courthouse surrender scene (figure 2.4), which was based on an illustration in
Campaigning with Grant by Col. Horace Porter (figure 2.5), and the design for Ford’s Theater in
the Lincoln assassination scene (figure 2.6), which was taken from an illustration in Abraham

31
DeMille, Autobiography, 115. The accuracy of this claim is hard to figure and could relate to DeMille’s self-
centered assumptions about past actions. For more on McGaffey’s background Mary Duncan Carter, “Film Research
Libraries,” Library Journal 64, May 15, 1939: 405, and Percey 253.
69
Lincoln: A History by John G. Nicolay and John Hay (figure 2.7). The intertitles described each
scene, mentioning the source of the information, along with the phrase “An Historical
Facsimile.” They would then dissolve into tableau vivants or shots that copied many of the
material elements from the published images.
Neither one of these scenes was actually an exact copy of the earlier published print,
however both were inspired by them and included several variations in presentation, architecture,
and furnishings—a typical relationship between a source and a work of art over the previous
centuries. That is to say, Griffith took the traditional practice of antiquarian-style research with
which many viewers were unfamiliar, and promoted it, suggesting to viewers a formal and
creative differentiation and a more elite status of his production. Publicity departments of
Hollywood studios would expand such exploitation in the following decades. Such visual
citations lent these depictions of important historical scenes a patina of authenticity. In so doing,
they also raised cinematic representation to a higher status, quite similar to Vitagraph’s work
with historical quality films showing George Washington or Napoleon; the film presented itself
as being on the same level of scholarship as respected books with historical merit in a similar
way to how antiquarian theater productions of Shakespeare had quoted their visual sources in
printed programs.
32
This suggestion of accuracy through visual research brought prestige to the
nascent film industry and the perception of credibility to the scenes that followed such title cards.
Many people involved in the production of Birth joined in the work of finding details in

32
For more on Griffith’s use of visual and textual sources, see Bernard Hanson, “D.W. Griffith: Some Sources,” The
Art Bulletin 54, no. 4 (December 1972): 493-515. In this article Hanson was mostly concerned with proving Erwin
Panofsky view that “the earliest films added movement to stationary works of art,” (Erwin Panofsky, “Style and
Medium in Moving Pictures,” Transition 26 [1927]: 122). He was less interested in how significant it was that such
sources recirculated images through a growing media culture. In stressing the correlation between static and moving
pictures, this article sidestepped a wider investigation of the visual culture that surrounded the creation of such a
scrapbook that Griffith’s research work presents.
70
images to reproduce on screen.
33
Actor Joseph Henabery, who played Lincoln, claimed that in
order to gain an advantage over other men looking to play the role, he “went down to the public
library, looked up several books on Lincoln, and […] studied his pictures,” for guidance on his
costume, makeup, and posture.
34
Most likely, he examined a book of portraits of the president by
Matthew Brady. In another instance, the assassination scene in the film showed film editor and
later feature director Raoul Walsh playing John Wilkes Booth with disheveled hair and a
mustache (figure 2.8), which was a look that was likely inspired by an iconic carte de visite of
the actor-assassin (figure 2.9). Viewers in 1915 would have known these photographs from their
wide circulation in the popular press and other visual media, and these references would have
helped the audience believe what they saw on screen considering how often they were
republished; had the cinematic portrayals looked different from these photographs, spectators
would have doubted the greater verisimilitude of the film, potentially dampening their
enthusiasm and making the film less popular and profitable.
35

This concept of how familiarity of references could help visual artists capture and engage
an audience was previously explored by John Cotton Dana, who believed viewers enjoyed
recognizing references to one work of art in another one. “To see old friends again after a time of
separation always gives us pleasure. […] This recognition element […] lies at the bottom of
much of our joy in familiar quotation, of our admiration for the classic in literature and familiar

33
Hanson 506. Hanson criticized Griffith for concentrating only on the “piecemeal” details of source images rather
than the vision of decadence presented in them, ignoring how antiquarian work had always been informative and
piecemeal in nature. The research methods of Griffith and his production team on Birth appear to have been
decentralized and erratic, however they were thorough in a way similar to those of Alice Guy Blaché in 1913.
34
Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By… (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), 47.
35
The notion that the sense of authenticity was partly built from a familiarity with the source image has been
examined by Vanessa Schwartz in her examination of the faits divers wax tableaux of the Musée Grévin in 1880s
Paris. In that case, the wax displays looked like images that had appeared in recent newspaper stories. The similarity
of appearance made the museum audience believe the authenticity of the wax depictions. See Vanessa R. Schwartz,
Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998),
118-130.
71
in art.”
36
He went further in explaining the appeal to viewers of historical images related to how
such pictures would make them feel about themselves. “…[W]e either pride ourselves on a
recognition which assures us that we are so far well-informed, or we please ourselves by adding
to the sum of our knowledge,” he wrote.
37
Beyond believing the depictions of characters and
settings in Birth, the 1915 audience would have enjoyed merely recognizing Henabery’s
portrayal of Lincoln, Walsh’s portrayal of Booth, or the settings of the tableaux vivants in
Appomattox Courthouse and Ford’s Theater. Cinema scholar Philip Rosen has also explored the
joy created among an audience from the participatory aspect where the audience recognizes
visual and narrative details. “It is a rather pleasing game, where knowledge claims are the goal
and the spectator cannot lose,” he concluded.
38
Considering this, visual research not only helped
audiences appreciate details in films but engaged viewers in an appealing game where they could
see “old friends” in the form of familiar images recreated on screen. Whether it was due to
familiarity or fun, research was clearly becoming a value tool for filmmakers.
Actress Lilian Gish also had a view of the visual research for Birth when she wrote that
Griffith did the research himself. She recalled the director used Brady’s photographs of Lincoln
as a guide for Henabery’s portrayal of the president and offered a handful of additional sources
he used while making the film. She explained that he “relied greatly on Harper’s Pictorial
History of the Civil War, Mathew Brady’s Civil War Photographs: Confederate and Union
Veterans—Eyewitness on Location; the Nicolay and Hay Abraham Lincoln: A History; and The
Soldier in Our Civil War: A Pictorial History of the Conflict 1861-1865 [by Frank Leslie et.al.].”

36
John Cotton Dana, “Some of the Extra-Artistic Elements of Aesthetic Emotion,” Popular Science Monthly 58
(1903): 413.
37
Ibid 416.
38
Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2001), 157.
72
She also explained that Griffith “telegraphed a newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina for
photographs of the interior of the state capital […] and constructed the legislative chamber
according to the photographs.”
39
While it is unclear how involved in the research process she
ever was, her account is believable considering several of the books she cited were confirmed in
other accounts. That Griffith tried to find a specific picture from a source across the country
further shows how important such visual media were to the production that he would go to the
trouble and expense for such a specific image. This showed that he believed the appearance of
authenticity was a crucial element of his film as it suggested to viewers how it was more
believable than many others they might see. This could have come from his background in
legitimate theater where he might have observed similar research that emerged from the
antiquarian movement, and could have also related to observations, like those of Dana, that
viewers liked recognizing familiar images. This small act also previewed the research technique
of seeking images from locations outside Los Angeles, which would be an important job of
Hollywood researchers over the next forty years.
While the research work for Birth was decentralized and included at least one actor
finding his own reference pictures, Griffith’s next film, Intolerance (1916), found his production
associates centrally compiling images into a research scrapbook. Considering it was made as a
business ledger, the spine was factory-stamped “Invoices;” the front cover bears a label reading,
“Scrap book of Intolerance, Research Dept., D. W. Griffith Studio, 4500 Sunset Blvd., Los
Angeles, Cal., R. Ellis Wales, Do not take away from this office.”
40
Whether the book was
created simply to make the research process for this one film more efficient or because this

39
Lillian Gish with Ann Pinchot, Lillian Gish: The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-
Hall, 1969) 136-137.
40
“Scrapbook of ‘Intolerance,’” D.W. Griffith Archive, Film Department, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
73
practice was spreading throughout the wider film industry is unclear as no other scrapbooks
remain from the period. Regardless, this development put research in the dedicated hands of a
few research specialists, R. Ellis Wales and Henabery, both of whom could spend time away
from the physical production as they visited libraries to find visual information. The fact that
Wales also worked on the costumes and sets for the production and Henabery doubled up as a
first assistant director and second unit director on two of the four segments, while also acting in a
small role suggested that Griffith did not yet employ a dedicated researcher. This work was still
an adjunct to other production work, rather than a stand-alone department.
In the case of the Intolerance scrapbook, each of the 187 numbered pages contained
between two and ten images from antiquarian books of ancient architecture and material culture,
or nineteenth-century paintings of ancient Babylon, Assyria, and other cultures in Mesopotamia.
It is unclear if there were similar scrapbooks for the three other sections of the film, however
none have survived and no others have been mentioned in historical accounts of the production.
Wales and Henabery organized the book by pasting images related to a specific theme or type of
object on each page. Page 3, for instance, showed images of tables, benches, beds, and footstools
(figure 2.10); page 9 showed jewelry and mirrors (figure 2.11); page 11 showed pottery
including wine and water jugs (figure 2.12); page 125 showed drawings of different views of the
exterior of the palace of the Assyrian emperor Sargon II, who ruled in the eighth century B.C.E.
(figure 2.13). The images came from a variety of sources, most of which were illustrated books
on Babylon, Assyria, Persia and other ancient civilizations in the region. Most of these books had
been published in the previous forty years, and mostly written by French, British, and American
scholars of the ancient world. There does not seem to have been much concern for the
periodization of these images, as material elements came from different centuries and different
74
areas of the region. The final pages of the scrapbook contained illustrations of several
nineteenth-century historical paintings of Babylon by French and British artists.
An assemblage like this was not an entirely new form of picture collecting, as it directly
came from the common nineteenth-century practice of scrapbooking, which “allowed readers to
save, manage, and reprocess information.”
41
The Intolerance book was formally similar to a
memorabilia book, in which children and young adults in the 1880s and onward gathered
pictures in different forms, including cartes-de-visites, postcards, and other visual ephemera.
42

Those books, however, expressed the identity of the book’s creator, whereas this research book
had no specific emotional investment in the images on its pages. Beyond all else, this scrapbook
was “a record of how people read and grappled with what they read,” or in this case, what people
saw and how they grappled with such images.
43

One illustrated source for a large number of the scrapbook’s images was the book The
Civilization of Babylon and Assyria: Its Remains, Language, History, Religion, Commerce,
Laws, Art, and Literature by Morris Jastrow, Jr., an American scholar of Semitic languages and
cultures at the University of Pennsylvania.
44
In the context of this scholarly volume, the images
illustrated details described in the text; once removed from the original context and pasted into
the scrapbook, however, the pictures became examples of types or classes of objects. Images of
cuneiform writing, for instance, illustrated a chapter in Jastrow’s book on the written languages
of these cultures (figure 2.14). When pasted to a page of the scrapbook next to the clay tablets on
which such language was printed (figure 2.15), a greater meaning of the visual and material

41
Ellen Gruber Garvey, Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 4.
42
Ibid 16.
43
Ibid 4.
44
“Dr. Morris Jastrow, Jr. Dies Suddenly at 60; One of the Foremost Semitic Authorities and Author of Many
Works on Religion,” The New York Times, June 23, 1921.
75
culture that surrounded the experience of written language in the ancient world emerged. The
hashes in the clay look like nonrectilinear pages of a book when illustrated in the scrapbook,
which helped to create a new understanding of the practical use and the physicality of such
objects for the craftworkers and filmmakers who examined it.
Henabery later claimed that Griffith carried the scrapbook like a catalog from which he
could order specific objects. “He’d flip through” to choose items. “It got to the point where he
was carrying the scrapbook around under his arm.”
45
While Griffith’s production company did
not have as large a library as the collection of the Ingletons, once organized and pasted into a
scrapbook, the thousands of images Wales and Henabery found became a mobile picture
collection he could consult frequently.
In advance of making the scrapbook, Henabery gathered a “shelf about fifteen feet long,
crammed with books,” and sought the advice of outside experts—a practice that would expand in
the following years as researchers would find experts in past and foreign cultures who could
offer information that might not appear in books.
46
One of his most important sources for “the
backgrounds and costumes of the Jewish period” was the four-volume set The Life of Our Savior
Jesus Christ: Three-Hundred Sixty-Five Compositions from the Four Gospels by the French
painter James Tissot, which the production team “followed carefully” in their designs.
47
An
intertitle before the Marriage at Cana scene in the film explained that it showed “[t]he ceremony
according to Sayce, Hastings, Brown and Tissot.” The first three names were scholars of the
ancient world who published unillustrated books on ancient history; Tissot, on the other hand,
had executed an illustration of the biblical scene (figure 2.16). None of the painter’s images

45
Brownlow 52.
46
Brownlow 51.
47
Brownlow 52.
76
appear in the scrapbook, however, suggesting certain pictures were examined but never pasted
into it or that there could have been other scrapbooks that were not saved. Still, the costumes and
other material details in the film looked like the clothes and wine jugs of Jesus and the others in
Tissot’s picture (figure 2.17); in fact, the wine jug in the center of the frame (figure 2.18) closely
resembled jugs on page 11 of the research bible (figure 2.19). Regardless of how much the film
recreated Tissot’s work, the cinematic material culture led one critic to note that “[p]ictorially,
the greatest filmings [sic] are the Judean scenes, perfect in composition, ideal in lighting, every
one [sic] in effect a Tissot painting of the time of Christ.”
48
Not only did the intertitle tell the
audience the scenes had been inspired by Tissot, but the richness of the film’s appearance and
settings gave the impression that the Judean sequences were similar in refinement and accuracy
to images by Tissot.
It seems that despite the creation of the scrapbook, there were still other production
associates who continued to seek visual sources for Intolerance. Cameraman Billy Bitzer helped
to gather pictures by:
Brib[ing a] local librarian (with a box of candy [or] silk stockings […]) to dig up
material for Intolerance. [He m]ade copies of engravings, etc., which Griffith
went over. [… Bitzer] would slip [some] in his pocket. On the set, [Griffith]
would order his actors to take general poses, then he would duck behind
something, take a quick look at the picture in his pocket, come back, change the
grouping and ask B[itzer] if the set would photograph like the picture.
49

48
Julian Johnson, “The Shadow Stage—A Department of Photoplay Review,” Photoplay, December 1916, 77-78.
Hanson examines the differences between the Judean section of the film and images created by Tissot, see Hanson
499.
49
“Billy Bitzer on Photography, Conversations with Beaumont Newhall,” D.W. Griffith Papers, 1897-1954,
Museum of Modern Art, New York. In his capacity as a librarian at the Museum of Modern Art, Newhall spoke to
Bitzer in 1936. He later wrote up notes of his interview, describing Bitzer’s actions in the third person. He did this to
assist Iris Barry, the director of the MoMA Film Library, who was working on an exhibition and catalog called D.W.
Griffith: American Film Master, which ran from November 13, 1940 through January 5, 1941. In the catalog, this
quotation was changed to say Bitzer bribed the librarian for photographs on Birth rather than Intolerance, in order to
fit better into the context of the show. Why a librarian would need to be bribed to perform a basic part of their job
was never explained. In 1940, Newhall became MoMA’s first curator of photography. See, Beaumont Newhall,
“Griffith’s Cameraman, Billy Bitzer: An Interview by Beaumont Newhall,” in Iris Barry, D. W. Griffith: American
Film Master [1940], Second edition, (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1965), 36-38.
77
Interestingly, the cameraman explained a mode of research similar to that of Birth, in which
images were gathered haphazardly and were used individually, with no mention of them being
pasted into a scrapbook. There is no accounting for Bitzer’s poor memory regarding specifics of
the production methods of the film, however this suggests Griffith could have asked Wales and
Henabery to make a scrapbook and also asked Bitzer to find other images at the library.
It is significant to recognize that in 1915 and 1916 Henabery and Bitzer both used the
materials from the LAPL to find visual information. It remains unclear if they used the Central
Library downtown, or the Hollywood branch located at Hollywood Boulevard and Ivar Avenue,
as both were nearly the same distance from the Griffith plant. Some images they might have
found in the LAPL were reproductions of several nineteenth-century paintings of Babylonian
scenes, including “Belshazzar’s Feast” (1821) by John Martin (figure 2.20), “The Babylonian
Marriage Market” (1875) by Edwin Long (figure 2.21), and “The Death of Babylon” (1891) by
Georges Rochegrosse (figure 2.22), all of which Wales pasted into the end of the Intolerance
scrapbook. The appearance of these pictures shows how visual research was much more than
simply an antiquarian effort to replicate the costumes, architecture and objects of the past from
archaeological sources, but that it also involved examination of paintings from an historical
poetic mode of representation, which included invented or embellished elements. All of these
visual elements reminded viewers of images they had previously seen, making films more
familiar to them, thus connecting movies with other believable information they encountered.
Researchers were looking at ways artists had previously depicted Babylon and for details in these
paintings, including clothing, architectural scale, and design details, whether true to the period or
invented by the artists, that craft workers could recreate and audiences could recognize. In the
case of Long’s “Market” painting (figure 2.23), Griffith nearly directly replicated it, simply
78
twisting the angle of engagement from a straightforward to a diagonal view (figure 2.24). In the
film, there is a stone platform with stairs at one end on which the would-be “brides” were
presented with others sitting or cowering below. Decorations on the back wall, the appearance of
feather fans, and many of the costumes are quite similar from the painting to the film.
These paintings were part of a greater movement of Orientalism in art of the mid-
nineteenth century and they each presented Babylon as a place with less conservative material
culture and sexual mores. This meant that in a painting like Martin’s “Feast,” the long table at
the top of the stairs that winds through the courtyard is covered in glimmering gold and silver
bowls, all clothing is made of shimmering textiles, representations of snakes and other pre-
Christian deities decorate the buildings, and the Hanging Gardens and the Tower of Babel appear
in the distant background. The scale of the space is daunting, with a focus less on the people than
on the storming sky in the center-top. The size of the buildings along with the receding
colonnades in the center-back are disorienting. While this is a biblical scene made in the
Orientalist idiom, it clearly suggested that the attendees at the meal were wealthy and decidedly
un-Christian. Researchers knew that the film had to be more recognizable than accurate and
viewers would be able to identify the painting’s themes of punishment for disobeying divine
orders and libertinism in the film.
The film that resulted from studying these paintings revealed a fantasy of the past that
seemed correct because of how it looked like past Orientalist depictions that frequently appeared
in the illustrated press. The massive-scale Babylonian temple Griffith created (figure 2.25) had
similar ziggurat-shaped archways to those of the Martin painting along with similar monumental
animal decorations (figures 2.26 and 2.27). It is worth noting that the shape of these entryways
79
were the closest Griffith got to showing the Tower of Babel itself.
50
The set also forced the
viewers’ eyes toward the sky at the center-top of the image and was similarly grand in size
making it difficult to follow individual people on the ground. While this is certainly not a direct
copy of Martin’s painting or the others, it follows enough of the same visual themes that it could
be confused with an Orientalist picture in its own right.
51
The most important inspiration this
twentieth century film took from these nineteenth-century pictures was the imaginative spectacle
of the invented past.
52

This interest in presentation over historical precision was visible on the pages of the
scrapbook, considering it included materials from a great span of time regardless of the
periodization of the film’s Babylonian section. One image shows a winged bull from the palace
of Sargon, the Akkadian king who reigned at the end of the twenty-third century B.C.E. (figure
2.28), while Rochegross’ painting shows the fall of Babylon, which liturgical sources date to the
sixth century B.C.E. Outside of relative geographic proximity, these two cultures were different.
In the eyes of Wales, Henabery, Griffith and others in the production, however, specificity of
culture and period in the distant past was not as important as the presentation of something
exotic. The wide date span shows how, despite using methods similar to antiquarians and
nineteenth-century painters or theater producers, the research goals in this era were not as

50
Miriam Hansen explained how the Tower in Intolerance was “a figure most powerful in its absence,” considering
one of the film’s major themes involved people not getting along due to a lack of a common tongue. Hanson’s point
was that Griffith narrative positions “film as a new universal language” (Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon
Spectatorship in American Silent Film [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991], 183 and 184.). It seems
Griffith might have been pointing toward the Tower of Babel in the art direction of these elaborate archways even if
he never directly presented it.
51
In his monograph on John Martin, art historian William Feaver explained how Griffith “exactly recreated Martin’s
painting ‘The Fall of Babylon’ (1831)” in a shot where the High Priest looks out a window at the city. In examining
both images, it is clear this cinematic shot was also similar to the painting though it was not identical to it (William
Feaver, The Art of John Martin, [Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1975], 213).
52
For an extensive examination of the relationship of the film to archeological sources and beliefs in the period, see
Yuri Tsivian, “Intolerance: Archaeology,” in Paolo Cherchi Usai, ed., The Griffith Project, Volume 9: Films
Produced in 1916-18 (London: British Film Institute, 2005), 88-96.
80
concerned with specificity of time period and accuracy of material detail as many of those past
artists and scholars. Ancient Rome, Ancient Greece, Ancient Mesopotamia, Ancient Judea, and
Ancient Egypt were all mixed into a general understanding of “Antiquity,” regardless of how
different cultures rose and fell through the millennia. For most in the film audience, the depiction
of ancient times looked about right as a result of the flowing gowns, monumental architecture
and statuary, and a preponderance of marble, metals, and rich textiles.
Seeing the results of work by Griffith’s team, the Ingletons, Bessie McGaffey, and others,
visual research began to gain more attention in the trade press and books on the Hollywood
production process by the end of the 1910s. In one example, a 1919 book on the formal and
technical methods that went into filmmaking mentioned how what it referred to as a “technical
director” must “be able to ‘dig up’ at short notice” any details he or she could find, suggesting
the time and cost savings connected to research were another valuable byproduct of such work
from a business viewpoint.
53
The book presented a direct link between what filmmakers could
find in visual sources and what they would present on screen.
54
In another example, a news brief
in the trade press mentioned that “Norma Talmadge, who recently installed a research
department at her studio on East Forty-eighth street [sic], has decided to do away with the
nuisance of having to pose for new photographs for the press and the magazines every little
while by having a staff photographer right on the studio premises.”
55
In a story about how

53
Austin C. Lescarboura, Behind the Motion-Picture Screen (New York: Scientific American, 1919), 118. This
account most certainly described the work of a researcher, regardless of the use of the term “technical director.”
Such a title is not found elsewhere in the popular or trade press of the period. In the mid-1930s, productions would
hire “technical advisors” who specialized in certain areas of interest, such as medieval weaponry, Slavic dance, or
Colonial American costumes, and would advise filmmakers on how to construct realistic settings.
54
That such a description appeared in the publication of a technical magazine, Scientific American, which was
concerned with technical equipment shows how important research had become to film production.
55
“Norma Talmadge Installs Photographer,” Moving Picture World, February 22, 1919, 1030. A month earlier,
Talmadge had hired Elsa Loper, who previously worked in research for Griffith. See, “Cuts and Flashes,” Wid’s
Daily, January 17, 1919.
81
successful the producer-actor was, the addition of a research department was a sign of the care
she took in making her films and her need for such work; there was no need to explain what a
research department did, as the role of the department was clear to readers by early-1919.
Furthermore, it is likely the hiring of a staff photographer in her production operation related not
only to glamor shots of the star, but also to the needs of the research library. As picture
collections expanded in Hollywood, staff photographers became standard roles in studio libraries
in order to copy images from books they borrowed.
The public’s broad familiarity with research work appeared again in another article that
same year in which George Ingleton advertised his library and services. The article described the
collection in detail:
Mr. Ingleton’s library is indexed and he can put his hand upon the required
knowledge within a very short time. His extensive fund of book lore [sic]
embraces types of mankind character make-up, Royal Palaces, Indian customs
and dress, landscape gardening, military tactics, […]clocks, watches, bells and
costumes of every country during each period. […] Mr. Ingleton also has indexed
portfolios which contain prints and steel etching of […] the exteriors and interiors
of places of interest [.…] One portfolio filled with Dickens’ characters would
hold the attention for hours of a lover of such characterizations.
56

Promoting the important cinematic elements, including costumes, make-up, architectural details,
and an assortment of depictions of Dickens characters, the work he could do for a film company
was clear. Mentioning how the library was indexed also suggested he could find sources and
solutions to potential issues in a short amount of time, thus saving money on productions.
Highlighting the indexing and organization of the library also showed how it was not merely a

56
Parks 5. After leaving Universal, the Ingletons had worked at different studios throughout Hollywood. In that
period, Magnus wrote scenarios for several production companies including National Film Corp. of America,
Thomas H. Ince Corp., and Famous Players-Lasky (Florence Porter Parks, “The Ingletons at Home,” Camera!, June
8 1919, 5, 12; “Very Forceful and Real Tragedy but Sympathetic Element is Lacking,” Wid’s Daily, September 19,
1920; “George Ingleton Research Library Acquired By Fox for Coast Plant,” Moving Picture World, February 6,
1926).
82
group of books, but a proper collection from which users could find knowledge.
More than advertising his services as an employee, George was suggesting in this article
that he could be a contractor whom studios could employ in order to access his library for
research for their films, as he had previously done for Universal. His collection would be
available at “the exclusive service of the producer who employed” him, regardless of the fact
some producers at the time were discussing “the advisability of making his library a general
utility for the education of all producers.”
57
Considering George emerged from an earlier era of
legitimate theatrical research, he could not yet see how visual information would ultimately be
liberally shared between studios, making the precise ownership of such images nearly irrelevant.
In this early moment of film research, he believed simply controlling visual materials was a
primary importance. He understood that the visual information in his library was a key to helping
viewers believe in the movies on which he worked; he also understood the value he would bring
to a studio related specifically to his ownership of his collection of visual materials.
58

In 1925, after seven years working as a journeyman in the industry, including acting in
two Vitagraph films, Ingleton finally began trying to sell his library and settle down by working
at the purchasing studio. While he never explained this choice, it is likely he sought more stable
employment and knew his collection was his most desirable asset. He looked for purchasers
throughout the film industry, in which many filmmakers and studios had been doing piecemeal
research for individual productions without in-house libraries. In March of that year, DeMille

57
Parks 5, 12. A central Hollywood picture library into which each studio would deposit their own collections and
from which they would be able to pull visual sources rose into the trade discussion around 1939. For a discussion of
proposals for such a central library, see the following chapter.
58
Years later, Hollywood art director Richard Day, who worked primarily at Twentieth Century-Fox from the 1930s
through the 1960s had his own extensive picture collection that he maintained outside a studio and which he made
available to his associates. The collection, while not as extensive as most studio libraries, contained pictures of
Ancient Rome, South and East Asia, and architecture throughout Europe, including a large section on churches and
castles. Today there are more than 60 boxes of pictures in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas,
Austin.
83
wrote a memo to McGaffey to ascertain whether the thousands of illustrated books and the half-
million clipped and organized images in Ingleton’s collection would be useful to their film unit
at Paramount.
59
After examining it, McGaffey responded that it was “completely indexed,
catalogued and very valuable,” although it was too expensive. She explained that if she spent
half of the $10,000 asking price in Europe she could “knock the spots off all the libraries in the
business!”
60
It would seem that by the mid-1920s, research libraries were a commodity whose
contents could be assessed and appraised as if they were the land on which the studios stood.
Two of the most important words in McGaffey’s appraisal were “indexed” and
“catalogued,” echoing the 1919 promotional article about his collection. While these terms
indicated a high level of attention to organization consistent with library science, neither Ingleton
nor McGaffey had formal training in the area. There was also an important element in her
response to DeMille that the library she had built over the previous decade could be further
improved and grown with more illustrated books and more indexed images. She believed the
library could always be enhanced with new visual resources—a sentiment similar to that of
Magnus in her article from 1915 and John Cotton Dana regarding his picture collection.
Finally, in 1926, the Fox Film studio purchased Ingleton’s library for his asking price and
he became the first head of their research department.
61
Fox had not previously had a research

59
Memo from Cecil B. DeMille to Bessie McGaffey, March 19, 1925, MSS 1400, Box 266, Folder 21, Cecil B.
DeMille Papers, L. Tom Perry Special Collections Library, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University,
Provo, Utah. While the number of books is not mentioned in the memo, an article by George Ingleton in Special
Libraries Journal, published a month after his unexpected early death in 1926, does mention the 500,000
“clippings” in the collection, (George Ingleton, “The Fox Studio Library,” Special Libraries Journal, June 1926,
245).
60
Bessie McGaffey to Cecil B. DeMille [March 1925], MSS 1400, Box 266, Folder 21, Cecil B. DeMille Papers, L.
Tom Perry Special Collections Library, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. According
to the website usinflationcalculator.com (accessed on February 7, 2020), $10,000 in 1925 is equal to roughly
$146,000 in 2020. While it is difficult to know whether or not she could find comparable books for half the price, it
is important to note her interest in remaining invaluable to her boss; the library from another researcher, who was
also selling his work services, would have threatened her role and status in the studio.
61
“George Ingleton Dead,” Film Daily, January 31, 1926; and, “Obituary: George Ingleton,” Variety, May 26, 1926.
84
department and saw this collection as a way to cheaply buy a large number of visual materials,
which might have otherwise been time consuming and expensive to purchase individually. The
studio valued these materials that could offer “information dealing with people, customs, modes
of living, habits of thought, dress, architecture, transportation and scenery with which the motion
picture maker may come into contact.”
62
They saw value in a ready-made collection and a
researcher who understood how to find pictures in rare collections.
Another article described the visual sources in the collection in terms of how they could
help the film company’s productions, explaining:
[b]esides the great number of books, obtained in every section of the world, the
library includes files of national and international magazines and reference books
dating back forty years. These are supplemented by clippings from other
magazines, covering every important event in modern history, postcards, color
prints, drawings and photostat copies of architecture of every period since Rome.
Information is at hand dealing with peoples, customs, modes of living, habits of
thought, dress, architecture, transportation, scenery and in fact every subject with
which the motion picture maker needs.
63

While the collection was touted as being “the most complete private collection of rare books in
America,” it is important to highlight how pictorially oriented its diverse sources were.
64
Details
about “modes of living” and “habits of thought,” while potentially difficult to visualize in
images, show how the goal of research was to create a sense of the world through the repetition
of familiar pictures that were already believable to the audiences because they looked like past
depictions of the world. Such sources of information also point to a culturally driven view of the
visual world that was organized systematically rather than chronologically or analytically.
65
That
is, the work of researchers was more similar to that of antiquarians who considered images and

62
“Fox Acquires Ingleton Research Library,” Motion Picture News, February 6, 1926.
63
“George Ingleton Research Library Acquired By Fox for Coast Plant,” Moving Picture World, February 6, 1926.
64
Ibid.
65
Arnaldo Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes
13, no. 3/4 (1950): 286.
85
materials in terms of types rather than historians who might think of the reasons events happened
and how they fit into greater narratives. In this way, the images that helped studio workers build
screen spaces were not necessarily meant to provide analysis in scenes, but a visual context from
which viewers could learn about and recognize those settings.

Library Science in Hollywood
As McGaffey’s interest in the indexing and cataloging of the Ingletons’ library shows, the
relationship between library science and studio research departments likely began shortly after
research became a formalized element of film production in studios around the middle of the
1910s. Several events from 1916 through 1926 show this connection through the growth of the
formal alliance between the LAPL and film studios in the early years of Hollywood. One of the
first signs of this association came in 1916 when Universal and the Hollywood branch of the
LAPL arranged to circulate books to the lot over the Cahuenga Pass, in the same year that
George Ingleton became head of research at the studio.
66
While this relationship was part of the
efforts by Carl Laemmle and H.O. Davis to create the feeling of a small-town at Universal City
where workers and residents could have access to books from a proper public library, it was also
a way George could access illustrated sources his library lacked.
67
This also related to the growth
of the LAPL into the San Fernando Valley as the city of Los Angeles expanded westward, and it
showed how Laemmle’s studio was a logical foothold destination for library expenses.
68

66
“More Laboratories are planned for Universal City,” Motion Picture News, July 15, 1916, 224.
67
For more on the origins and ethos of Universal in this early era, see Mark Garrett Cooper, Universal Women:
Filmmaking and Institutional Change in Early Hollywood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010) and Shelley
Stamp, Lois Weber in Early Hollywood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015).
68
While data on the growth of the San Fernando Valley are difficult to separate from the rest of Los Angeles county,
the growth in the region was tremendous in this period. Census statistics from 1910 to 1920 show a 50-percent
growth in the county during this period, one of the highest rates in the state. The data also show the county had the
highest population density in the state by 1920, showing how many city residents saw the San Fernando Valley as a
less-dense option for living. See “Fourteenth Census of the United States: 1920—Bulletin, Population California,”
86
Also beginning in this period, the LAPL’s library school—which opened in 1891 and
operated until 1932, out of which nearly every graduate was a woman—began having alumnae
working in studio research libraries.
69
Two of the graduates, Helen Gladys Percey, from the class
of 1917, and Frances Richardson, from the class of 1919, began working in and helping develop
techniques for studio research departments shortly after finishing their training. They arrived at a
moment when research was becoming a more systematized stage of the production process that
would support all films, rather than only prestige pictures as it had in previous years.
In the library school, students learned important methods to improve the efficiency of
Hollywood research. Much of the curriculum was based on practical lessons librarians would
experience in their daily work, including ordering, classifying, and sorting of books, creating,
using, and updating bibliographies, gathering and organizing collections of periodicals, and
bookbinding. These courses would help Hollywood researchers create scrapbooks, sort and lend
illustrated books and pictures between studio libraries, and create bibliographies of pictorial
media.
70
While the school did not yet offer specific classes about creating or maintaining picture
collections, press accounts make clear that library students learned about such work through the
relationships between LAPL librarians and their film studio counterparts.
For instance, in 1918 a “system of indexing and retaining pictures conceived and installed

United States Department of Commerce, accessed September 2, 2018,
ftp://ftp.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1920/bulletins/demographics/population-ca-number-of-
inhabitants.pdf.
69
Alumni Association of the Library School, Los Angeles Public Library, “Library School and Training Classes,
Los Angeles Public Library—Directory of Graduates,” 1934, Los Angeles Public Library Special Collections. For
more on early library schools and the options they opened for women’s labor and social standing, see Joanne E.
Passet, Cultural Crusaders: Women Librarians in the American West, 1900-1917 (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1994).
70
“Lecture Outlines and Class Stencils of the Library School of the Los Angeles Public Library, 1928-1929,” Los
Angeles Public Library Special Collections. While this listing of class descriptions, lectures, and examinations dates
from a decade after Percey and Richardson were students and therefore is not necessarily the exact curriculum they
had, it shows a general type of education and points to standard practices in libraries in the era.
87
in the Lasky library by Elizabeth McGaffey [was] adopted by the Los Angeles [public] libraries
as an aid to motion picture companies who use the libraries for research work in connection with
preparing settings, costumes, and customs, in various period of the United States in foreign
lands.”
71
This meant that in four years McGaffey had already created a picture collection large
enough to require an indexing system and had also created that system. She knew how
researchers around the film industry were major patrons of the library’s picture collections, knew
the library would be interested in an efficient organizational system, and knew all researchers
would appreciate a system created through practical work rather than untested expectations of
behavior. Pausing on this for a moment, it is significant that the LAPL adopted an indexing
system developed in the film industry outside formal library science and underlines the important
reciprocal relationship the city’s library system had with Hollywood research departments.
72

Less than a year later, an article in the trade press indicated that a class from the library
school visited the Lasky studio library to view the “filing system used for illustrations.”
73
The
article explained how “accurate and simple” McGaffey’s organizational system was to use. It
stated that Eleanor Jones, the librarian for the Hollywood branch, made the visit along with the
students to learn McGaffey’s systemization methods.
74
Not only would Jones have known

71
“In and Out of West Coast Studios—F.P.-Lasky Studio,” Motion Picture News, June 8, 1918.
72
In her recent book, The Library Book, author Susan Orlean has claimed studio researchers would go to the
Hollywood branch in pairs so one could throw books out the window to their accomplice below, thus avoiding
checking out books and returning them. While this seems possible, it is also strange considering how much effort
studio libraries put into re-photographing books they borrowed. Regardless of the accuracy of the claim, this shows
the relationship between the Hollywood branch of the LAPL and the studios was always intimate. See Susan Orlean,
The Library Book (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018): 109-110. Many thanks to Brian Jacobson and Dan
Josefson for finding this passage.
73
“Librarians Study Lasky Filing System,” Moving Picture World, March 22, 1919. It is important to highlight that
when explaining what would turn out to be a major innovation in Hollywood production methods, the trade press
referred to Bessie McGaffey as Mrs. Kenneth McGaffey. While this makes sense in the context of the gender roles
of the era, and that as a publicist for the studio, Keneth had a day-to-day relationship with this newspaper, it is
noteworthy considering how his work was much more pedestrian than hers. She would ultimately be recognized for
her diligent and careful work with DeMille, however in this early era, she was still simply her husband’s wife.
74
While it was never stated explicitly, it seems the Hollywood Branch also had a picture collection of some size. It
is not clear if other branches also had picture collections. It is possible the picture collection for the LAPL was
88
McGaffey from the researcher’s frequent visits to the branch collections, but Iva-Ette Sullivan,
who had been working in the library with McGaffey since 1917, had previously worked at the
LAPL with Jones. Sullivan would have helped strengthen the relationship between the library
and the studio and would help build the librarian ethos of sharing materials and methodologies
that would characterize Hollywood research in the decades to come.
75

The fact that the public library’s school would visit a studio research department shows
how important the early film industry was to the everyday culture of Southern California. Such a
class would help the library students learn the idiosyncratic needs of filmmakers, which they
would take with them as they worked in libraries around the region including those of the film
industry itself. Not only did these articles show how the public library organized itself with help
from private institutions, but that Hollywood was a key to the way knowledge, visual or
otherwise, was disseminated throughout the city and beyond. About six years after the film
industry moved to Los Angeles, it had already become one of the most important influences and
advisors of public life and understanding.
Meanwhile, in the New York area, where many studios maintained production
operations, research library improvements were also moving in a direction of standardizing work
and applying library science techniques to their collections. A 1920 article announced that
Paramount’s East Coast plant in Long Island City, Queens had created a research library “to
furnish all of the wide range of information necessary for the making of more accurate,

ultimately moved from the Central Library to the Hollywood branch, as that is the only specific place such pictures
were mentioned in the press by the mid-1920s
75
“Los Angeles Film Brevities,” Moving Picture World, February 10, 1917, 855, and J.C. Jessen, “In and Out of
West Coast Studios,” Motion Picture News, February 10, 1917. It seems Sullivan was hired at a moment when
McGaffey was taking on the additional role of scenarist, under William C. DeMille and Marion Fairfax. Sullivan
was able to cover the research work McGaffey could no longer handle while she worked on other scenario writing
projects. For more, see “Elizabeth McGaffey to Write Lasky Scenario,” Motion Picture World, February 17, 1917;
and Jessen.
89
interesting, and beautiful motion pictures.”
76
The department was created by Pauline Peyton
Forny who had “a number of years of experience in the Library of Congress” and she was
“assisted by Miss Gertrude Koch, formerly of the Newark Public Library.” Coming from these
two libraries, they would have both come in contact with picture collections; Koch, in particular,
worked directly with John Cotton Dana and would have helped filmmakers in the New York
region, including those from Fort Lee companies. Paramount saw value and efficiency in
mirroring on the East Coast the collection McGaffey had created in Los Angeles.
The article also explained how a “modification of the Dewey Decimal System will be
utilized for numbering and classifying the books,” of which the vast majority were illustrated.
77

There is no doubt that this decision was influenced by the work experience of Forny and Koch
who worked with classification systems in their previous jobs. Forny would have used the
Library of Congress system, a standard in university and research libraries that held large
numbers of books on unusual subjects, and Koch would have the Dewey Decimal Classification
system, which became the standard for local lending libraries along with primary and secondary
school libraries with more limited collections of books. It is important to note that they chose to
use the Dewey system, which would become the organizational standard for film industry
research libraries, because most of their workers with library experience would have been
familiar with it considering they mainly came from school or public libraries that used it.
This standardization movement resurfaced again six years later after George Ingleton
unexpectedly died in a car accident and “Miss Hazel M. Knott, the new assistant in the research

76
“Paramount Eastern Studio Establishes Large Research Department and Library,” Moving Picture World,
December 25, 1920, 1000.
77
It is essential to keep in mind that research librarians and the press frequently referred to materials as “books,”
which simply differentiated their form from portfolios, images, and other forms of visual media. Nearly every book
in any cinematic research library was illustrated or entirely image-based. Looking at hundreds of inventory lists,
ordering requests, and descriptions of libraries, it becomes clear that writing “books” was merely a simple way of
expressing “books of pictures.”
90
department, [took] charge of re-cataloging the Fox Studio Library. The Dewey Decimal System,
used in public libraries, [was] installed and material in the books [was] indexed according to a
corresponding system.”
78
By the 1920s, studio libraries were interested in sharing research
materials; if they each had their own organizational system it would have been harder for
researchers to keep track of their books and images out on loan. The arrival of stricter library
science protocols in Hollywood libraries helped to move visual research from its artisanal and
antiquarian origins tied to individual researchers and the bespoke organizational systems of their
collections, to a universal one that could give a much wider view of the visual world that could
be shared and grown more easily. In order to tackle research work for more complex films, there
needed to be standard practices that allowed for the gathering of more visual material from a
wider variety of sources. This would require more scientific and repeatable processes beyond the
simple finding of piecemeal images related directly to the scenario, as Griffith’s associates had
done. The growing studios needed a more professional, systemized, and reproducible mode of
research to take cinema into the sound era.
One such improvement was that researchers would create bibliographies for every
production that listed the hundreds of books and other published sources they consulted. These
listings simplified the reuse of materials for later productions that dealt with similar subject
matters. Publicity and exploitation departments used these bibliographies to market films by
creating reading lists for libraries around the country.
79
Many studio research heads wrote
articles in library journals and film industry publications about the methods and holdings of their

78
“New Library Assistant Experienced Worker,” Fox Studio Mirror, August 12, 1926.
79
The creation and distribution of reading lists for libraries around the United States was a central part of marketing
prestige pictures based on celebrated novels and other sources and these bibliographies helped create these lists.
Studio marketing department would send them to the Hays Office of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors
of America (MPPDA), who would organize and disseminate them to local libraries and theaters around the country.
For more, see Mary Duncan Carter 404.
91
departments, which helped to spread technical knowledge about research.
80
As these
standardization practices spread through the industry, research departments also physically grew
on studio lots. McGaffey’s library was moved into its own new building to allow it more space in
early 1920, an impressive expense for such a support and planning department.
81

In 1921, Helen Gladys Percey taught a course at the LAPL library school “concerned
chiefly with the needs of picture studios” that included instruction on “art books and picture
collections.”
82
Considering the library school was training its students to work in the Los
Angeles area and considering how important studio research departments were for the
dissemination of information through movies, it was logical for the school to create such a class.
Studios needed researchers who knew how to find illustrated books, clip images to build picture
collections, and effectively distribute these materials to filmmakers.
After her own graduation from the library school, Percey worked in the LAPL
Hollywood branch from 1916 to 1919 where she assisted many studio researchers, including
George Ingleton, McGaffey, and Griffith’s associates, learned their methods, and possibly taught
them certain ways to improve their work.
83
In 1925, Percey began working in Paramount’s
research department as an assistant to McGaffey.
84
Later that year, when McGaffey transferred
to work exclusively for Cecil B. DeMille, Percey took the reins of the Paramount library.
85

80
See, LeRoy Armstrong, “Building a Library,” Universal City News, August 1922; George Ingleton, “The Fox
Studio Library,” Special Libraries 17, No. 6 (June 1926): 243-245; Helen Gladys Percey, “The Problems of a
Motion Picture Research Library,” Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, March 1936, 253-158;
Robert R. Bruce, “The Movies Use Research,” Special Libraries, 30, No. 9 (November 1939): 291-294; Frances
Richardson, “Previous to Previews,” Wilson’s Library Bulletin 13, No. 9 (May 1939): 589-592.
81
“The F.P.-Lasky Studio,” Motion Picture News, February 7, 1920, 1506.
82
“In the Library World—California,” The Library Journal, Vol. 26 (Feb. 15, 1921):190.
83
“Library Schools—Los Angeles Public Library,” Public Libraries 26, no. 2 (February 1921): 155-156. See also,
“Research Heads Off Historical Anachronisms for Hollywood,” Sales Management, 1946, 120. In this era, the Los
Angeles Public Library’s branch in Hollywood was located on the northwest corner of Hollywood Blvd. and Ivar
Avenue, only half a block from its current location, two blocks from Paramount, ten blocks from Fox, and just over
two miles from Griffith’s studio.
84
Thirty-Eighth Annual Report of the Board of Directions of the Los Angeles Public Library,” October 1926.
85
“Mrs. McGaffey Signed,” Exhibitors Herald, May 16, 1925, 35.
92
One of Percey’s most significant collaborators in this era was Frances Richardson, who
also happened to have been a student in the library school class that visited McGaffey at the
Lasky studio in 1919. After graduating, Richardson took her first job as the children’s librarian
in the Fresno Free Library.
86
By1923 she returned to the LAPL as an attendant in the Art
Department where she would have handled prints and illustrated books. There she worked with
Percey to give lectures to library school students on managing picture collections and working
with picture-based art books in the library school.
87
Following George Ingleton’s death in 1926
and Hazel Knott’s brief but organizationally important management of the collection, Richardson
was hired as head of the Fox Films library in January of 1928.
88
It is not only important that
Richardson brought her training from the library school, but also that she understood how to
manage and grow a primarily image-based library. While she was able to create and use
bibliographies and knew about organizational methods, she also understood how to accurately
organize images.
While cinema scholarship has traditionally viewed studios as an archipelago of
companies protective of their talent and treasure, the growth of these research departments in the
mid-1920s shows that their staffs worked within a librarian world view, concerned with easily
finding and sharing sources and information to present to filmmakers and craft workers. Both
Percey and Richardson were less concerned with the institutional borders of their studios, and
more interested in expanding their abilities to find information throughout the libraries of the
film industry, as well as other domestic and international collections. No other area of

86
“Library School of the Los Angeles Public Library, Circular of Information, 1919,” 21. While there is no written
accounts of her work in Fresno, it likely involved the management and use of picture collections, considering how
important such resources were to children’s collections of the era. See, John Cotton Dana, “The Age of Pictures,”
The Call, August 10, 1902, Newark Public Library scrapbook.
87
“Library School of the Los Angeles Public Library, Circular of Information, 1923,” 4, 23.
88
Frances Richardson, “The Twentieth Century-Fox Research Library,” California Librarian 28, No. 2 (April
1967): 94.
93
Hollywood film production allowed for such an exchange of materials free of contracts. While
studios were always willing to lend actors or directors to rival studios, such occasions were
guided by legal agreements and exchanges of people or money; research libraries constantly
searched for materials in rival studio libraries, borrowed them, and copied them for later use.
Such camaraderie between companies was unusual in the corporate and legalistic climate of the
film industry. Much like antiquarians, visual research subscribed to an ethos wherein information
acquisition was the goal. This was different from most other areas of studio work that fixated on
artistry or corporate profit; knowledge dissemination and collaborative problem-solving were the
goals of most researchers. There is scant evidence showing studio executives ever understood
how broadly researchers shared their individual picture collections; considering the legalistic and
corporate mindset of other studio interactions, there is a chance such work would have been
curtailed if they knew the extent to this inter-company collaboration.
89

Outside the collections of studios, researchers looked for visual materials in the libraries
of the University of Southern California (USC), the University of California Los Angeles
(UCLA), the New York Public Library (NYPL), and the Library of Congress, among other
public and private institutions. One in particular, the Huntington Library in San Marino,
California—between fifteen and twenty-five miles from most studios—became an important
destination for images of American history, particularly pictures of Western and Latin America.
When the library opened to the public in 1921 the Los Angeles Times published an editorial
about the value it would have to the people of the region, including those who worked in the film

89
One moment when studio executives did look at the work of research libraries was in the 1960s and early-1970s
as multinational groups based outside the film industry bought most of the traditional film companies. While it is
only speculation and there is no evidence of a cause outside of the temporal correction, it is possible that part of the
reason for the collapse of the research network that occurred at that time was due to a rejection of the librarian and
collaborative ethos at a moment when each firm was trying to maintain and capitalize on its diverse assets.
94
industry. “Such a library so near at hand for the motion-picture capital of the world will be a
wonderful asset to it,” the piece proclaimed. “We will have better American [photo]plays, since
it will be easier for producers to get the facts about the spirit of America.
90
” Not only did this
signal the unique value of the Huntington to the city, but it also pronounced the seriousness of
film industry that it would want to study the arcane materials that made up the this special
collection.
The library opened in 1919 and its reader program began in October of 1924. Seven of
the first 260 readers came from five different studios—Universal, MGM, Fox, Famous Players-
Lasky, and First National.
91
Among these early readers were two research pioneers who
understood how the Huntington’s collections of rare books and prints could help them access
materials that would otherwise be difficult to find in the region. Percey was one of the first
people to use the library’s new system in 1925 as reader 45, when she visited to find materials on
the “Pony Express—for use in a picture to be made by Famous Platers-Lasky Corporation to be
directed by Mr. James Cruze.”
92
While the specific books she examined remain a mystery, it is
possible she examined Glenn D. Bradley’s book The Story of the Pony Express: An Account of
the Most Remarkable Mail Service Ever in Existence, and its Place in History (1913), which
included illustrations of western scenes, with horses and riders (figures 2.29 and 2.30). She
returned several months later to examine several books on sailing ships in New England for
Cruze’s 1926 film Old Ironsides, which was produced to celebrate the sesquicentennial of the

90
“The Huntington Library,” Los Angeles Times, December 3, 1921.
91
“History of Readership of the Huntington Library,” The Huntington Library. Many thanks to Laura Stalker, Avery
Associate Director of the Huntington Library, for sharing this list. Curiously, Warner Bros., which purchased First
National in 1928, did not open a research department until 1936—an incredibly strange and aberrant detail in the
history of Hollywood research. Considering First National had researchers using the Huntington in 1924 and 1925, it
raises the question of why exactly Warner Bros. did not continue this research work.
92
Reader application for Helen Gladys Percey, n.d., The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Many thanks
to Laura Stalker, Avery Associate Director of the Huntington Library, for sharing this material.
95
U.S.S. Constitution. For that film she examined The Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783-
1860 (1921) by Samuel Eliot Morison, which contained illustrations of important captains and
their ships (figure 2.31), and The Sailing Ships of New England (1924) by John Robinson, which
had illustrations of Old Ironside itself (figure 2.32). In both cases, the Huntington was a useful
resource for a researcher who needed to fill in gaps in her own library’s collection.
The other pioneer who visited the Huntington as reader 75 was George Ingleton. Shortly
after his arrival at Fox in 1925, he went to San Marino looking for “[i]llustrations of ‘The Seven
Deadly Sins,” in preparation for John Griffith Wray’s film Hell’s Four Hundred (1926).
93
The
film set in the present day of the 1920s, featured a nightmare sequence where the heroine was
tormented by seven monsters representing each of the sins. Ingleton examined a volume from
The Holy Bible Illustrated by J. Gibbs (1836), which was a collection of thousands of prints of
paintings and other biblical images compiled by biblical historian John Kitto. Considering the
Seven Deadly Sins were not mentioned in canonical texts, it is unclear exactly what images
Ingleton would have found in this source of biblical imagery. Still, it is important to see how
after compiling the visual materials he needed for the film at his studio’s library, Ingleton went
to the Huntington to find this arcane book to supplement his work.
The Huntington would become the destination for researchers looking for rare materials
in Los Angeles throughout the next several decades. Many of the most prestigious and important
films of the 1920s were produced with sources found there. In another example, Burdette
Ellsworth Brown, a researcher for Universal became reader number 139 when he visited in the
summer of 1926 looking for images related to slavery in America for Harry A. Pollard’s

93
Reader application for George Ingleton, December 21, 1925, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
96
adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1927).
94
The film was widely promoted and written about in
the trade press as costing $2,000,000, which was a towering sum of money for the period.
95
Part
of the expenses were the extensive costumes, sets, and props, all of which were designed, made,
and dressed to look like images of the antebellum South found in published sources. Brown
consulted four books including Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself (1882)
(figures 2.33-2.35), as well as photographic portraits of author Harriet Beecher Stowe and
Abraham Lincoln. Additionally, Brown looked at illustrated books by landscape architect and
social critic Frederick Law Olmstead, who published several works on slavery in the United
states, including A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States: With Remarks on Their Economy
(1856), which included several illustrations of pastoral scenes from those regions (figures 2.36-
2.38). While it is difficult to know exactly which images Brown examined and copied for use by
his craft department colleagues, these pictures of enslaved people and white Southerners, would
have given production workers information on the clothes, hair, and household furnishings.
While there is no reason to doubt the high production cost of the film, it is important to note that
the research department sent an associate to the Huntington for such a prestigious project; the
distinction that research and the recycling of familiar images from printed sources brought with
them was as important an element of promotion as the advertisement of the film’s budget.
The use of the Huntington was one of many research practices that had developed by the
middle of the 1920s as Hollywood studios were making more feature-length films with more
complex stories set in the past or present, in nearby or distant locations. By 1926, most of the

94
Reader application for Burdette Ellsworth Brown, August 4, 1926, The Huntington Library, San Marino,
California.
95
Nearly every time the film was mentioned in the trade press the $2 million cost was mentioned. For example, see
“Laemmle Smashes Rumor of Any Universal Merger,” Moving Picture World, December 11, 1926; “Universal
Spending $15,500,000,” Moving Picture News, April 8, 1927; “Little Eva of Universal’s ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ Has
Dress Designed and Named for Her,” Universal Weekly, July 1, 1927.
97
practices that would stay with researchers for the next forty-five years were in place. One
excellent example of the developments of research work that took place over the previous decade
was the research scrapbook for the 1926 film Beau Geste (figure 2.39), made by Harold Hendee,
the East Coast head of research for Paramount Pictures.
96
The techniques employed in its
creation were typical of research work in the era, which Herbert Brenon, the film’s director, had
likely been using for the previous two decades. It was not surprising that such a thorough book
was created by a researcher at Paramount considering how important its department was in
creating and standardizing research methods.
Paramount hired Hendee in 1924 to work in their New York studio in Long Island City,
in the same office where Pauline Peyton Forny and Gertrude Koch had standardized the research
library four years earlier.
97
He had previously worked as a journalist and run the research
department at William Randolph Hurst’s New York-based film company, Cosmopolitan
Productions, which had a much smaller production slate than he would find at Paramount.
98
His
new studio made Beau Geste and its less popular sequel Beau Sabreur (1928), directed by John
Waters, on its Hollywood lot and in the California desert; Hendee assisted the production by
finding visual materials from resources in New York, including at the NYPL.
99

The scrapbook was primarily made up of images from illustrated French newspapers,

96
Beau Geste (1926) research scrapbook, private collection of the author. This scrapbook is specifically described in
an article on Harold Hendee’s work. In it he argues for the usefulness of photographs when trying to understand past
or distant places. See, Margaret Doty, “Ask Him Another,” The Family Circle, July 27, 1934, 10-11, 17-18, 22-23.
97
“Hendee with Famous,” The Film Daily, June 10, 1924. In one unusual structural difference, Paramount
maintained research department heads in New York and Hollywood. The eastern office managed visual media from
the New York Public Library and the many museums in the city, while the western office handling day-to-day
operations and management of research projects, and communication with other libraries, and other studios. When
Hendee later moved to the research department of RKO Radio Pictures, in 1928, he remained in New York; at that
time, Paramount made its New York department fall under the supervision of Percey, the Hollywood-based head of
research.
98
Margaret Doty, “Ask Him Another,” 17-18.
99
“Beau Geste” Paramount Production Files, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick
Library, Beverly Hills, California.
98
including L’Illustration, Le Monde Illustré, and Le Petit Journal Militaire, Maritime, Colonial
Supplément Illustré. It contained images of the French Foreign Legion in uniform, along with
their living quarters, horses, and camels (figure 2.40), as well as pages on the clothing and
material culture of different groups of people of Africa, including the Tuareg of North Africa
(figure 2.41) and the Senegalese of West Africa also dressed in Foreign Legion uniforms (figure
2.42). Many of the images also showed the French captions of their original source publications
as well as hand-written translations into English. Some images featured more specific marginalia
calling attention to specific details in the images, such as one picture of military awards and
ribbons with the note, “Medals Beaujolais may wear,” referring to the costume of one of the
film’s characters (figure 2.43). This handwriting seemed more likely to have grown out of the
tradition of scrapbooking than the industrial system of research that was still developing
considering it related to a separate level of information for specific characters in that film rather
than a character type that could be reused later. Communication through marginalia like this
would not continue in the decades that followed.
Paramount’s art department found many obscure details that became useful for the
productions of Beau Geste and Beau Sabreur in this scrapbook. Audiences might have never
noticed these elements but they added a patina of fastidious attention that viewers would read as
accuracy. In one case, a single image of a ladder built into the corner of a Foreign Legion fort
(figure 2.44) was precisely replicated on the Geste set (figure 2.45). Like an antiquarian archive
of images, these detailed pictures could show viewers the material culture in remote places they
might never be able to see in person.
This scrapbook shared many formal qualities with the one created for Intolerance,
including the fact that the images were pasted into a large-size book originally designed for other
99
purposes that featured the researcher’s name on the cover. Both books served as “filing systems”
for images that showed a wide range of illustrations of material culture and people that revealed
depictions created over a long period of time.
100
Much like one of Warburg’s panels, both
scrapbooks showed typologically or thematically connected items on a page that could be
compared and contrasted by craft workers and filmmakers to find the appropriate item to use in
the film. This research book gave craft departments a tremendous amount of detail about the
world of North African people and the Foreign Legion in the area.
In 1928, only a few months after its founding, RKO Radio Pictures hired Hendee as the
head of its New York research department and also hired Bessie McGaffey as the head of
research on its Hollywood lot.
101
This aggressive move of hiring two staffers from an established
studio was not just a competitive action, but also brought two veterans with experience building
and managing libraries of illustrated books and pictures to the newly opened studio. RKO
quickly purchased the rights to Beau Ideal, a later Geste story, which they adapted into a film in
1931, with Herbert Brenon once again at the helm. It can be assumed Hendee brought his Geste
scrapbook with him from Paramount to RKO and that he used it for research on Ideal.
As was the typical practice of studio libraries, Hendee would have created multiple
copies of the book, which allowed Paramount to reuse those materials for later productions after
he had left the studio. Two significant films in particular likely involved visual materials from

100
Ellen Gruber Garvey 4.
101
For more on the complicated formation and early years of RKO Radio Pictures, see Richard B. Jewell, RKO
Radio Pictures: A Titan is Born (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 8-19. It is interesting that these
two researchers worked in the same companies across the country from one another and that they likely interacted
on a near-daily basis, however neither one wrote about the other or described them in the press. This could have had
to do with the fact that part of Hendee’s role was to work for McGaffey in fetching books for her from the NYPL,
which could have led to enmity or dissatisfaction between them; however, there is no way of knowing today. It
seems from press reports they each considered themselves to be the head of research at both Paramount and RKO.
Regardless of the fact that many research departments hired New York assistants to oversee relationships with
institutions there, managing research on the East Coast for productions shot in the West would have been inefficient
and logistically impossible.
100
this scrapbook: Morocco (1930), directed by Joseph von Sternberg and starring Marlene
Dietrich, and the remake of Beau Geste (1939), directed by William Wellman and starring Gary
Cooper. Both films would have required the similar information on the people of the Sahara,
uniforms of the French Foreign Legion, and other material culture including the exteriors and
interiors of their forts. In both cases, researchers could have gathered more information at the
time of production, possibly involving sources that were not available in 1926; however,
Hendee’s scrapbook would have been the nucleus of research for each film.
This is an excellent example of how research materials circulated through the industry
where they could inspire several different films. As Hollywood research shifted from primarily
focusing on larger prestige productions for films including The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance
in the mid-1910s, to finding visual sources and inspiration for all films, the way they would do
after the mid-1920s, the boundaries of individual collections in any one studio softened so
materials could be shared and circulated between researchers at rival studios. It would become a
standard practice for research libraries to borrow entire scrapbooks from counterparts around
town, copy them, and use the assembled images to help inform the craftworkers and filmmakers
on their productions. With the advent of sound, the film industry went through many
developments in terms of production systems, costs, and personnel; studio research departments
were not immune from such changes.
Cinema research, which began in an irregular manner around 1908 after borrowing
antiquarian methods from fine artists and theater producers of the nineteenth century, expanded
in the 1910s, as film production grew and moved from the New York area to Hollywood. It
continued to grow and become more formalized in the 1920s, with more studios opening their
own research libraries in which they built large collections of illustrated books and images from
101
the pictorial press and other media. Researchers would liberally share materials and help one
another find sources and solutions for productions. By the time of the advent of sound at the end
of the 1920s, the foundation of research contained an array of methods borrowed from
antiquarians, artists, art historians, and librarians of the past centuries that would serve the
complex visual needs of the Classical period to come. In circulating materials between research
staffs, a familiar look of the world emerged on movie theater screens. This common look helped
to amplify the truth of representations that had circulated in the illustrated press and on cinema
screens. Movies became one of the most important sources in the “Republic of Images” through
the work of early Hollywood research departments as they disseminated pictures to film
production staffs and helped a wider audience encounter a broad set of informative images that
could enhance their engagement in society.
102
Chapter Three—Pictures as Thoroughly Indexed Data:
The Growth of Research in Classical Hollywood, 1929-1969

In advance of the production of MGM’s historical romance Janice Meredith (1924) the
studio’s research department pulled together as much visual information as they could find
relating to the film’s scenario. For one scene involving George Washington crossing the icy
Delaware river on a snowy night in 1776, the library found a reproduction of the iconic painting
by Emanuel Leutze that depicted the event (figure 3.1). Their search also uncovered other visual
and written sources that proved that the Stars and Stripes flag seen in the painting had been
anachronistic. That banner was adopted by American forces the year following the crossing; the
one Washington likely traveled under was the Grand Union flag that featured the Union Jack in
the upper corner over thirteen red and white stripes (figure 3.2). The research department gave
this information to the property department who, in turn, created the historically accurate flag
that appeared on screen (figure 3.3). Many film viewers who recognized the recreation of the
painting and noticed the change to the flag sent disapproving letters to the studio scolding the
production for what they perceived to be sloppy research.
In 1943, this anecdote appeared in an article that also explained how the researchers were
not worried about such criticism considering they “had an ace up their sleeve” in the visual
documentation they had amassed. They knew for certain that “[t]he flag that appears in the
[motion] picture […] was historically correct.”
1
This episode shows an important and often
ignored element of the function of research in Hollywood and how it related to issues of
perception and accuracy. Almost everyone who noticed the difference between the flags in the
painting and the film believed the production had made a mistake; the studio’s position that the
researchers were actually right and that Leutze was wrong was entirely irrelevant to those

1
Sara Colton, “Veracity Seekers of Hollywood,” Magazine Digest, October 1943, 47.
103
viewers. The true role of research work in Hollywood studios was not to bring accurate
information to a film production but to expose filmmakers to past depictions of events and places
so they could create screen environments the audience would recognize and appreciate.
Presenting viewers with cinematic representations that were inspired by familiar images they had
seen in museums, libraries, books, magazines, newspapers, advertisements, and other media, was
more important than showing the world as it may actually have been.
Regardless of the that fact this film was made in the early-1920s it made a lasting impact
in the way research would continue through the Classical era.
2
As studio libraries continued to
support the work of filmmakers and craftworkers, their goals shifted from being primarily
concerned with the replication of past and present spaces through visual precision, as was typical
of research from 1908 to 1928, to presenting film workers with media that would show them
options for how spaces had previously looked so they could create believable spaces. The flag
episode became a touchstone for Hollywood researchers in the sound era, because it showed how
research that was disconnected from a general understanding of the visual world could lead
viewers to feel uncomfortable and skeptical about cinematic productions.
3
By the late-1920s,
there was a rising belief by researchers and filmmakers that movies could not precisely recreate
the world, and could represent familiar depictions of it. This evolution was more rhetorical than

2
The Classical era is defined in this chapter as running from the advent of synchronized sound around the end of
1927 and early 1928 to 1969 with the sale of several studios to multi-national firms less connected to entertainment
media, best symbolized by Kirk Kerkorian’s 1969 purchase of MGM, one of Hollywood’s most prestigious studios.
In The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1985), David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson define the era as running from 1917 to 1960,
however this chapter sets different limits on the period due to specific changes in modes of work in studio research
libraries that occurred.
3
Sara Colton and Hawley Jones, “What’s Right about the Movies,” Harper’s, July 1943, 148 and Sara Colton,
“Veracity Seekers of Hollywood,” 47. It is noteworthy this anecdote came out nearly twenty years after the event,
which suggests the story was even more relevant to researchers in later eras. Also noteworthy is how fleeting the
new flag is in the film and how the audience who noticed the change was reacting to something they could only see
for a few split seconds.
104
practical considering most early researchers, filmmakers, and critics merely promoted the images
that films resembled but never interrogated the accuracy of those images.
From 1929 through 1969, studio libraries added a tremendous number of images from
visual media to their picture collections, which made this modification possible. Twentieth
Century-Fox’s director of research Frances Richardson referred to the many images her
department gathered as “data,” which were “gathered in […] books, magazine articles, etc.”
4

RKO’s New York research director Harold Hendee also used the term, explaining how his
department would “furnish […] data from which all the sets, costumes, furniture, and props that
you see in the picture were made.”
5
The use of the word “data” revealed how the most important
contents of a library was the information that could be found in its images. The large number of
pictures was more important than the library science that organized them or the accuracy studios
would claim emerged from them. Pictures would help craftworkers interpret the world rather
than replicate it. The “thoroughly indexed and easily available” data visible in images were
factored into the equations of costume and set designers, among many others, to become creative
cinematic solutions.
6

The more illustrated materials Hollywood researchers could gather from institutional
collections and mass-media sources, the more data they would have to support their filmmaking.
In this era, studio researchers gathered a maximum number of images to give creative workers a
wide target to hit in order to make cinematic spaces seem familiar to viewers. The basis of
research work was inculcation, meaning viewers would believe what they saw in movies was

4
Frances Cary Richardson, “Previous to Pictures,” Wilson Bulletin for Librarians, May 1939, 590.
5
Harold Hendee, “Research in the Motion Pictures,” National Board of Review Magazine, March 1939, n.p. RKO
had a research office in New York, which allowed more ability to search for images and books in that bigger city,
including the use of books and pictures from the New York Public Library. Both Hendee and Bessie McGaffey, the
head of the Los Angeles research department, were referred to in various articles as the head of the department. It
seems they both managed their own library; however, the hierarchy between them remains unclear.
6
Richardson, 591.
105
true because those screen images looked like other visual media from print sources and other
films, as the episode with Leutze’s painting showed.
7
While their methods were employed
tactically and situationally and were sometimes inconsistent from one production to another,
researchers in this era hoped to achieve the nearly impossible goal of amassing and presenting
images of every imaginable nuance of the world that could lead craftworkers and filmmakers to
build recognizable screen spaces. Researchers found many cliché images for their collections and
presented them to cinematic craftworkers knowing that viewers would recognize elements of
these pictures when recreated in movies because such images had already circulated through the
“Republic of Images.”
8
Research in the Classical era became more systematized, proactive, and
geared toward arming craftworkers with visual information from which they could make
imaginative inventions more easily. These robust libraries showed creative workers many
options for how scenes could look, dramatically improving their efficiency as they maintained a
familiarity for viewers. The potential profit that resulted from movies in which viewers would
recognize more elements and respond in a more positive way interested studios, who supported
research departments by growing their collections through the addition of more visual media.
Researchers’ descriptions of their work in journal articles and interviews reveal
contradictory claims related to their methods and their concern with accuracy. These
inconsistencies show how they were institutionally orphaned between creative and administrative
workers who had different goals for their work: the former were more interested in historical

7
For more on the power of familiar images giving a sense of correctness to a viewer, see Nelson Goodman,
Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1976), 38.
8
Historian Catherine E. Clark has written about how scholars can look to cliché images of Paris to better understand
the important role of the city in the modern world. She has argued that much of what modern people encountering
postcards, photographs, illustrated photobooks, and cinema know about Paris comes from trite and frequently
reproduced visual depictions of the city, many of which were imagined views that showed idealized views of broad
avenues and iconic monuments. See Catherine E. Clark, Paris and the Cliché of History: The City and Photographs,
1860-1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
106
poetic interpretations of images of the world and the latter were more interested in the efficient
creation of movies they could market as factual and in profiting from their financial investments
through more ticket sales. In these explanations, researchers showed how they knew the creation
of accuracy was impossible and unnecessary to their work, but that sentiment of exactness spoke
to an industry-wide interest in social uplift through films of a higher quality.
9

Hollywood studios used research libraries to try to present a maximum number of
pictures of the world from diverse media to viewers. In turn, American films became a dominant
mode of information dissemination to a global audience. By examining how these visual sources
recreated settings and people, how images circulated, and how research workers gathered and
distributed pictures to harness the information within them, this chapter shows how studios and
researchers made an effort to show viewers elements of the world they could believe but might
have never encountered in their lives. Just as a combination of numbers becomes an equation
once placed in a particular order and context, so too were the data from thousands of images,
gathered by research departments, that would be recombined in specific ways to create an
understanding of the world in Hollywood films.

The Work of Research
As visual research was standardized across the film industry, each studio’s library adopted
similar work processes and timeframes based on the scheduling of individual productions. While
there were some incidental differences from one studio to another related to how they assigned
work to the library staff and how they sorted and labelled certain materials, most methods were

9
While there was no mention of research work in the Motion Picture Production Code, which sought to clean films
of the unseemly elements many critics disliked in them, its arrival in 1930 and enforcement in 1934 paralleled the
rise of the more scientific methods and practices of research departments throughout the film industry.
107
similar from one library to another. Frances Richardson explained how in her library, the “work
of the research department beg[an] in earnest as soon as a treatment of the story [was]
completed. At that time a member of the research staff [was] assigned to the picture and
work[ed] on it throughout.”
10
Similarly, in the case of Walt Disney Productions, research director
Janet Martin explained that “the fun” of research began when “the artists take up their pencils
and go to work on the thousands of drawings from which emerges the finished picture.”
11
The
library would spend weeks or months, depending on the scale and budget of the production,
finding and organizing as much material as possible; for certain large-scale historical
productions, researchers could spend more than a year searching for information. They would
look for images in the studio’s library, the libraries of other studios, and in other collections in
Los Angeles, including the LAPL, USC, UCLA, and the Huntington Library.
Depending on the setting for a film and the availability of published information on that
place and topic, researchers would also contact the archives or historical societies of other cities.
They would sometimes request information from specific companies or organizations, to gather
pictures of uniforms, cars, and other material culture connected with those institutions. For such
work they would occasionally seek help from the studio’s distribution and exhibition network,
which was already carefully spread across the country. Helen Gladys Percey explained that
Paramount’s regional offices would help the library by “contact[ing] the local libraries at [the
research department’s] request,” which was seen as efficient considering “the local office [knew]
the best and quickest method for obtaining material from the libraries.”
12

10
Frances Cary Richardson, “Previous to Previews,” Wilson Bulletin for Librarians 13, No. 9 (May 1939), 590.
11
Janet Martin, “Librarian to Walt Disney,” Wilson Bulletin for Librarians 14, No. 4 (December 1939), 292.
12
“Research Work in Motion Picture Production: Notes on a Luncheon Meeting in Honor of Dr. J.T. Shotwell of
Columbia University and Studio Research Directors,” January 27, 1939, general “Research” file, Margaret Herrick
Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California.
108
Many researchers in the 1930s and 1940s noted how finding images and information
about mundane, contemporary, or rural American places and events was challenging and that it
was “sometimes easier to find out how a street in Amsterdam appeared in the 17
th
century than
what firemen wore in Cincinnati 15 years ago.”
13
One article explained how in searching for
information on the Mississippi Valley for RKO’s production of The Life of Virgie Winters
(1934), the research department found their collections were “full of pictures of London, Paris
and New York and many out of the way places of almost any year;” however, “American small
towns of two or three decades ago [were] missing.” For this reason:
[a]gents of RKO visited the chambers of commerce of many Mississippi Valley
towns before they secured a pictorial record of the […] cities which would guide
the studio art department. From this material, they designed a composite town,
which [was] built on the studio ranch.
14

There were three important admissions in this report. First, the research library had more visual
resources depicting major metropolises of the world than rural towns in America. Second,
studios sometimes sent scouting teams to less-illustrated places, many of which were in remote
locations, to gather images and information. Finally, many screen spaces were “composite”
places rather than precise recreations of specific locations, or as another author mentioned,
Hollywood studios “never made a film based on exactly [one] decade.”
15
The massive amount of
visual information gathered by studio libraries helped film workers build visual averages of
places and time periods.
The difficulty researchers faced finding visual information on newer things and smaller
towns actually exposed a gap in resources created by the fact their standard research methods

13
Gretta Palmer, “Dear Sirs: You Make Me Laugh!,” New York Tribune Magazine, January 16, 1944, 96. See also,
Motion Picture Research brochure, Western Personnel Service, 1941; and Colton, “Veracity Seekers of Hollywood.”
14
“Here and There in Hollywood’s Studios,” New York Times, April 22, 1934.
15
Stephen Watts, Behind the Screen: How Films Are Made (New York: Dodge Publishing, 1938), 44-45.
109
relied heavily on published sources. Because so much of the visual media that research
departments collected showed major world capitals—in part because so many illustrated
newspapers were based in those cities—they were well represented in the pictorial press. Those
papers and magazines also frequently printed images depicting scenes of historical interest and
sites from the past. This meant that researchers would have large collections of pictures of those
places and time periods and fewer of those related to common spaces in contemporary America
outside of major cities.
In order to protect against these holes in their collections, research departments seemed
singularly obsessed with finding visual media covering a wider set of topics. Percey explained
that her library would “buy almost no book that [was] not illustrated, and [the] picture file
comprise[d] hundreds of thousands of clippings and photographs which we have gathered from
all parts of the world.”
16
The MGM research department staff “attend[ed] auctions and haunt[ed]
old book shops, looking for reference books containing authentic information.” Additionally,
each department “receive[d] hundreds of magazines monthly and each one [had to be] carefully
read and clipped and these clippings of unusual information [were] carefully filed away in a
catalogued file that would do credit [sic] to the ‘morgue’ department of any large metropolitan
daily newspaper.”
17
The newspaper morgue, which was the department that gathered all wire
images, pictures from staff photographers, and negatives, was also a product of the need for
organization in the “Republic of Images.” It is a useful analogy for understanding how studio
research libraries sorted as many images as they could, regardless of whether or not they would
ever be used, so they might have one when needed.
Studio library clerks were tasked with examining every page of each publication that

16
Percey 256.
17
Irving Crump, Our Movie Makers (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1940), 99.
110
entered the door, identifying every illustration and advertisement, and creating or adding to
catalog cards for every pictorial subject. In order to efficiently create and manage their cards, the
Paramount research department had what they called a “master bible” of image subjects to which
researchers would refer when searching for a specific item in a picture.
18
With such a listing,
researchers could organize pictures by standard topics. A researcher would find these cards in
card catalog cabinets, hunt down the source books, magazines, or files, and photograph the
image for reuse. Like a standard card catalogue for books, this organizational system allowed
users to find images of a wide range of objects, animals, places, or people. “The card file is ever
present. The smallest item […] can be located at a minute’s notice, so perfect is the system of
indexing,” explained one children’s book from the period about how movies were made.
19
It
described how the department had:
the quiet, studious air of a college library. Endless shelves of books line the walls
of a large and well lighted room. There are nooks here and there entirely
surrounded by loaded bookshelves, and furnished in a manner that would delight
the heart of a student. Maps and pictures are everywhere. Great cabinets contain
thousands of photographs and clippings that cover every imaginable subject.
20

Recalling Percey’s claim about the illustrated contents of all of the books in the collection, this
description showed how many visual assets made up a research library.
If a researcher at Twentieth Century-Fox was looking for pictures of briefcases, they
would find that subject card in the catalogue (figure 3.4). Printed on it, they would see that such

18
Interview with Debbie Fine, November 26, 2018. Debbie Fine began working in the Paramount research library in
1968, several months before the studio closed the department; she later created the research department for
filmmaker George Lucas at his Skywalker Ranch in the mid-1980s, using many of the visual materials from
Paramount’s library.
19
John J. Floherty, Moviemakers (New York: Junior Literary Guild, 1935), 36. This book is fascinating for its detail
about the many jobs related to the film industry. As it was geared for children, it presented a variety of unusual jobs
at the studio that would appeal to kids and their limited understanding of filmmaking, including the studio police
force and its officer who guarded the front gate. That research was mentioned in it shows how it was seen as a
significant position and one possibly suited for a child who would like to work with books.
20
Ibid 35. While not stated explicitly, the photographs and narrative in this book relate to MGM, though the
description of the research library was rather universal for similar departments at other studios.
111
items had appeared in images or advertisements in the November 24, 1951 issue of Picture Post
on page 16 (figure 3.5), in the July 1955 issue of Esquire on page 113, and in the April 26, 1958
issue of the Illustrated London News on page 712 (figure 3.6).
21
Gladys Caldwell, a librarian in
the Art and Music Department of the LAPL, explained that “such important subjects as bull-
fights and the various portraits of Salome are scattered through the files”—meaning certain
images might have been clipped and sorted into files of bulls, and others were in illustrated
books on sports or spectacle events, for instance. The card catalogue would help researchers find
such images faster.
22
As studio research departments added “new pictures [to the collection],
subject cards as well as shelf-list cards [were] made for them.”
23
Libraries organized pictures
into files by subject, which were, in turn, “arranged alphabetically in sub-files and folders. Here
is a folder marked ‘Zoology to Zulu Weapons,’ another, ‘Clocks to Court Houses.’ [sic]”
24

The arrival of sound in motion pictures in the late-1920s brought with it many
complications for research departments including the need to investigate questions related to
dialogue. Researchers began offering help to screenwriters who needed to find period-
appropriate language for the actors to speak, foreign languages that might need translation, and
legal clearances of names and businesses. This last area would help protect the studio from libel
litigation from viewers with names and professions shared with a film’s characters.
25
Research
departments spent only a minor amount of their time on such verbal inquiries—somewhere

21
“Briefcases” visual reference card, Twentieth Century Fox Research Library. Special thanks to Fox research
director Lisa Jackson for offering a tour of the studio library and copying certain materials for reference. Twentieth
Century Fox is the only studio to continuously maintain a research library for research on live-action feature films.
While this card on briefcases is from the 1950s, it is similar to ones made in the previous decades.
22
Gladys Caldwell, “The Public Library and The Moving Picture Studio,” address delivered at the American
Library Association annual conference, Seattle, Washington, July 8, 1925 (later published and distributed by the
ALA, 1926).
23
Ibid.
24
Colton, “Veracity Seekers of Hollywood,” 44.
25
“RKO Radio Pictures Inter-Department Communication” from Regina Shibbeth to Ernest Scanlon, May 28, 1952,
formerly in the RKO Archive, now courtesy of Richard B. Jewell.
112
between ten and twenty percent of the total work—however these new requests led libraries to
hire more staff to oversee them.
26
The library science of these departments, including locating
and organizing telephone directories and contacting the studio’s network of regional
representatives for assistance with local inquiries, helped those workers with such investigations.
As the press covered the growth of research departments including their expanding staffs
and libraries, many articles also began mentioning the monetary cost of the books in their
collections—figures, no doubt, supplied to journalists by the publicity departments of studios.
One article explained that the library of MGM had “a monetary valuation [that] approximates
$500,000; but if it were destroyed no amount could replace it.”
27
While the studio likely inflated
the costs to impress readers, this was actually a significant change in price from the $10,000 that
Fox had paid Ingleton for his library in 1926—a price at which Bessie McGaffey had balked.
This statement also admitted how the amount of knowledge in the collection exceeded the
accumulated monetary value of each book; the way studio library directors curated an
understanding of the world through image-based media would have been difficult to replace by
purchasing new materials. Previously, research was simply connected in the press to the creation
of cinematic verisimilitude; this article showed how such resources were themselves becoming
valuable commodities based on a sense of the potential aggregated utility of their contents.
28

This article also introduced a new research director, Nathalie Bucknall, who would lead

26
The article, “Research Heads Off Historical Anachronisms for Hollywood,” explained that research work was
“[n]ine-tenths pictures, one-tenth words […],” however judging by the way researchers described their work, that
ratio was likely conservative. See, “Research Heads Off Historical Anachronisms for Hollywood,” Sales
Management, 1946, 118.
27
Dorothea Hawley Cartwright, “Their Business is Looking Up,” Talking Screen, July 1930, 64.
28
In 1941, the Special Libraries Association (SLA) published the Special Library Resources guide which listed the
holdings of different reference libraries. In it, the libraries of Twentieth Century-Fox and MGM were broken down
by staff members, number of volumes, and number of clip files. At that time, Fox had 15,000 volumes whereas
MGM had 16,000. Considering these numbers, the fact that the value of illustrated books did not spike between
1925 and 1930, and that there would have been no reason for Fox’s library to grow disproportionately from 1930 to
1941, it seems unlikely that the $500,000 value of the MGM library in 1930 was more than a massive overstatement.
113
the MGM library and be profiled and interviewed extensively over the following two decades.
This article promoted her as a genius manager who was “fluent in half a dozen languages and
understandably articulate in half a dozen others.”
29
Unlike many other research heads, she
claimed to not delegate the oversight of productions to her staff and was “directly responsible for
every technical [element] on a production […] and spen[t] much of her time on the sets checking
details.”
30
These assertions are difficult to confirm and seem doubtful considering how the
supervision of such a wide range of work and such a heavy production schedule would have been
nearly impossible without the assistance of deputies.
One element of research Bucknall did take on herself was the gathering of images from
abroad. An article promoting her work and management explained how each year she would
make “a ‘flying trip’ to Europe for the purpose of obtaining first-hand information to be used in
filming new pictures, and also to visit old book and curio shops for items of possible value, to
collect materials to add to her research files at the Coast.”
31
She would take her “pocket camera”
to snap pictures of places she visited, and she would collect “every place card, menu, laundry
slip, and other documentary material” she found.
32
Some researchers also looked to vacation
photographs of studio staff to find images of places outside Los Angeles that might be helpful to
the research library on later productions. Richardson explained that when she was on holiday,
she found it “most difficult to pass a jail in a small town without stopping to inquire if any
picture of it is available, and if the sheriff has a spare badge to give you to add to the reference
collection […].”
33
Research departments were growing at such a fast pace and were in need of so

29
Cartwright 64. While the article celebrated Bucknall’s intelligence, it also described her as, “an attractive young
person,” which is something that would not be mentioned for most male department heads.
30
Ibid.
31
“Research in Hollywood: The Thousands and One Details Ferreted Out the Make Pictures True to Life,” New
York Times, January 3, 1932.
32
Ibid.
33
Frances Cary Richardson, “Picture Research—Variations,” International Photographer 9, No. 2, March 1937, 8.
114
many images for so many different productions that snapshots from any studio employee could
be useful to them. Richardson wrote this article for International Photographer magazine, a
publication of the camera operators guild, which also served the purpose of requesting its
members take pictures for research libraries when they were travelling or shooting on location.
Percey later confirmed that her department also sought similar snapshots from travelling
colleagues, explaining that her department was “always delighted when any […] people from the
studio [were] sent abroad” as they could take pictures and bring back any contemporary
ephemera including “theater tickets, stubs, [or] canceled bills.”
34
While these pictures would not
have circulated in the popular press, they were filled with valuable details of the world that might
have appeared in other representations of places and people. They were furthermore reminiscent
of the sketches and other visual media seventeenth-century antiquarians made and collected
when they visited sites throughout the Mediterranean.
One characteristic of good research work was “knowing where to look for the desired
information,” as Carl Milliken, Jr., the director of the Warner Bros. research department in the
1940s, explained.
35
This was also reminiscent of how one of Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc’s most
remarkable abilities was his knowledge of the contents of different collections and the locations
of many images and objects around the Mediterranean.
36
Being able to quickly locate items of
interest was one of the most important traits for antiquarians and studio researchers alike. While
the press celebrated researchers for having the answers to questions, their true support of
filmmakers derived from the wide information network they had created. One journalist
explained how researchers “[could not] profess to know everything, but [they] always [had] an

34
Ibid.
35
Carl Milliken, Jr., “Information Please!,” Warner Club News, June 1940,3.
36
Peter N. Miller, Peiresc’s Mediterranean World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 15.
115
angle on where to find it.”
37
Also similar to the research practices of past scholars was the fact
this information was described as being potentially “valuable for future reference,” meaning it
was not reactive, but found visual media before it was specifically needed for later projects.
38

It is important to underline how all of these methods were created in the 1920s and 1930s
by a cohort mostly made up of women who were directors of major studio research libraries. As
such work expanded, the majority of research department heads and their staff would remain
mostly female. This was largely due to how librarianship and such “detail” work had become
coded as women’s work inside and outside Hollywood by the mid-1920s.
39
Research, like the
work of secretaries, stenographers, typists, and script readers, “took place on paper, behind the
scenes, and away from set[…].”
40
Studio managers saw these paper-based jobs as ancillary to
filmmaking, which was seen as “men’s work” by the mid-1920s. These were foundational jobs to
the process of making movies; however, they were devalued because the work was seen as
unskilled and the workers as replaceable, likely also because they were women.
Mervyn LeRoy, one of MGM’s top directors, explained in his book about Hollywood
film production that “[r]esearch is one department where mature women, preferably unmarried,
are employed.” He explained this point, writing that:
[u]nmarried women are preferred because they are less independent about their
jobs. If a married woman stays out a day, she still eats. This may be a rather cool
appraisal of the situation, but, with a limited staff, and production going at top
speed, the girl who is dependable, always there, not worrying about her husband’s
dinner or her child’s cold, makes the best researcher.
41

37
Sara Colton, “Veracity Seekers of Hollywood,” 48.
38
Crump 102.
39
For more on the gendered work of women in Hollywood, see Karen Ward Mahar, Women Filmmakers in Early
Hollywood (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); and, Mark Garrett Cooper, Universal Women:
Filmmaking and Institutional Change in Early Hollywood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010).
40
Erin Hill, Never Done: A History of Women’s Work in Media Production. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 2016), 168.
41
Mervyn LeRoy with Alyce Canfield, It Takes More than Talent (New York: Knopf, 1953), 203.
116
This strong statement was divorced from the reality on the ground, as many women who worked
in research departments and did excellent work were married and had children. Lillian Michelson
worked in the Samuel Goldwyn research department and later ran her own independent research
library, while married to art director and storyboard artist Harold Michelson and raising three
children.
42
There were some men who worked in the library, although most of them arrived in
the department after working in adjacent areas like the art department rather than working their
ways up as librarians. They were almost always managers who delegated work rather than
engaging in research themselves. There were certain “male” jobs in research departments such as
library pages, who were mainly teens and young men who shuttled materials around the lot and
fetched books from outside libraries, and photographers, who took pictures of materials
borrowed from other libraries. After the late-1920s, however, almost all researchers hunting for
images and other information for film productions were women.
43

Regardless of the scorn from certain men like LeRoy, the special abilities of researchers
were recognized by the most important Hollywood institution in only its fifth year of existence.
In February 1932, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences invited the heads of
research departments for the major studios, including Percey, McGaffey, Richardson, and
Bucknall to join as associate members under the Art Director’s branch.
44
This was quite a
remarkable act that signaled how essential research work had become specifically to art
directors. Membership in the early years of the Academy mostly included above-the-line
technical or creative workers—most of whom were men—and generally ignored the role of

42
For more on the Michelson family, see the documentary Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story, directed by
Daniel Raim (Los Angeles: Adama Films, 2015).
43
Carl Milliken, Jr., “Information Please!”
44
“Membership Invitations,” Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Bulletin, February 8, 1932, 17.
117
planning workers like researchers who lacked their own guild or a branch to sponsor them.
45

The Research Bible
The facility of Hollywood studios to make films inspired by and containing references to familiar
images relied on the ability of researchers to efficiently present visual materials to craftworkers.
Among the most important tools of these libraries were their “research bibles,” which were
thematically organized books of images that were first developed by studio libraries in the mid-
1930s. Richardson explained that these information books were “used throughout the production
by the director or anyone working on the picture who wishe[d] to familiarize himself with the
background. The art director, property man, and costume department generally want[ed] to study
them, and later they [were] used by publicity.”
46
Their format drew upon and expanded past
research methods, allowing for the examination of more pictures to produce more films. The
main difference between research bibles and the scrapbooks of the previous twenty years, such
as those made for Intolerance and Beau Geste, resided in how the former were mainly collected
into three-ring binders that could include as many pages as needed for a project; the latter, on the
other hand, had been more limited because they were factory-bound with a fixed number of
pages. This meant that while researchers could paste images of different types of material culture
onto the limited pages of scrapbooks, they could also add as many new pages into a research
bible as they needed to create a portable picture collection that contained the most visual
information possible.
Each page of a research bible contained an image, a verbal index for the item, a citation

45
Considering researchers were not in a guild of their own or part of any of the Academy’s creative or technical
branches, it is important to recognize how the Art Director’s branch sponsored their memberships. This was a strong
sign of support and respect for these four women who greatly helped the work of its members.
46
Richardson, “Previous to Previews,” 590.
118
of where it was published, and a date indicating when the page was created. Unlike the Beau
Geste scrapbook, almost no pages had marginalia related to a specific production. This was
possibly the result of the fact these pages could be reorganized or reused for subsequent
productions, and therefore comments on details of a specific film could interfere later with visual
information dissemination. This could also reflect the way these images were part of an
industrial system rather than the more artisanal work of the early research period in which such
written comments might have been more apt.
Researchers could quickly find images pre-sorted by subject matter in their files of
folders, which made relocation and duplication of visual information even easier. Because these
books were organized as binders, research workers could also remove individual pages and place
them into later bibles, or reshuffle the images as needed. Since they were physically smaller than
the scrapbooks of previous decades, researchers were able to reuse entire bibles on later
productions that had similar genres or subjects to earlier films. Each bible volume had an index
and a check-out card, as if it was a standard book on the library’s shelves, which could track the
movement of the volume during and after the production (figure 3.7). One journalist explained
that when a film “of similar background is to be made, the right ‘bible’ is taken down, supplying
a wealth of information. The [Private Lives of] Elizabeth and Essex [1939] bible, for instance,
was a divine revelation to researchers when the Sea Hawk [1940] script came along,”
considering the second film also featured a portrayal of Queen Elizabeth and her court.
47
A
research bible could have multiple volumes and would be reproduced many times allowing every

47
Colton, “Veracity Seekers of Hollywood,” 48. It is important to note that in 1939, Warner Bros. research director
Robert R. Bruce claimed his research department did not keep researcher bibles, however they organized “a research
file” for each film (see, “Research Work in Motion Picture Production”). From the example given in this article, it
would seem that by 1943 the library had changed its methods to fit in with the libraries of other studios or that these
files were saved and reused in a similar fashion to the bibles.
119
department to use the same visual sources simultaneously, which not only created a consistent
appearance throughout the many visual elements of the film, but also controlled costs by limiting
the independence of the many craftworkers who worked on the production.
Research departments would distribute these books to every craft department involved in
a production. Workers in managerial and craft departments—including producers, directors,
writers, art directors, costume designers, hair and makeup designers, set decorators, and prop
builders—would study these books. The art department could see images of costumes, and the
props department could examine images of hair and makeup; all of a film’s creative crew had
access to the same visual field. Research bibles would help craftworkers visualize and improvise
upon all sorts of mundane details such as bowls, tables, and lamps, as well as items more specific
to the time and location of the film, including Roman chariots, World War I military uniforms,
gangster machine guns, or pioneer wagon trains.
48

The use of images from every form of printed media without a hierarchy of value related
to the “flat ontology” system that research employed, in which no one image or object was given
priority over others, and where there was no hierarchy of media types and styles of
representation.
49
A photograph was no better an illustration of a place or person than a painting,
drawing, or print. In more practical terms, research bibles were antiquarian collections of
evidence that had a systemic order for the data it contained, rather than a chronological or
analytical structure that made an argument. Researchers were not concerned with the artistic

48
Research departments would also find information on music to help create the score and other music in the film,
however most of this information was not included in the bible as it was mainly text-based.
49
David McNeill has examined the origins of the concept of flat ontology. See, David McNeill, “Art Without
Authors: Networks, Assemblages and ‘Flat’ Ontology,” Third Text 24, No. 4 (2010), 400; also see, Manuel
DeLanda, A New Philosophy Of Society: Assemblage Theory And Social Complexity (New York: Continuum, 2006),
27. This also relates to Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, which argues for the agency of non-living objects, this
flatness means that no one item would be valued more than any other. See Bruno Latour, “Where Are the Missing
Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts,” in The Object Reader, ed. Fiona Candlin and Raiford Guins
(New York: Routledge, 2009), 229–254.
120
merits of any image in the bibles, they were only interested in what they could show film
workers. Paintings, prints, drawings, and cartoons might have contained exaggerated or
untruthful depictions of the world, but they carried the same informational value as images that
accurately presented material culture. Because researchers primarily concerned themselves with
gathering and distributing familiar and informative images, the difference between artistically
enhanced pictures and those that showed scenes in more straightforward ways was irrelevant.
Because of how craft workers needed large numbers of visual sources, more binders
would be added when researchers found more images, which meant research bibles always
included material that never appeared on screen. This was not a sign of inefficiency, but of
hyper-efficiency; a surplus of images allowed craft workers and filmmakers to visualize a greater
world beyond the limits of the screen and offered background material on any unanticipated
detail requested during a production. Because of the large store of visual evidence in the bibles,
directors and craft department heads were able to incorporate story and script revisions quickly
and efficiently. Excess material could also help designers invent new details that looked
appropriate for the time and place, regardless of the veracity of their origins. For instance, the
research bible for the 1951 MGM film Quo Vadis included many images of chariot races and
gladiators with armor and several of war machines taken from Bernard de Montfaucon’s opus
L’Antiquité expliqué et representée en figures, despite the fact that no gladiators, chariot races, or
battle scenes appear in the film (figures 3.8 and 3.9).
50
Through their practice of collecting a
broad range of images that might not have been relevant to the film they were making, many

50
Bernard de Montfaucon, L’Antiquité expliqué et représentée en figures, book 5, chapter 7, “Où il est parlé de la
castrametation, des sieges & des machines de guerre,” 2nd ed. (Paris, 1722), 140–43. Plates in this volume show
military “siege machines,” weapons, and military encampment arrangements. See Quo Vadis Research Bible, Vol.
IV, “Props,” Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) Research Department files, Collection number 323, University of
California, Library Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles.
121
images that entered the Hollywood visual system showed craftworkers details to inform the
cultural context of their work without needing to be copied.
All of this visual information gave studio publicists the ability to tell the press that
movies accurately recreated the world, regardless of the fact that many articles highlighted the
inaccurate details that appeared on screen. Researchers would explain away these factual issues
to the press by affirming that certain narrative or visual details were changed for creative
reasons. In one interview, McGaffey said that an “anachronism or inaccuracy is occasionally
deliberate, but only when it seems especially necessary to enhance the pictorial value of a
production.”
51
This statement highlighted the many people in different departments who made
decisions over the course of a film production; while researchers would try to guide craftworkers
and filmmakers with pictures, ultimately the library only had an advisory role in the production
of a movie. Research departments could not overrule production workers. Percey summarized
the position of most research workers succinctly, writing that there “are occasionally mistakes in
pictures for which we are not to blame.”
52

The excuses for minor inaccuracies in movies reached their zenith in an article that
claimed certain errors in films were made specifically to help keep the research department
visible and necessary in the minds of studio managers. If the research department “slip[ed] up,”
it argued, “and a mistake occur[ed] as a result of its failure, the studio executives [would] holler;
but if no mistakes occur[ed] the company [would take] that for granted and pretty soon [would
begin] wondering why the research budget [was] so big.”
53
While amusing, this argument goes a

51
Ibid 65.
52
Helen Gladys Percey, “The Motion Picture Library,” Special Libraries 21, No. 9 (September 1930), 257; for a
similar defense of research work, see Cameron Shipp, “Meet Hollywood’s Quizmasters,” Coronet, November 1946,
96.
53
Sara Colton and Hawley Jones, “What’s Right about the Movies,” 151.
122
bit too far considering, again, historical errors were largely the result of choices by filmmakers to
change a narrative or creative detail to better express the sentiment of a scene.
The article also explained that “since the movies are a visual medium, visual accuracy is
all-important.”
54
The logic of this statement that images would be more valuable to filmmaking
than words could be was apt and important, though “visual accuracy,” however, was not the goal
of researchers because it would have been impossible to achieve. Research departments were
unable to manage perfect recreations and only showed craftworkers and filmmakers a maximum
amount of visual information as they created screen spaces. Studios could only produce films
that looked like past depictions of a time period, event, or character, as the incident with George
Washington’s flag illuminated. Viewers did not care that they were being given a correction to
their understanding of the past; they only saw a flag that did not look like what they were
expecting to see. Accuracy, as a marketing concept, promoted movies to a more serious art form
and claimed that through the financial investment by the studio, the film that viewers paid to see
would be uplifting to them.
The marketing materials for MGM’s romantic historical melodrama Marie Antoinette
(1938), for instance, mentioned that the research work for the film included “answering 59,277
questions dealing with noted historical characters, settings, costumes and furnishings of the
period,” and used 1,538 books and 10,615 images.
55
One newspaper column before the film’s
release mentioned that because the studio “doubt[ed] the authenticity of the famous, ‘Let them
eat cake’ episode,” it was not included in the film.
56
While a charming tidbit for a gossip
account, the statement implied that what remained in the film was accurate. So important was the

54
Ibid 149.
55
“Marie Antoinette in the Making,” Marie Antoinette Campaign Book, MGM, 1938.
56
Douglas W. Churchill, “Hollywood Cake: ‘Marie Antoinette Spreads Largess—But What About Marie Wilson,”
New York Times, May 22, 1938.
123
need to suggest accuracy in the film that MGM opened a “Marie Antoinette Museum” in the
Astor Theater, the studio’s flagship venue in Times Square. One newspaper columnist argued
that the exhibition introduced “a new note of dignity and learning into film exploitation,”
signaling how many visitors would learn from the visual materials in the show as it entertained
them—a microcosm of the filmgoing experience.
57
While these numbers books, images, and
displays seemed impressive they gave no proof of the accuracy of the film, and entirely ignored
how the production embellished sets and costumes to make them more grand than the historical
settings and characters on which they were based.
58

The promotion of accuracy was sufficient for most viewers and critics to believe in the
details of a film and studios exploited this marketing connection to make audiences trust what
they saw on screen as truthful. The expenditure of money in the service of information—
regardless of how much of that knowledge was used—was the most important aspect of
accuracy. One critic made this point, writing that “[e]xpensiveness in itself is impressive.”
59
It
was never clear if the studio employees and journalists who made statements about the use of
research for accuracy were simply repeating a marketing position, or if they misunderstood the
role of that work. Researchers were not historians and not supervisors of right and wrong; they
were mainly “looker-uppers,” as Warner Bros. researcher Carl Milliken, Jr. once quipped.
60

Knowing this, it becomes clear how certain statements by researchers that appeared to represent
the fascination with accuracy, were actually cleverly dodging such a concern. In one interview,
Harold Hendee appeared circumspect in observing that “[a]uthenticating is made up of

57
B.R. Crisler, “Gossip of Pictures and People,” New York Times, July 17, 1938.
58
MGM marketed the fact that the film’s sets were actually bigger than the rooms in Versailles they represented.
Many press accounts repeated this, including Churchill, “Hollywood Cake,” and B.R. Crisler, “The Screen—
MGM’s ‘Marie Antoinette,’ in Terms of Norma Shearer, at the Astor—‘Dark Sands” at the Rialto,” New York
Times, August 17, 1938.
59
B.R. Crisler, “The Screen—MGM’s ‘Marie Antoinette.’”
60
Carl Milliken, Jr., “Information Please!”
124
achievement always balanced by failure. If a hit contains only a few errors, we’re satisfied.”
61

Researchers were satisfied with only a few items standing out as anachronistic or otherwise
incorrect because they were not actually concerned with such issues and such a paucity of errors
would keep audiences and executives from complaining to studio libraries.

A Multitude of Research Sources
In their search for visual information, researchers turned to many different types of images. Each
contained different amounts of information, from an advertisement that would feature a single
object being promoted, to a magazine photograph that might show many different elements
including costumes, household objects, or architectural details. Drawings, illustrations, and
cartoons in political, literary, and humor magazines of the nineteenth century became a useful
resource for understanding the material culture of the era. In one case, while working on George
Cukor’s adaption of David Copperfield (1935), Bucknall “called in a squad of ten research
workers located in England” who searched for images in “British libraries, museums and private
collections […].” There they found “paper pamphlets of ‘David,’ which first was published in
monthly installments. These […] contained the original drawing by Phiz (Habolt K. Browne),
which served as guides […].”
62

While these illustrations showed exaggerated characters who were shorter or fatter than
any human would have looked, they also included a stockpile of details that were a rather direct
reflection of those items in the story’s time period. Furthermore, such images were equally part
of the visual lexicon viewers would know, which meant they contained familiar details that
situated them in certain places or periods that could also be extracted. One image, called “My

61
John B. Kennedy, “Hits and Errors,” Colliers, April 1, 1933, 48.
62
“David Copperfield,” New York Times, October 2, 1934.
125
magnificent order at the public-house” (figure 3.10), for instance, showed a chandelier, some
glassware and barrels, and a rotund barkeep with a white waistcoat. Another image, called “I fall
into captivity” (figure 3.11), showed a bourgeois living room with a piano, a portrait painting on
the wall, and window draperies. Not only would each of these images be useful to many craft
departments, but film viewers could have been familiar with them from their appearance in
various publications.
The Paramount’s library had a bound collection of Punch magazine from 1886 in its
collection.
63
The generously illustrated volume contained drawings relating to politics, current
events, and popular culture that presented exaggerated bodies, costumes and other objects. Even
though the nature of many of these images was sarcastic, much of the material culture depicted
in the pictures appeared to be standard. As Richardson explained, she looked at sketches by
George Cruikshank, another important illustrator who also created pictures for Dickens’
serialized stories, to find information on many details of the late-nineteenth century. Images from
the artist:
were done somewhat in cartoon fashion. They pictured everything in the life of
that time in England from wooden legs, brooms, and garden tools to doctors’ bags
and chandeliers; from police uniforms and cooks’ attire to court counselors’ wigs
and dog collars.
64

While mockery of a politician might include his exaggerated chin or ears, it was likely his suit,
cane, and chair would be drawn similarly to how they appeared in life. Richardson and her
fellow researchers noted the value in understanding the world as an intersection of many specific
visual and material details, such as brooms, uniforms, wigs, and dog collars, and such an image
would have provided helpful information for filmmakers.

63
“Punch, Vol. 91,” Paramount Research Department, private collection of the author.
64
Frances Richardson, “The Twentieth Century-Fox Research Library,” California Librarian 28.2 (April 1967): 96.
126
Such an antiquarian approach to examining all available materials from lowbrow and
middlebrow popular illustrations to highbrow paintings helped researchers see different aspects
of people and places over a long span of time. Following the creation of the research bible, some
craft departments requested more information from individual sources. The library would lend
them individual books, as if they were a public or university lending library. In one instance, the
MGM library had a bound volume of Graham’s Magazine from March through May of 1849.
65

Published in Philadelphia, for a mostly middle-class readership, this was a literary journal active
in the mid-nineteenth century that contained several images in each issue. One illustrated story
showed a history of men’s clothing (figures 3.12 and 3.13), which was helpful to costume
designer Walter Plunkett when he checked out the book to examine period fashion for the film
The Man with a Cloak (1951). Set in New York City in 1848, the film starred Joseph Cotton,
who appeared with high-necked collars, cravats, and hats (figures 3.14 and 3.15), which
appeared in these illustrations. The way the costume department used this magazine for reference
was similar to how other craft departments would use similar materials to recreate settings that
seemed familiar to audiences who had previously seen analogous images reproduced in many
visual media forms, including cinema. Many viewers would not have known these specific
details were historically correct for the period in New York City, however such elements looked
similar to how men had previously been depicted in mass-media publications like this one.
Aside from the multitude of illustrated journals and newspapers, some of the most
important sources for researchers were their shelves filled with illustrated books and the images
clipped from them. In one such example from the Warner Bros. library, workers cut images of
church architecture out of the book Arte y Decoración en España edited by V. Casellas

65
Graham’s Magazine, 1848, MGM Research Department, private collection of the author.
127
Moncanut, a nine-volume series published between 1917 and 1926, and removed textual content
other than captions.
66
They gathered the pictures in a heavy-stock wrapper with the title “Spanish
Churches” printed on the spine. Most of these images are close-up shots of stone carvings,
showing details of arches, columns, murals, chairs and benches for prayers, and other
decorations. If a production needed to know how to decorate the set of a scene taking place in a
church in Spain or its colonies in North America, such clipped images would have made
accessing this information easier than flipping through every volume of this set, which also
included images of houses, castles, and paintings. It is possible there were similarly organized
books for other types of Spanish art and architecture from other parts of the nine volumes.
Art director Edward Carrere and set decorator Lyle B. Reifsnider each checked out this
collection of images during their work on Warner Bros.’s film Adventures of Don Juan (1948).
While it remains unclear which specific images they used, nearly any could have been helpful for
their work. For instance, in one sword-fight, Don Juan, played by the studio’s dashing
swashbuckler Errol Flynn, ran across a balustrade of a castle toward his opponent (figure 3.16).
It appears as if at least two images from the collection could have helped inspire the set. The
round motif on the ornamented railing in the film looks somewhat like the banister of a church
staircase in one image (figure 3.17), and the large carved lozenge showing the Spanish royal
crest beneath the railing could have been inspired by an image of the exterior of the church with
a crest beneath a crown (figure 3.18). For set designers and decorators, the differences between a
Spanish church and castle were insignificant because they looked similar; accuracy was not their
interest while acceptable detail was.
This picture collection shows how visual research in Hollywood was concerned with

66
“Spanish Churches,” Warner Bros. Research Department, private collection of the author.
128
quickly finding many images to present to craft departments, while generally not offering the
verbal information in books that would give more context to what the pictures showed. This is
also why researchers used non-English-language books, as the text did not matter much to them.
Researchers merely gathered details of the world that could help art directors and set decorators
build spaces filled with elements that seemed right to the viewers who had seen similar images
across many media. This collection of images shows how a few hundred pictures provided many
options for how a film set could look. In this way, research allowed craftworkers to invent details
while also controlling their work and limiting extreme creations. Seeing so many images showed
craft departments many options for their designs but also offered a creative restriction beyond
which craftworkers would not design. In other words, art directors could design spaces that
incorporated some elements from many pictures and those designs would ultimately look like
they could fit back into this set of images.
Many pictures that had been sorted into the subject files were originally solicited from
photographic wire services, chambers of commerce, and independent photographers to find
images of specific places or events. One example was a file from the MGM research department
that contained photographs from the Cleveland National Air Races in 1937, which appear to
have been shot by such a professional photographer.
67
Of the nine pictures, none actually showed
a plane or an aviator, but presented many details about the appearances and uniforms of those
who worked at the event. Such images would offer visual guidance to costume and prop
departments, such as the Texaco Fire Chief gasoline jacket worn by a woman or the ushers with
their bowties, badges and hats (figures 3.19 and 3.20). MGM’s library would have also offered
hundreds of other images about parachuting and air race events to craft departments. While these

67
“Cleveland National Air Races, 1937” folder, MGM Research Department, private collection of the author.
129
specific pictures would have been unfamiliar to the film audience, unlike those that might have
been published and clipped from magazines, they gave filmmakers a sense of the location, such
as the size of the field or the grandstand.
While there remains no information on which films these pictures were used, they could
have helped Douglas Sirk and his production team on The Tarnished Angels (1957), made for
Universal-International Pictures (UIP), a melodrama about aviators and their spouses touring in
an air show. Seeing as research libraries always shared material, UIP’s research department
could have borrowed these images from MGM’s library to help inform the costume, art, props,
and hair departments, and possibly given Sirk inspiration for the scale of one shot in particular.
At the end of a scene showing a death-defying acrobatic skydiving stunt, a character landed with
a wide shot showing the horizon line and the billowing silk of the parachute (figure 3.21). This
was reminiscent of one of these photographs from the Cleveland show in which a parachutist
landed in a far field as dozens of spectators ran to him or her (figure 3.22). In this way, research
images sometimes functioned like pre-set storyboards from which directors could envision and
plan a film’s shots and cuts. This is not to say such pictures would ever take the place of
storyboards, but that specific views shown in research images sometimes inspired similar angles
or compositions in movies.
Paramount’s library also included books on ancient and antique medals and coins, which
were some of the oldest media in the “Republic of Images,” that could help filmmakers
understand how past political and royal leaders looked. One such volume was an illustrated
catalogue from the International Medallic Exhibition of the American Numismatic Society of
1910, which showed medals and coins from the Holy Roman Empire, Italy, Germany, and
130
France.
68
The images in the book presented film workers with the general appearance of past
leaders, as well as their clothing and hairstyles; the scenes on the reverse included ships, horses,
and religious stories that also informed craftworkers about the belief systems and iconography of
past cultures. Sixteenth-century antiquarians, including Jacopo Strada and Giorgio Vasari, had
also used coins to know how such rulers looked along with visual details about them. Francis
Haskell celebrated their work, explaining how “the care devoted to numismatics in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries constitutes one of the greatest (but most neglected) achievements of
Renaissance scholarship […].”
69

Researchers also found the visual information in numismatics helpful when preparing for
a film set in antiquity or the middle ages. Their use of coins represented an early-modern mode
of antiquarian inquiry and knowledge unexpectedly overlapping with a modern form of
communication. It is unlikely many Hollywood researchers knew how important coins were to
the appearance of the past during the Renaissance, although, they also found these materials
helpful for recreating the appearances of figures from the past. This connection between an
earlier form of understanding the visual world and a modern one brings a new value to cinema as
a form of historical comprehension. Through the work of research, Hollywood brought with it
the collected modes of perception of the world through all the visual forms that preceded cinema.
Not only did movies present their own visual stories to viewers, but studios also imbedded earlier
methods of visual knowledge dissemination in them. While both antiquarians and Hollywood
films have been dismissed by academic historians for their superficiality and lack of historicity,
they still gathered a tremendous amount of information about material culture that has led to a

68
“International Medallic Exhibition of the American Numismatic Society catalogue, 1910,” Paramount Research
Department, property of the author.
69
Francis Haskell, History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1993), 14.
131
visual literacy of global place, period, and people that has become the bedrock of visual
understanding in the modern era. This can also be seen in the lack of distinction found in many
images of non-European-American cultures that has led to many misunderstanding and
denigration in the present day; rather than being a specific blind spot for cinema itself, these
representations reflected a wider visual culture in printed media that predated movies.
An unexpected but illuminating postcard tucked inside the cover of the numismatic
catalog showed how such ephemeral media were used for cinematic research. The image
depicted a woman sitting atop a horse in a square, with several people standing around her
(figure 3.23) and was printed with the title “Amazone Tunisienne” (Tunisian horsewoman). On
the reverse, the card bore a stamp from the Paramount library and the year 1938, along with a
hand-written note reading, “Gift of Sam Comer” (figure 3.24). Paramount’s library had an
“extensive postcard collection,” and this example represented the very tip of a massive body of
visual knowledge that came from the large number of postcards produced and circulated in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
70

Sam Comer, Paramount’s head set decorator from the early 1940s through the mid-1960s,
would have encountered thousands of postcards in his typical work due to the specificity of place
and period each one contained. Nearly twenty years after giving this postcard to the research
library, Comer would dress the sets of Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Man Who Knew Too Much
(1956), which contained a sequence in which an American family visited Marrakech (figures
3.25 and 3.26). While the exteriors and some of the interiors were shot in Morocco, the art,
costume, and prop departments, including Comer, would have looked to images like this
postcard for information on how to enhance the locations to make them look like images of the

70
Special Library Resources, Vol. 1 (New York: Special Libraries Association, 1941), 19.
132
country viewers knew from visual media.
The Paramount Research department maintained a collection of hundreds of postcard
albums on subjects related to American and foreign locations. At least four volumes contained
postcards of French locales, most of which were views of Paris.
71
These collections gave
researchers a broad sense of the most important sites in different cities, including opera houses,
train stations, city halls, churches, and ancient ruins. These albums displayed three cards on each
page and were mostly organized around specific themes, including train stations (figure 3.27)
and other well-known buildings (figure 3.28). Each card was stamped with a sequential number
on the image indicating they could each be removed separately for use on specific films, similar
to how each image from the “Spanish Churches” book could have been checked out separately.
Much like the picture collection in a public library, these postcards could be used independently
or in combination to give film crews the best information about a place.
Because of their value as sources of visual information, most of which projected an
idealized view of the world, postcards became an important way for modern people from the
late-nineteenth century into the twentieth century to visually understand the world. Postcards
have functioned as “a cross between the modern print and communications media, something
like CNN, People, Sports Illustrated, and National Geographic all rolled into one.”
72
They only
showed a “fragment” of life in the place they depicted, but they created a link between that
location and the viewer looking at the picture in their living room.
73
In the context of a studio
research department, these individual images helped film workers create screen worlds. The idea

71
Paramount Research Department collection, Special Collections, Cinematic Arts Library, University of Southern
California, Los Angeles. These items were donated to the library in the mid-1970s, however they have never been
processed or indexed and none of the boxes have been assigned numbers. I was granted special access to three
boxes, one of which contained some of the postcard albums. It is possible there are many more groups of postcards
in the collection. Many thanks to Ned Comstock of the Cinematic Arts Library for assisting me with this inquiry.
72
Naomi Schor, “Cartes Postales: Representing Paris 1900,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 2 (1992): 193.
73
Ibid 237.
133
of postcards as fragments recalls Richardson’s view of images as data. Researchers did not use
pictures to offer a full understanding of distant places or past times; images were partial
containers of details and clichés film workers could activate to make cinematic settings.
Postcards have also been a way for European and North American viewers to see the rest
of the world as an idealized other, where the images would “no longer represent Algeria and the
Algerian women but rather the Frenchman’s phantasm of the Oriental female and her
inaccessibility behind the veil.”
74
While such cultural criticism helps comprehend the complex
vision of people depicted in postcard images, Hollywood studios were generally interested in that
very phantasm when making movies set in places that would seem exotic and unknown to
viewers. That is, when filming an exterior on location, certain visual details would have been
increased or highlighted to make the shot look more like the North African clichés viewers had
seen in postcards. Ephemeral materials like these were incredibly important for the creation of
enduring screen visions produced by Hollywood. The most important of these sources were the
massive number of illustrated magazines that sprung up in the twentieth century.

Illustrated Magazines and Images Out of Context
The 1920s and 1930s were an important period for the expansion of photographic media, of
which illustrated magazines were only a part. There was also a rise in the number of photo
agencies and the images they created partly as a result of the expanded interest in photographs in
daily life for magazine and newspaper storytelling and advertising. Virtually any topic could
become the subject of a photographic feature in a magazine, which led each studio research

74
Barbara Harlow, “Introduction,” in Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1986), xiv.
134
department to subscribe to dozens of publications from around the world.
75
Hollywood libraries
benefited from this enormous amount of visual information which they indexed and reused. Such
weeklies and monthlies had always been an important resource to research workers, and gained a
stronger position in studio libraries when several photographic magazines began, including Life,
which Henry Luce purchased, transformed, and expanded in 1936, and Picture Post in the
United Kingdom in 1938.
One example of how researchers used these publications was in the Warner Bros. atomic-
ant monster movie Them! (1954). As pre-production for the film was underway, the studio’s
research department examined illustrated books about insects and requested pictures of many
locations in the film from regional police departments, chambers of commerce, and New York
City subway systems, where the ants would stage an attack on the human characters.
76
They
looked through many illustrated magazines, including Life, National Geographic, Colliers, and
Picture Post to find images of ants and the biological effects of radiation after a nuclear blast.
77

In one story from Life in August 1947, researchers found photographs of the nuclear bomb blast
on Bikini Atoll taken by Life photographer Fritz Goro aboard an Air Force plane during the test
(figures 3.29 and 3.30), as well as pictures showing how pigs, fish, and micro-organisms
withstood the radiation.
78
Researchers also found a story from Picture Post in June 1948 called
“The Mysterious Life of Ants,” which showed several microphotographic pictures of the insects
climbing and fighting that were taken by photographer Raymond Klebor (figures 3.31 and

75
For more on the French magazine Vu, and the variety of images on its pages, see Michel Frizot and Cédric de
Veigy, Vu: The Story of a Magazine (London: Thames & Hudson, 2009).
76
Inter-office communication from Harry Mayer (NYC office) to Finlay McDonald, September 24, 1952, “Them!”
Research file, F027403, Them! Special box, B00430, Warner Bros. Archive, University of Southern California, Los
Angeles, California. Henceforth “WBA.”
77
Inter-office communication from the Research Department to Steve Karnot [of the Story department], November
11, 1955, “Them!” Research file, F027403, WBA. Due to a lawsuit filed in February 1955, the research department
made an audit of all the visual and verbal information they had found for the film.
78
“What Science Learned at Bikini—Latest Report on the Results,” Life, August 11, 1947, 74-85.
135
3.32).
79
Each of these images gave a tremendous amount of information to craftworkers and
director Gordon Douglas that would turn an otherwise silly monster movie into more plausible
science fiction narrative with some basis in the natural world from which the audience could
actually learn something about the dynamics of ants. The microphotographic pictures captured
details of the ants that were centrally important to the property department, which had to build a
large-scale ant that could fight the scientists in the film; the images allowed craft workers to see
how terrifying such insects could be if they were supersized by radiation. Interestingly, while
there is no bomb blast in the film, Goro’s images might have influenced a shot of the ant hill in
the desert (figure 3.33). Like the pictures in Life, the shot in the movie was taken from the air
looking down at the circular hole.
Researchers ignored or lost all of the composition and design that magazine editors
managed because the details in individual images were the most important element to such
cinematic work. The visual arguments built through images printed next to one another on the
page mostly vanished when the pictures were clipped and resorted by topic. Researchers were
interested in the nearly-encyclopedic amount of information these publications contained. In the
case of the rise of photo essays from the late-1940s into the mid-1950s, which presented visual
or narrative themes with a few paragraphs of explanatory text followed by six to twelve pages of
larger-sized images, researchers disconnected the pictures from one another, fundamentally
eliminating the artistic meaning of the story. Isolated images from photo essays, were orphaned
and broken up into their indexical parts. Political theorist Jane Bennett has explained how lifeless
elements can affect other things as if they were alive, in what she referred to as “vibrant matter,”

79
“The Mysterious Life of Ants,” Picture Post, June 5, 1948, 20 and 23. Interestingly it was Fritz Goro, the
photographer of the color images of Bikini in Life who is credited with developing techniques for microphotography
in the 1940s.
136
or “the material agency or effectivity of nonhuman or not-quite-human things.”
80
In this way,
dissociating images from their published contexts effectively undid the argument they created as
well as their efficacy as vibrant matter. When stripped away from their original contexts, in
which individual images enhanced one another, the power and meaning of these images was
mitigated and changed, sometimes eliminating aspects of pictures that honored, criticized, or
mocked subjects.
One excellent example of such modifications were the images used for research on the
film I Want to Live! (1958), directed by Robert Wise and produced by Walter Wanger. The
research department found a photo essay that ran in Life in September 9, 1957 called “Crime in
the U.S.” that featured color photographs by the great American photographer Gordon Parks.
81
A
note on the clipping indicated three images of interest. One was a picture of the gas chamber at
San Quentin Prison (figure 3.34), where the film’s lead character would be executed; one was a
shot of the gate to the prison seen in the reflection in the window of a novelty shop across the
street (figure 3.35); and one was an image of the four-story tower of cells in the prison (figure
3.36). Ignored by the researchers was the criticism of the American penal system that emerged in
the essay, as were the many technical achievements of the photographs. For instance, because the
picture of the prison gate is a reflection, the image is reversed, which serves to undermine the
austerity of the building and the system it represents. Parks’ mastery of lighting color film
allowed the image to show both the reflection and the interior of the shop. Through the window,
pennants for San Quentin are on display, which calls attention to the strange idea that anyone
would want to celebrate the prison with such a flag. Researchers were not concerned with such

80
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), ix.
81
“I Want to Live—LIFE Crime Series,” folder 17, Walter F. Wanger Papers, US MSS 136AN, Box 81, Wisconsin
State Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin.
137
assessments or the artistic skill required to make them; such a picture was valuable for the
collections of visual details it contained.
Once taken apart, scrubbed of their narrative function, and made into separate images,
photo essays became containers of data and details that film workers could use to recreate the
visual world. Once pasted to the pages of research bibles these recontextualized pictures created
visual antiquarian typologies of different subject matter, from modern tables, to ancient weapons.
In this way, the research bible assembled by Lillian Michelson for Otto Preminger’s film
adaptation of Porgy and Bess (1959), produced by Samuel Goldwyn, contained images from
books and magazines about Charleston and Southern architecture grouped by topic, including
“exterior doors and windows” (figures 3.37-3.39), “interiors and stairways,” “interior ceilings,”
“interior kitchens,” “gates, fences and ironwork,” “wharves and docks,” and “cotton carts
loading.”
82
In any of those sections, research workers pasted a dozen or more images to
individual pages with their original captions and a brief citation of the source, in case a
researcher needed to find the source image again or for greater written context. When looking at
images from the research bible in succession it becomes clear how researchers were trying to
show craft departments how spaces could look, presenting options of how similar locations in the
world had been illustrated in printed media, rather than how they had to look. Sets constructed
for the film (figure 3.40) did not look exactly like any of these images but could have fit in with
any assortment of images of buildings in Charleston.
One of these source images (figure 3.41) came from a photo essay about Charleston from
the May 1949 issue of Holiday magazine, with photographs by Hans Knopf and text by Henry F.
and Katharine Pringle. The monthly was one of the most important American illustrated

82
Porgy and Bess Research, vol. 2,” Special Collections, Los Angeles Public Library, Los Angeles, California.
138
publications in the postwar era and was geared toward an audience “whose income allowed them
to travel and whose values led them to spend freely.”
83
The caption on the photograph directly
mentioned the poor living conditions created by the “Jim Crow doctrine” in the American South,
though it optimistically pointed toward some possible positive changes in the era.
84
Other images
in the essay presented African-American poverty and servitude (figures 3.42 and 3.43) including
the wharves (with a caption that referenced Porgy and Bess), a fertilizer plant, and a lumber
yard. When removed from the context of the original article that showed many colorful
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings of Charleston along with a two-page spread of
photographs of the lives of African-Americans in the city, the sense of hopefulness was wiped
away. The image of the wharf was used in the research bible and other images were likely
indexed and entered onto subject cards for “lumber,” “Baptist minister,” and “servant.” The
antiquarian way in which images showed the appearance of the world without any substantive
cultural analysis was essential to research and movie making. Craftworkers and filmmakers
needed to know how people dried their sheets on their back decks, or that a broken-down car sat
in their yards. For film workers, pictures were simply catalogs of the objects they had to find or
build and the characters they had to dress in order to make a scene look like a familiar setting.
Illustrated magazine editors and photographers built narrative through the placement of images
on pages; research libraries began their work by disassembling publications into their component
pictures in order to find details that could be recombined by craftworkers and filmmakers to
create new cinematic narratives.
While most of the clipping and thematically reorganizing images occurred in the research

83
Richard K. Popp, The Holiday Makers: Magazines, Advertising, and Mass Tourism in Postwar America (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012), 41.
84
Henry F. and Katharine Pringle, “Charleston,” Holiday, May 1949, 58.
139
departments of each studio, some craftworkers used library techniques to create their own picture
collections they could access outside the research system of the studios. One such image gleaner
was Richard Day, a prolific set decorator and art director who worked actively from the 1920s
through the 1950s mostly with Samuel Goldwyn and other independent production companies on
the United Artists lot, and later with Daryl Zanuck at Twentieth Century Fox. To support his
work, Day built and maintained his own picture collection of images clipped from diverse
sources or photographed from books and other publications.
85
As in studio libraries, each image
was indexed and tagged with a region, a time period, and pasted to a hard-stock board. The
periodization of these pictures was broad, with most tagged as “Period”—meaning, that it came
from an older era—“Contemporary,” or simply the century in which the subject of the image was
made. For the region, most of the images offered a country or region such as “England,” “Rome”
(as in the Roman Empire), or “North Africa.” This lack of precision shows how Day and his
associates understood world geography for their use of these images for reconstructing the
material culture from around the world. If they needed an image of a North African town, for
instance, they were generally not concerned with the precise difference between the architecture
and culture of Tripoli and Marrakesh, for instance. For craftworkers building sets something
merely had to look like past depictions of similar places in print or earlier films. To
contemporary eyes, some of these depictions show an Orientalist view of non-European people
as “others;” most craftworkers and filmmakers in this era would have generally been interested
in such images for the way they could straightforwardly present cultural typologies for reference
in terms of costumes, props, and set dressing. Problems with prejudice in any individual

85
The Richard Day Picture Collection is now in the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin. Many
thanks to Steve Wilson, Curator of Film at the Ransom Center, as well as Michael Gilmore, Archivist, for their help
in viewing many thousands of these images.
140
representation would likely be unquestioned and repeated considering such stereotypes were
endemic to the visual culture of non-Western subjects.
Because many of the images Day used were created in his contemporary time, they were
indexed as “modern” regardless of the fact that they frequently depicted older sites. For example,
one board featured four snapshots of the architecture in and around Marrakesh, including the
monumental Bab Agnaou gate (figure 3.44), and was simply marked “North Africa, Modern,”
with nothing specific about the city, its history, or the names of the sites in each picture. The fact
that the gate was built in the twelfth century of the common era does not appear in the label.
Most important to the users of these images was how and where they could be used, and whether
such a picture could help to build a film set in the past or present. The simple fact that the eight-
hundred-year-old structure was still standing and looked like its photograph, meant it could be
helpful to craftworkers making a film set in their contemporary.
This mindset was again visible in pictures of ancient Rome. In one image, Lawrence
Alma-Tadema’s “Sappho” (1881) was labelled “Italy, Ancient” (figure 3.45). This image showed
an imagined past where three women sat by the sea eating fruit and playing music. The clothing
and the décor in the painting were nineteenth-century views of antiquity; Day never
acknowledged the fact that they were historically imagined elements of an invented past and was
only concerned that a picture could be useful for a film set in antiquity. To complicate this
understanding, another board showed four photographs of the ancient ruins in Rome, including
the Forum and the Colosseum (figure 3.46). This board was also labelled “Italy, Ancient,”
despite the fact that the pictures showed contemporary views of the crumbling sites. The
background of the image of the Forum, in the lower left corner, also shows the back of the
Neoclassical Altare della Patria, built from the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth
141
century (figure 3.47), and the Palazzo Senatorio, built in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and
redesigned by Michelangelo in the sixteenth century (figure 48). The Forum never appeared in
this state until the modern era. Similar to how every culture since ancient Rome reimagined the
site and constructed religious and governmental buildings there, Hollywood studios took these
images to reconceive their own ideal view of the square. Day and his associates were examining
these ruins like an antiquarian who could extract details including the columns, capitals,
brickwork, and the way the buildings were constructed so closely together. His picture collection
gave him a tremendous amount of visual data from which he could build screen spaces inspired
by past images that contained the accent of truth that viewers would recognize and believe.
86

The many visual details that helped craftworkers build settings and characters for the
screen was as influenced by earlier Hollywood notions of those places and people as any images
from the press. In some cases, those big-screen portrayals of places and periods influenced the
appearances of historical spaces when they were illustrated in the mass media. For example,
craftworkers occasionally needed images of colonial American vernacular architecture and
interior design for films set before and during the American Revolution and would turn to
photographs of living history museums, as if they were truly old spaces. Two random sources for
such pictures were the March 1931 issue of the illustrated magazine International Studio, from
the Paramount research library, and a subject binder called “Colonial Fireplaces,” from the
Twentieth Century-Fox research library, each of which showed how a visual understanding of
the past could be influenced by such screen portrayals.
87
One article in the publication featured

86
Fanny Field Hering, Gérôme: The Life and Works of Jean-Léon Gérôme (New York: Cassell Publishing
Company, 1892), 88. Also see the first chapter of this dissertation for more analysis in the context of nineteenth-
century painting and the work of Jean-Léon Gérôme.
87
“A Complete Example of ‘Early American,’” International Studio, March 1931, 34, Paramount Research
Department, and “Colonial Fireplaces,” Fox Research Department, both from the private collection of the author.
142
photographs of the interior of an eighteenth-century Massachusetts house (figure 3.49) and the
binder featured more than one hundred illustrations of colonial kitchens and parlors (figure 50).
There is a chance some of these images could have been useful to Cecil B. DeMille’s production
team while they built sets and costumes for his early American epic Unconquered (1947). In one
scene of the film, a group of American men plotted against a British officer in the living room of
a home (figure 3.51). There were several specific items that appeared in the film shot and in the
published images, including the wood paneling and sconces over the mantlepiece, a modest
staircase tucked into the wall, similar tables and chairs, and low ceilings. More than any specific
design details, however, the film set looks a lot like these illustrations and these illustrations look
like they could have been built and decorated by Hollywood craft departments.
The circulation of images between different studio research departments built a
consensus about how certain places in the world looked at different times. Understood another
way, films dealing with similar places and periods would use similar research materials, which
would make them look similar and would help grow a common understanding of the world in the
minds of the audience. Photographs of historically restored colonial living rooms in museums
helped to guide art directors and set decorators in their creation of screen spaces. They, in turn,
functioned for viewers like a walk through a living history museum, including Colonial
Williamsburg in Virginia or Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts, where they could find “a
number of peripheral details, such as horse-drawn carriages and proper period costumes for those
working at the various trades.”
88

These images from the magazine, the fireplace binder, and the film looked like the many
colonial reenactment sites that opened in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. They

88
Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2006), 59.
143
developed their own sort of historical accuracy that focused on “resemblance rather than
sameness.”
89
Many photographs of historical interiors resembled film sets, which was the result
of the massive influence Hollywood had on the art direction of such houses and living history
museums. The circular logic in which images of idealized historical sites that looked like movies
of colonial America later became sources for filmmakers to recreate on screen built the notion of
America’s early years in the minds of many cinema viewers. Such structures and spaces were
historicized within the same fictionalized ideal of “Colonial Americana” that emerged from
American pageantry in nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
90

The way Hollywood films influenced the look of spaces in the outside world was
recognized by film researchers who understood their movies also had to look like past depictions
that circulated in the “Republic of Images,” and, significantly, past film portrayals. As a result of
this, by the 1940s, researchers would collect set stills from productions made in their studios.
These photographs were taken to document each set, prop, costume, and many character
positions in scenes in order to visually monitor their appearances for later use in pickups or
reshoots. When they later examined these images for subsequent films set in similar places or
periods, researchers found they had as much visual details in them as any painting or photograph
of a true place. This created a system, in which one movie could look like another movie because
the latter borrowed specific visual elements from the former. This mise-en-abîme led to films
creating their own understanding of spaces and history as they contained factually inaccurate
visual details that nonetheless dampened the errors and became familiar from replication in
multiple productions.

89
Rosen 65.
90
For more on historical pageantry and how it related to living history museums, see David Glassberg, American
Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1990), 267-271.
144
The importance of these images to visual research was made clear by Percey during the
production of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) when she reprimanded a
studio executive for changing a policy that previously sent all stills to her library. She felt “very
strongly” that this adjustment was a “mistake, for in a few years the negatives will have been
destroyed and nobody will know where the material is.”
91
She and her department wanted those
images for the information they contained and fewer pictures meant a loss of knowledge.
92

Despite the fact that these pictures were manufactured by past studio workers, they provided
important details about depictions of the world the audience might recognize.
This mixing of Hollywood stills into picture files created picture collections that were
truly “flat” without hierarchy in the different media or image accuracy. For instance, the research
library of the Western Costume Company, the film industry’s largest supplier of period clothing,
built a “Roman Empire” file for images of ancient clothing and armor. In one subfile on
gladiators researchers placed two stills of contemporary actors dressed in costumes made by
Hollywood craftworkers for the RKO film The Last Days of Pompeii (1935) (figures 3.52 and
3.53). While these costumes look cheap, with the shields and armor clearly made from board
painted to look like metal, they contained as much visual information about representations of
such uniforms as the prints of paintings by Gérôme and other artists that also appeared in the file,
many of which had been clipped from the pictorial press. The costumes from a recent film that
many viewers would have seen were as relevant a source for a future production as any
nineteenth-century painting. The only advantage the older image would have had was the
cultural perception of historicity that had been built up over the previous century.

91
Helen Gladys Percey to Hugh Brown, November 29, 1950, Paramount Pictures Production Collection, Box 145,
f.1880, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles.
92
Aside from the visual information in the photos, these stills could also function as a visual archive of the studio’s
production. If lost, a tremendous amount of visual documentation of work would also vanish.
145
The reuse of images from older films again occurred in advance of the production of
MGM’s Roman romance Quo Vadis (1951). For guidance on the sets and costume, the studio
sent stills from the Italian film Fabiola (1918) to the art department.
93
This earlier film, directed
by Enrico Guazzoni, who had made a name for himself with a different feature adaptation of
Quo Vadis in 1913, contained many visual details in costumes and interiors that would have been
valuable to the later Hollywood production. While the stills were evidence only of a film made
thirty years earlier rather than a more scholarly record of the past, they offered insight into what
viewers would expect ancient Rome to look like. The following year, as work on the film
continued, the production team went even further than just examining stills by watching the
chariot race sequence from the studio’s production of Ben-Hur (1925). This scene offered further
guidance on costumes, props, and sets.
94
Filmgoers who had seen Fabiola or Ben-Hur might
have recognized those images in Quo Vadis; the production team found a clear and believable
portrayal of the visual and material culture of that era of ancient Rome that midcentury audiences
could recognize. All of these images from past films had become part of the visual lexicon
audiences understood, and were just as valid as guides to film workers as paintings from the
century before were. Inculcation in the cinematic past had become tantamount to history;
familiarity with moving pictures became a new standard of visual accuracy.

The Quo Vadis Research Bible
A deeper examination of the visual materials the MGM research department gathered for Quo

93
Memo from Miss. D. Wright to Mr. [Alfred] Junge, August 11, 1948, MGM British Production Collections, f.
163, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles. At this early point,
more than two years before production began, John Huston was slated to direct and Alfred Junge was scheduled as
the art director; both men would leave the production before it began.
94
Memo from Henry Henigson to Leon Algrant, April 7, 1949, John Huston papers, f. 756, Margaret Herrick
Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles.
146
Vadis reveals how craftworkers examined different pictorial sources to recreate the ancient world
in a way that looked familiar to audiences and resembled traditional portrayals of Rome.
Researchers for the film applied antiquarian and library practices, including gathering and
organizing sources, clipping images, and presenting users with hundreds of options that were
topically or thematically connected in research bibles, in order to produce a profitable and
popular film. The film, directed by Mervyn LeRoy, presented the story of a Roman general
falling in love with an early Christian woman around the year 64 C.E., during the brutal reign of
Nero. As the young religion grew in popularity, the emperor lashed out by burning the capital to
the ground and sending the faithful to be devoured by lions. In finding visual materials for the
film, researchers pulled pictures from diverse sources and time periods to show objects and
places of the past. They harnessed the data in images, including contemporary photographs of
Roman ruins, illustrations from books, prints of paintings of Roman settings by nineteenth-
century artists including Jean-Léon Gérôme, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and Thomas Couture, to
pass along information about a vast array of material culture to craft department workers.
The research bible was made up of five three-ring binders, each focused on a different
element of the production: locations, costumes, sets, props, and sculpture from the ancient
world.
95
Each volume contained photographs of images from books and magazines pasted onto
yellow medium-stock paper. The published source of the image was generally cited on the top
edge of the sheet, along with the date of publication and page number. Some pages had simple
identifications such as “Roman Emperor” or “The Old Appian Way” (figure 3.54) to identify

95
Quo Vadis Research Bibles I, [Locations]; II, Costumes; III, Sets; IV, Props; and a book marked “Received from
London Studio, December 1950, v. II,” including shots of the Appian Way and sculpture and objects from museums,
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) Research Department files, Collection number 323, University of California,
Library Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles. The volume marked “Received from London
Studio” was created at MGM’s Borehamwood, London, studio, which managed the production of the film in
Rome’s Cinecittà studio. Considering that the book is marked “v. II,” there was likely a first volume that has been
lost.
147
them, which referred to visual subject files in which researchers would have found the images.
Frequently the pictures contained visual information beyond these simple titles, as in the case of
one image marked “Slaves” (figure 3.55) that showed three men laboring with wood in a
passageway that also revealed a brickwork archway and a stairwell, all of which would have
been useful to the art department.
Some images were well-known works of art that only infrequently included an artist’s
name or title. One such picture, marked “Roman Emperor” (figure 3.56), was a print made after a
painting by the French artist Georges Rochegrosse, “Vitellius Dragged Through the Streets of
Rome by the People” (1882-3). The image was a photograph of a print from a magazine that also
contained the caption, “Vitellius Torn by the Mob,” proving researchers knew this was a
different leader than Nero; his identity did not matter, however, as he was merely a
representation of any Roman emperor. Basing the look of Nero on this presentation of Vitellius,
shows a slippage from truth to the accent of truth, from accuracy to verisimilitude. Such a change
in presentation was not unique to this film, but was the overall presentation mode of Hollywood
cinema—as well as all historical reconstructions including historical texts and reconstructions, as
Hayden White, Stephen Bann, and Philip Rosen have examined.
96

There were two main modes of employment of images in this research bible: direct and
historical-poetic. They could also be called antiquarian or interpretive. The first way involved
craftworkers taking images in research bibles and directly turning them into props or visual
elements that looked exactly like these sources. For instance, in the opening sequence of Quo
Vadis Roman soldiers marched along the Appian Way and paused at an overlook above the city.

96
For more, see Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 1-42; Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of
History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 1-7; and Rosen
65.
148
Two officers, Marcus Vinicius and his lieutenant, sat atop horses in armor decorated with medals
won during their recent battles as their legion stood behind them with shields and weapons
(figure 3.57). The research bible has extensive antiquarian typological images of Roman soldiers,
showing different pieces of armor, standards, medals, and chariots that function as visual
catalogs of ancient Roman people and their material culture (figures 3.58-3.61).
In another example, as the story moved into the city, there was a scene where the female
lead character, Lygia, meets some of the ladies in waiting at Nero’s palace (figure 3.62). The
bible provided many images of specific hairstyles, gowns, and ancient statues of women, again
all elements of a syntax of the past’s material culture (figures 3.63 and 3.64), which were copied
by studio hair and costume designers. Still later in the film, a scene in which the strongman slave
Ursus fought a gladiator in the street (figure 3.65) appears to have been choreographed to
resemble an illustration by Polish artist Jan Styka, whose images based on the Quo Vadis novel
were published in the French magazine Le Figaro Illustré in 1902 (figure 3.66). Both the fight
scene in the film and the published illustration showed the characters wrestling in a paved
passageway with a fountain.
Hollywood movies were clearly more than reproduced details from past images,
however, and the second mode of use for the research bible involved the creative interpretation
of past images in the historical-poetic mode. The research bible included many reproductions of
nineteenth-century depictions of ancient Rome, including Jean-Léon Gérôme’s “Pollice Verso”
(1872) (figure 3.67), Thomas Couture’s “Romans of the Decadence” (1847) (figure 3.68), and
Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s “Spring” (1894) (figure 3.69), all of which provided creative
renditions of the past upon which Hollywood filmmakers could invent new visual details. These
images included accurate material culture from the past, no doubt due to the artists examining
149
antiquarian sources, as well as spectacular, fabricated elements, all of which were equally
important to craftworkers and filmmakers. When constructing the sets and sequences in the
Circus Maximus, film workers would have looked at these images for inspiration, rather than
instruction. Gérôme’s painting showed how the arena might have appeared from the ground level
during a contest of gladiators; Couture’s painting showed the general clothing of wealthy Roman
citizens, as well as the scale of architecture relative to those people; Alma-Tadema’s painting
showed how crowds of people looked when gathered in a celebratory group. In the hands of
craftspeople, such a collection of visual details helped create believable screen images.
As a visual encyclopedia of Roman material culture that offered a wide scope of entries,
the Quo Vadis research bible also introduced a nonspecificity to the place and period in which
the film was set. Quite unlike a traditional antiquarian practice, which would have relied heavily
on precise periodization and historical accuracy of particular objects of different types, these
volumes contained images from different eras of Roman culture and from many locations in the
Roman Empire. In one image from the bible’s third volume, a print of the interior of a house
bears the caption, “Living Room—Petronius or Plautius/The House of Faunus Restoration”
(figure 3.70), suggesting the picture could be useful for designing sets for the homes of two
characters in the film (figures 3.71 and 3.72).
97
The House of the Faun was one of the grandest
homes in Pompeii, built no later than the first century BCE and buried in ash along with the rest
of the region following the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE. While there might have been some
differences between a building in Pompeii and one in Rome constructed a hundred years apart,
they were irrelevant to researchers who saw such homes simply as collections of details that

97
The image is from A History of the Ancient World by Michael Rostovtzeff, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1927), which traces the
political history of the Mediterranean region and is extensively illustrated with images of art and architecture from
different regions over time.
150
could produce a sense of space during antiquity. For cinema researchers and craft workers, the
precise location and period of a building was irrelevant as long as it seemed correct and evoked
the familiar understanding of these spaces. The audience would generally see them simply as
“ancient,” and not know the specific differences between architecture in different cities. This
shows how, while the audience would believe a film as being accurate because it resembled
images they had repeatedly seen, there was a large amount of visual generalization in screen
images—just as there always had been in written narratives and history.
98

In looking for reference images, researchers would typically cast a wide net to gather
pictures from locations near a film’s setting, never limiting a search to the specific site. For
instance, during the production of another film, David O. Selznick’s Gone With the Wind (1939),
the narrative’s location in Georgia was centrally important, but researchers gathered photographs
of entry halls and stairways from Mississippi and Kentucky for the art department to understand
the look of antebellum homes in and around Atlanta (figures 3.73-3.75).
99
This was certainly
caused in part by the fact that after Union General William Tecumseh Sherman burned Atlanta in
1864—which was depicted in the film as one of its most significant set pieces—few antebellum
houses remained in the region; interiors of homes on large slave plantations similar to Tara were
easier to find in neighboring states with similar architectural and economic backgrounds. The
visual average that any craftworker would make after examining the many images in a research
bible eliminated the most visible vernacular shibboleths of design or style. Just as a midcentury
American viewer would likely not understand differences between a home in Pompeii and one in

98
For more analysis on generalization in written history, see William O. Aydelotte, “Notes on the Problem of
Historical Generalization,” in Louis Gottschalk, ed., Generalization in the Writing of History (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1964), 145-177.
99
Gone With the Wind Research, Box 3966, Folder 1, David O. Selznick Collection, Harry Ransom Center,
University of Texas at Austin.
151
Rome, they would not have known the differences between a staircase in Georgia and one in
Mississippi. More important to any film production than accuracy was that the film met the
visual expectations of the audience as it looked familiar to them because it resembled earlier
productions set in similar places.

The Afterlife of the Bible
Having been produced for the astounding sum of $7.6 million, or nearly three times the cost of a
major film in the period, Quo Vadis was a massive box office success, earning $21 million in
worldwide box office, or nearly five times the average successful film in the period, making it
one of the most profitable films the studio had ever produced.
100
Considering filmmakers always
wanted their movies to generally look like past productions, and considering the positive
response from viewers, its research bible became valuable to those making subsequent films set
in ancient Rome. Examining the check-out cards for each volume shows which craft workers or
rival studio research libraries borrowed these books in the subsequent years. These materials
would become part of the visual understanding of ancient Rome and would be reused as much as
any published sources about the period on the shelves and in the files of the research library. It is
plausible that, aside from the popularity of Quo Vadis, Hollywood studios made many of the
peplum films of the 1950s and 1960s partly because such thorough research bibles dramatically
simplified the planning for such productions.
Several significant productions used these materials, including Fox’s religious epic The
Robe (1953), which was the first film produced in the widescreen CinemaScope format. Like

100
“Loew’s Incorporated Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer Studios Operating Results by Pictures, 1951-1952,” Margaret
Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills. Adjusted for inflation, the film was
produced for just under $75.5 million and earned just over $208 million in 2020 dollars according to
http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/.
152
Quo Vadis, it was set in the years following Christ’s crucifixion and also showed the growth of
the early Church. Architecture, Roman soldier uniforms and armor, robes, and tools seem to have
been inspired by images of those items in the volumes of the research bible (figures 3.76 and
3.77). Several largely forgotten films also referred to these materials for guidance on sets and
costumes, including Douglas Sirk’s widescreen Technicolor film Sign of the Pagan (1954),
produced at UIP, which took place in the Roman Empire of the fifth century as it battled the
encroaching armies of Attila the Hun (figures 3.78 and 3.79) and the MGM Esther Williams
romantic comedy Jupiter’s Darling (1955), which involved the star swimming through ancient
Rome (figures 3.80 and 3.81). It is relevant that the four centuries between the settings of Quo
Vadis and Sign of the Pagan did not matter to researchers who were interested in finding material
details that generally looked “Roman,” regardless of the precise period of the material culture.
Because UIP’s research department likely copied the images in the bible while making Sirk’s
film, as was standard practice, the production team for the studio’s peplum film Spartacus (1960)
directed by Stanley Kubrick, probably referred to the same images for guidance on the recreation
of Roman villas and gladiator armor (figures 3.82 and 3.83). Each of these films presented
similar military uniforms, standards, architecture, hairstyles, and other design details that all
added up to a general sense of ancient Rome that was believable to viewers.
Edward Carfagno, who served as the art director for Quo Vadis, later worked on several
other MGM peplum films that also used the same research materials, including Joseph
Mankiewicz’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1953), starring the young Marlon
Brando as Marc Antony. While the visual style of this later film appeared more modernist in its
black and white rectilinear starkness, many details of the costumes and props are similar to those
153
used in Quo Vadis (figure 3.84).
101
This film serves as an important example of how research
bibles presented information about material culture in a generic way and how creative teams
were subsequently tasked with developing films from them within a certain style. Researchers
gathered and presented data in their bibles and creative workers organized the details.
Carfagno’s most important project was MGM’s epic Ben-Hur (1959), one of the biggest
films the studio ever produced, and one of the most acclaimed peplum films in Hollywood
history. The similarity of the Circus Maximus in Ben-Hur with that of Quo Vadis strongly
suggests that the craftspeople on the later film consulted the prints of Gérôme’s paintings in the
bible and might also have looked to the earlier film itself for visual guidance (figures 3.85 and
3.86). Because of the critical and box office success of the film, in the years that followed it
would replace Quo Vadis as the model on which other films were based and compared, even if
most of its visual research had been gathered for the earlier production.
By the mid-twentieth century, Gérôme’s images of the Circus Maximus were widely
known to the point of becoming clichés. The cinematic view of Rome that originated in
nineteenth-century paintings greatly influenced the modern view of the ancient city. A “hall of
mirrors” effect developed in these peplum films in which each movie looks like the others, and
in so doing, distorted the modern representation and understanding of the past.
102
It became
unclear whether filmmakers referred to earlier films in their productions or to the paintings those
movies cited. In an oft-cited anecdote, director Ridley Scott remarked that the paintings of

101
Roland Barthes wrote of the actors’ bangs in Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar, that “the frontal lock overwhelms one
with evidence, no one can doubt that he is in Ancient Rome” (Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers
[New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1972], 24). While Barthes used this hairstyle as an example of a readable
sign, it is important to note that these bangs were not arbitrary; the craftspeople for the film consulted the Quo Vadis
research bible, where they saw sources for the haircuts, most of which came from photographs of Roman statuary in
museum collections.
102
Charles Tashiro, “When History Films (Try to) Become Paintings,” Cinema Journal 35, no. 3 (Spring 1996): 19–
33.
154
Gérôme inspired him during the production of his film Gladiator (2000) (figures 3.87 and
3.88).
103
Curiously he never mentioned referring to earlier peplum productions such as Ben-Her
and Quo Vadis for visual guidance, which were also based on these pictures. The precise origin
of the information on ancient Rome that Scott used cannot be known considering how much
every film referenced others from the same genre and how much craft workers also borrowed
from images in other media. Meanwhile, by citing the French painter, the director, who had
attended art school where he likely learned of Gérôme, brought higher esteem to his films in a
similar way to how Vitagraph had promoted its Life of Moses film series ninety years earlier. By
2000, a pictorial reference to the artist might have become obscure with changes in visual
literacy, even as the cultural understanding of Rome partly created by Gérôme and dozens of
Hollywood films remained intact.
Peplum film images became “icons and clichés” of ancient Rome.
104
For this reason,
Scott did not have to see an image of a Gérôme painting to understand the time period; it was
already part of his knowledge of Rome from the pervasive media that had been previously
inspired by those images. When Stephen Bann argued that in Ben-Hur “the amphitheater [was]
constructed in clear analogy to Gérôme,” he was stating that the audience would necessarily be
familiar with the artist’s paintings and would have recognized director William Wyler’s allusion
to them because they were reproduced extensively and had circulated widely.
105
There was no
way of separating the film from its sources, including these French paintings; there remained an
important relationship between the painting, the screen image, and a construction of a specific

103
Alex Lewin, “Rome Wasn’t Filmed in a Day,” Premiere, May 2000, 44. Also see Marc Gotlieb, “Gérôme’s
Cinematic Imagination,” in Allan and Morton, Reconsidering Gérôme, 57, and Ivo Blom, “Quo vadis: From
Painting to Cinema and Everything in Between,” in Leonardo Quaresima and Laura Vichi, eds., The Tenth Muse:
Cinema and Other Arts (Udine, Italy, 2001), 281.
104
Blom 288.
105
Stephen Bann, Ways Around Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2007), 191.
155
sense of the past they created together.
The system of viewing and copying visual clichés in cinema and various print forms has
helped modern audiences develop an understanding of the world both on and off the Hollywood
screen. Whether the subject was the radioactive desert of New Mexico or ancient Rome, research
libraries found data in the form of visual media that circulated widely through the “Republic of
Images” that could help inform filmmakers and viewers about the look of the world. The
evolution in research work, from a search for older print media that would give direct
instructions to filmmakers and craft departments to an examination of massive amounts of visual
information including past films that could help inspire filmmakers in constructing spaces,
demonstrated how Hollywood studios were more concerned with offering viewers familiar
images rather than historically accurate ones.
By the mid-twentieth century Hollywood cinema itself became a major source of visual
understanding for later films. Twentieth-century filmmakers did not work like antiquarian theater
producers who were concerned with recreating the precise robes worn by eleventh century kings,
but worked like nineteenth-century painters who would rely on certain amounts of authentic data
gleaned from past sources to creatively interpret and present stories. As Hollywood studios
began to crumble under the expense of their traditional filmmaking processes at the end of the
1960s, producers, directors, writers, and craftworkers would rely more frequently on earlier films
for information about how to build new spaces. When the industry rebuilt itself in the early-
1970s, the visual and material culture of American cinema, which had been created over the
previous sixty years thanks to the picture collections of the studio research network, became
significant references for filmmakers, which the audience would also understand as reality.
156
Chapter Four—The Reconfiguration of Cinematic Knowledge:
From the Research Network to the Cinematic Image Archive, 1969-1974

In 1969, Kirk Kerkorian, a self-made Las Vegas hotelier, who claimed to have worked on one of
the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer backlots clearing rocks in the 1930s, purchased enough shares of the
once-great studio to take control of the firm’s board of directors and all of its assets.
1
He soon
appointed James T. Aubrey president, a veteran television executive who had come to be known
as “The Smiling Cobra” for aggressively cutting costs in his previous positions.
2
When
Kerkorian made his purchase, he believed the company would lose $25 million that year,
however it ultimately lost close to $35 million.
3
The numbers did not add up for the studio’s
survival without making significant changes. The difference of nearly 30 percent necessitated
Aubrey, with Kerkorian’s blessing, to make cuts even faster than planned. One of his first moves
was to cap film budgets at $2 million for each production, a fraction of what was normally spent
on films in the era.
4

MGM was not alone in losing money. By the end of the 1960s, most studios were in
economic trouble, spending more money on making films than they earned. One solution for
their difficulty was to cut overhead expenses across the board. Some studios decided to sell parts
of their real estate holdings, including their backlots and their ranches in the San Fernando
Valley, while others looked to cut costs in the production culture that had developed over the
previous fifty-five years. Among the first departments to face the budgetary axe at MGM was the
camera department, which Aubrey sold to the Panavision camera company in 1969. The studio

1
“Kerkorian Calendar,” Screen International, September 9, 1989.
2
Peter Bart, Fade Out: The Calamitous Final Days of MGM (New York: Morrow, 1990), 32.
3
“Aubrey Named M-G-M President, Kerkorian Moves in as Bronfman and Forces Lose Out,” The New York Times,
October 22, 1969 and Bart 38.
4
“MGM Plans 15-20 Pics: Aubrey—These Features For Here, Exclusive of Production Slate Elsewhere, Exec
Says,” The Hollywood Reporter, May 7, 1970.
157
would rent cameras for film productions going forward and would not employ the staff required
for transportation and service of such heavy equipment.
5
“Our philosophy is very simple,”
Aubrey explained to the press. “Anything we feel is not helpful to our prosperity we will dispose
of for the good and welfare of the company.”
6
Following this credo and his nickname, he
trimmed the full-time staff on the Culver City lot from the already-slim 450 employees to 250,
then closed the studio’s London office and sold its Borehamwood lot. He then closed the New
York business offices, sold its East Coast assets and real estate, and moved all its marketing,
legal, and production operations to the West Coast. All of these cuts and moves added up to a
savings of $12 million each year, or nearly 35 percent of the studio’s losses. “We don’t make
films for film’s sake; we make them to produce a profit,” Aubrey told reporters.
7
This invocation
of the studio’s iconic Latin motto, “Ars Gratia Artis,” or “art for art’s sake,” was particularly
ironic, considering the studio had always been in the business of attempting to make a profit—
and had done well at that for nearly fifty years.
In 1970, Alfred Hitchcock sardonically quipped that “The Sound of Music was very
possibly one of the worst things that ever happened to this business,” suggesting that the musical
had fooled studio executives throughout the industry into thinking they would always earn
massive profits for major spectacle films and musicals regardless of audience interest.
8
That film
cost Twentieth Century-Fox $8 million in 1965, which was a comparable budget to other
prestige films; it earned roughly $286 million worldwide, which was a jaw-droppingly massive

5
A.D. [Arthur] Murphy, “$20 Mil Tag on 118 MGM Acres—Camera Dept. Gear Going to Panavision,” Variety,
February 5, 1970.
6
“MGM Plans Two Films A Month—That Will be Minimum From The Studio; Details About Other Plans,” The
Hollywood Reporter, June 5, 1970.
7
Ibid.
8
Bob Rose, Chicago Daily News, “Who Killed King Hollywood?,” Press Sun-Bulletin [Binghamton, New York],
May 9, 1970.
158
return on such an investment.
9
The intersection of elevated production costs, a slightly lower
interest in movie-going that generated lower box office returns, smaller numbers of films
produced by each studio, and a large amount of costly legacy material, including backlots,
ranches, and departments with expensive equipment, led most studios into the red.
10
The new
cohort of Hollywood executives that came to run the industry from the late-1960s into the early-
1970s had little experience in the feature film industry and saw visual research libraries as
another costly overhead expense that produced work not clearly seen on screen. As a result,
many studios shut down these departments.
When examining their accounting books, the new owners realized the most financially
profitable part of their studios was the real estate on which their empires were built and the
libraries of old movies they had made during their many decades of filmmaking. Some studios
sold their backlots to real estate developers and tried to harness the value of their film libraries
through remakes, theatrical re-releases, and television rebroadcasts.
11
In the case of Kerkorian,
pivoting the high esteem of the studio’s brand to create a Hollywood-themed resort hotel was
another idea for transforming his new investment into a profitable project.
By the mid-1970s, MGM had sold all of the props and costumes that had been stored on
its stages and backlots, sold the land on which those films were made, opened one of the biggest
hotels in the world, and released a major compilation film that contained scenes from the studio’s
best musicals, all of which showed how in this new era of filmmaking, old movies themselves

9
Aubrey Solomon, Twentieth Century Fox: A Corporate and Financial History, (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow
Press, 1989), 254; also www.the-numbers.com/movies/1965/0SOMU.php, retrieved October 1, 2019).
10
Peter Bart explained how five of the seven majors were in the red, though he did not mention which ones
remained in the black. Still, systematic financial loss was not unusual in Hollywood at this time, and most of it came
from an outmoded model of filmmaking the studios would need to change. See Peter Bart, Fade Out: The
Calamitous Final Days of MGM (New York: William Morrow, 1990), 29.
11
For more on this, see Eric Hoyt, Hollywood Vault: Film Libraries before Home Video (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2014).
159
had largely replaced printed media in the minds of most viewers to become the visual archive
from which they understood the world. The hard work studios had invested in making movies
look believable made films an easy visual depiction for viewers to recall. Hollywood
memorabilia, which had been undervalued as junk by studio executives, reminded audiences of
the films they held dear and helped to prove that the images they saw on screen were real, even if
they had been fabricated with the help of visual research libraries. Just as Roland Barthes
explained “the object is the world’s human signature,” these costumes and props were proof of
the reality of past filmmaking.
12
Audiences saw the visual and material culture of Hollywood as
historical details of the actual world rather than as relics of artificial environments.
Viewers always knew that what they saw on screen were artificial reproductions or
inventions of spaces. The sets, costumes, and props were so believable, however, that viewers
could assume the living world looked like their cinematic depictions. Hollywood researcher
Lillian Michelson described this complex understanding of the relationship between reality and
artificiality in cinema. She explained that what the audience “look[ed] at on the screen [appeared
to be] reality, but we [knew] it’s a fantasy. So, [researchers were] giving [craft workers] reality,
that they were changing into fantasy, that was changing back into reality for the people in the
audience.”
13
Hollywood cinema became more self-aware and conscious of how the audience
could also see the production culture that made movies. Both moving images and the objects
within them transitioned from materials that appeared before viewers as verisimilar objects into
accurate details of the world. This reappraisal of the way these visual and material elements

12
Roland Barthes, “The Plates of the Encyclopedia,” [1964] in A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag, trans. Richard
Howard (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2009), 186.
13
Lillian Michelson interviewed in the documentary Harold and Lilian: A Hollywood Love Story, dir. David Raim,
Adama Films, Los Angeles, 2015.
160
functioned as purveyors of visual knowledge created an important shift in the way audiences
experienced movies and cinema culture.
The massive auction of the MGM’s props and costumes in 1970, the opening of its resort
hotel in Las Vegas in 1973, and the release of its compilation film That’s Entertainment! in 1974
showed how the studio was more than just a dream factory that made movies, but rather
functioned as a generator of a movie archive that contained significant visual depictions and
objects viewers understood as authentic history that they had personally witnessed. Once the
auction returned the cinematic fragments to the living world in the early-1970s, viewers
recontextualized them as artifacts from an historical place in time. As the industry changed in the
late-1960s and early-1970s and studios closed their picture libraries, Hollywood filmmaking
came to rely less directly on standard modes of visual research, shifting to examine the industry’s
past productions as visual and material sources of image-based information.

The Fabricated Cinematic Image Functions as Factual
By the mid-1970s, only Twentieth Century-Fox, Universal, and Disney maintained traditional
visual research departments with dramatically reduced roles. The other major and minor studios
including Paramount, Warner Bros., MGM—which could barely be considered a proper studio
anymore, having cut production dramatically—and RKO—which had gone out of business two
decades earlier—shut their libraries or donated them to outside caretakers. Independent research
companies took on the work of filling the visual research gap left by studios. Some of these
operations bought materials from the studios as they closed their libraries. Lillian Michelson,
who had previously worked as a researcher at the independent Samuel Goldwyn Studios library,
161
purchased that collection in 1969.
14
She ran it in a traditional manner on contract for independent
producers, including Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studio in Hollywood. Kellam DeForest
bought parts of the MGM and Paramount libraries and created the De Forrest Research company,
which was available to consult for any studio.
15
Warner Bros. gave their research materials to the
Burbank Public Library in 1975, where it was maintained as an independent department until the
end of the century.
16
In certain cases, the filmmakers themselves bought visual media from the
closing research libraries including George Lucas who purchased parts of the Paramount
collection and later that of Universal and Coppola purchased materials from RKO.
17
Because
executives always had trouble seeing the monetary value in these collections, through the 1970s
large portions of their materials were thrown into the trash, given away, sold, or simply lost
without record.
As a result of all of these changes, the network of studio libraries that had been built up
through the middle of the century was torn apart as the surviving libraries became increasingly
isolated and less interested in sharing their materials. With smaller staffs, each remaining
research department had to change their work, becoming more reactive and gathering images for
items specifically mentioned in scripts. Research evolved into a more decentralized work mode

14
Interview with Deborah Fine, November 26, 2018. Fine worked in the Paramount library for nearly a full year
before it was closed. For more, see Steven Bingen, Paramount: City of Dreams (Guilford, Conn.: Taylor Trade
Publishing, 2017), 233-236. In 1967, CBS television purchased the library of the Poverty Row studio Republic
Pictures along with its Radford Studio Center lot, however it is not clear what, if any, research the television
company did.
14

15
Stephen Farber, “Before the Cry of ‘Action!’ Comes the Painstaking Effort of Research,” New York Times, March
11, 1984. This article explains DeForest bought parts of the MGM research library, however it was unclear when
that occurred. It is likely that the materials stayed on the MGM lot through the 1970s considering they seem to have
been checked out for productions through the decade; presumably the studio only sold them in the early-1980s.
16
Paul Clinton, “City defends turnover of Warner Research Collection,” Burbank Ledger, August 26, 2000.
17
Interview with Margaret Ross, who worked for the Universal library from the 1970s through the 1990s, Mar 14,
2016. Universal sold its visual materials to George Lucas after its library closed in 2000. See Amy Wallace, “A
Collection Gets Shelved,” Los Angeles Times, March 5, 2000; and, Anahid Nazarian interviewed in the documentary
Harold and Lilian: A Hollywood Love Story, dir. David Raim, Adama Films, Los Angeles, 2015; and “Forerunner to
DreamWorks.”
162
frequently performed at the craft-department level for films set in historical eras or exotic
locations; research for films set in contemporary America was largely eliminated. In this new
idiom, costume designers or art directors would look independently and sometimes redundantly
for their respective sources, or they would hire outside researchers for this purpose. Just as
feature production had shifted away from the studio lot as the center of film production, so too
was a centralized research department mostly eliminated.
Many other changes occurred at this turning point in the early-1970s, as Hollywood films
became visibly self-aware with influential movies explicitly cited by filmmakers and audiences
more aware of those referential acts being pastiche. As J.D. Connor explained, in this period,
“the historical epic [said] to its model audience that all this […] has been expended for you, you
as the inheritor of millennia of history, you as the audience of this monumental motion
picture.”
18
Not only did audiences recognize that one movie cited another one, but also that they
were witnessing this visual discourse through the hall of mirrors that might distort their view of
the past. Seeing as studios in this “post-research-network” era knew viewers understood the
screen worlds through past experience with movies, it became easy to dramatically limit or
eliminate the gathering and curating of visual media in each library.
Even in altered forms, however, certain elements of traditional research continued at
several studios through the 1970s, sometimes through the reuse of cinematic images for the
creation of new ones. Researchers in Disney’s Animation Research Library (ARL), an internal
reference collection of visual materials created by studio artists, used sketches, backgrounds,
overlays, and cels from past productions for preparation on their films. Walt Disney himself
began saving these materials in the 1920s and the collection was formalized in the 1970s when it

18
J.D. Connor, The Studios after the Studios: Neoclassical Hollywood (1970-2010) (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 2015), 8.
163
also gained control over the traditional research department that had been on the studio for the
same amount of time .
19
Contemporary animators could look at images created by past animators
dating back to the 1930s to find inspiration for their current projects:
The historical importance of Animation Research is that, within its vast
catacombs of storage shelves, are stored original animation cels, background and
storyboards for our films dating back to pre-Snow White through to our most
current project, The Fox and the Hound […] Animation Research serves a very
real and timely purpose; one that is essential to our animations product […] Any
new member of the animation team […] may check out and study original art
from any of our animation films.
20

With the ARL, Disney turned inward, believing the archive could help animators know the
material culture of any setting in a film through the animation art created for past features and
shorts the studio had produced. Considering that the network of industry libraries had collapsed,
the Disney research department could no longer access media from other collections and had to
supplement the images found in traditional illustrated sources with materials from its own past
productions.
Many of the corporate and creative shifts in studios during the 1970s led to changes in
how studios related to their creative workers. Most notably, this new production ethos allowed
directors and screenwriters more independence to create films in a more personalized style, and
allowed many actors and other filmmakers the ability to write, produce, and direct their own
projects. In other words, Hollywood embraced and adjusted its production culture to fit the
“auteur” theory—the belief that certain directors working within the industrial structures of
Hollywood were able to creatively separate themselves from the hegemonic system and were
able to hold absolute control of a finished film to became fine artists with reliable styles, themes,

19
Interview with Sharon Mizuta, Archive Data Specialist for the ARL, and Jamie Pinetta, Collections Specialist for
the ARL, May 15, 2019.
20
“From ‘Snow White’ to ‘The Fox and the Hound”—Animation Research at Work,” Disney Newsreel 9, No. 51
(December 19, 1980): 1.
164
and strengths.
21
As one example, Francis Ford Coppola, a director who benefited from such
creative allowances, explained that an important difference between the old production system
and that of the 1970s was the embrace of writers and directors in studios and the emergence of a
general feeling that the studio had finally become a “hospitable place for creative people to
work.”
22

Perhaps the best way of understanding how these creative people—the so-called “New
Hollywood” generation of filmmakers—engaged with their work is through art history and
connoisseurship—a somewhat discredited form of simplified visual understanding in which a
viewer examines individual elements of a painting, such as the depiction and execution of an ear
or a hand, to figure out the identity of the artist—which entered filmmaking in the postwar era
and was amplified in this period.
23
This process of visual analysis examined individual details of
an art work so that “before the eyes of the connoisseur, paintings [would] fall into pieces.”
24

Such an investigation of art through the categorization of its elements brings to mind certain
practices of antiquarianism and also connects to modes of visual researchers in Hollywood. In
theory, a connoisseur could watch a movie and see the sources the craftworkers drew upon to
make a screen space. That is, they could see the visual research images that helped make a film.
This understanding of cinema as an art that could be endlessly disassembled and requoted
in later films had always appeared in Hollywood films but it was expanded in this period. The
cohort of young writers, directors, and producers who arrived in Hollywood in the 1960s from
film schools, including the University of Southern California, the University of California-Los

21
Jeff Menne, Post-Fordist Cinema Hollywood Auteurs and the Corporate Counterculture (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2019), 1-31.
22
William Murray, “Playboy Interview: Francis Ford Coppola,” in Francis Ford Coppola Interviews, ed. Lester
Friedman and Brent Notbohm (Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 37-38.
23
For more on the creative uses of connoisseurship for scholars, see Carlo Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock
Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method,” History Workshop Journal 9, no. 1 (Spring 1980): 5–36.
24
Jeremy Melius, “Connoisseurship, Painting, and Personhood,” Art History 34, no. 2 (April 2011), 294.
165
Angeles, the American Film Institute, and New York University took control of their productions
and imbued their films with many antiquarian elements from film history. These young
filmmakers, including Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, John Milius, and
Terence Malick had learned about the history of cinema from watching earlier movies before
reusing or evoking details from them in their later productions.
25

It was not only that these filmmakers were self-consciously engaging with earlier
cinematic productions, but they were breaking down those films to their component parts—
sometimes down to certain camera angles, color palettes, or lens effects—to reuse them in their
own work. Filmmakers were continuing the visual work previously done by fine artists and
cinema researchers as they referenced moments or individual elements from the visual world—
or, the cinematic world. A viewer of Malick’s film Badlands (1973) could recognize and believe
certain shots of the fated lovers driving while on the run from police (figure 4.1) that were
originally used by Nicholas Ray in his film They Live By Night (1948) (figure 4.2); similarly, a
viewer watching Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) would see the gangster Moe Green shot in the
eye (figure 4.3) and recognize the same event happening to a woman in Sergei Eisenstein’s The
Battleship Potemkin (1925) (figure 4.4). These quotations would function both as a reminder of
specific shots and films but also as a game-like fluency with older films. Not only were these
young directors seen as connoisseurs of classical cinema, but their own style also created a meta-
textual self-awareness that left clues to discerning connoisseur spectators about their influences.
One case in particular showed how much this mixing of the cinematic past with history

25
Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante, John Sayles, and James Cameron did not attend film school like the others, however
they were in the same age cohort as those who did. Furthermore, they worked with B-movie master Roger Corman
to make cheap exploitation films where they honed their artistry and technical abilities. Many of their films would
fall into classical genre categories—notably many suspense/horror and adventure films—possibly as a direct result
of their work with Corman. In many ways, his independent studio, American International Pictures, was comparable
to film school for this group of filmmakers.
166
helped filmmakers tell new stories. While working on the film Bound for Glory (1976), director
Hal Ashby hired an independent researcher to find visual sources about the early career of folk
singer Woody Guthrie. With the United Artists research department shut down by the time of the
film’s production, researcher Frederic Hill worked independently to find images to inspire
Ashby’s team of craftworkers. Hill later provided the filmmaker with an exhaustive list of the
resources he used, including visits to the Bettmann Archive, the picture collections of the New
York Public Library, the Library of Congress prints and photographs department, the Museum of
Modern Art, and many illustrated books containing photographs of the Great Depression. Hill
also looked to many moving picture collections for documentary footage of the 1930s, as well as
Hollywood movies for inspiration regarding the look of the era. He studied King Vidor’s Our
Daily Bread (1934), John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940), and two recently completed films,
Larry Buchanan’s A Bullet for Pretty Boy (1970) and Milius’ Dillinger (1973), both of which
were produced by independent studio American International Pictures (AIP).
26

Studio researchers had worked extensively to find pictures of indigent farmers in the
American West for the films of Vidor and Ford; it is not clear if AIP ever had a formal visual
research department as it was primarily focused on making inexpensive films to profit off a
teenage audience interested in monsters and sex. It seems more likely that Milius looked to
Howard Hawks’ film Scarface (1932) (figures 4.5) for inspiration on Dillinger (figure 4.6) than
to any photograph or clipping from an illustrated magazine. That three years later, Hal Ashby
and his team turned to these exploitation films for inspiration on the look of the early-1930s is

26
Bound for Glory—research, 12.f-119, Hal Ashby Collection, Margaret Herrick library, Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills (hereafter ‘AMPAS’). The researcher, Frederic Hill, was also involved in
shooting the documentary Woodstock (Michael Wadleigh, 1970) and a 1973 documentary by musician Neil Young.
His only other relevant credit was producing a tribute concert honoring Woody Guthrie at the Hollywood Bowl in
1970. It seems he had limited experience in formal research work; however, his work materials appear professional
and thorough.
167
significant. While Dillinger might not have been as thoroughly or traditionally researched with
still images, it looked correct because it looked like past films set in the early-1930s.
One source in particular that Hill used was a New York Times article about Dust Bowl
migrants from Oklahoma who settled in California in the mid-1930s.
27
The story ran along with
photographs of the aged Okies alongside a still from the film The Grapes of Wrath showing
Henry Fonda and Jane Darwell in the roles of Tom and Ma Joad (figure 4.7).
28
The newspaper’s
conflation of a film still and photographs of migrants in the Depression shows how by the mid-
1970s fictionalized Hollywood films were entirely part of the “Republic of Images” and many of
them had seemingly replaced documentary images shot in the period. Hollywood fantasy had
become a definitive source of the past for filmmakers, journalists, and newspaper readers alike,
which complicated efforts by writers to present stories without embellishment. By the mid-
1970s—and likely well before that—the hall of mirrors that Hollywood had created, in which
reality emerged from and was deformed by the repetition of visual elements in films, had spilled
out of the limited boundaries of Hollywood and into modern visual culture more generally. The
fabricated world of movies had become the same as the real world through the recycling of
familiar images. The fractured industry in which Hill produced this film was the result of many
different changes that had occurred in Hollywood over the previous decade, some of which
would fundamentally change the relationship between the audience and the screen image.

The Lot on the Block and a “Spectacular Grossness”
One of the most visible events that showed how Hollywood fantasy had truly become a

27
Bound for Glory—research, AMPAS.
28
Douglas E. Kneeland, “West Coast ‘Okies’ Recall Depression, Scoff at Recession,” New York Times, February
22, 1975.
168
substitute reality for viewers took place in 1970 when MGM sold its props and costumes in an
eighteen-day auction from May 3 to May 21. The massive tranches of land occupied by its back
lots, which totaled roughly 169 acres spread across six non-contiguous plots throughout Culver
City, were some of the studio’s most sellable assets.
29
The land included one lot on the west side
of Overland Avenue between Washington Boulevard and Culver Boulevard and four smaller lots
down Overland near its intersection with Jefferson Boulevard. By the late-1960s, the studio was
using these backlots less frequently because it was making fewer films and because there was an
industry-wide change in film aesthetics that called for the shooting of movies on location.
In order to sell the land, MGM first had to clear it of the tremendous amounts of stuff that
had accumulated over the previous 46 years. After production on each movie, costumes,
furniture, paintings, decorative arts, costumes, weapons, miniatures, plants, horse tack and
coaches, vintage cars, trucks, boats, a locomotive, a paddle-wheel steamer, and a few tanks were
put out for storage in the stages, and on railroad tracks, lakes, and fabricated neighborhoods.
Many of these costumes, props, and machines were reused in later productions, such as the
“Cotton Blossom” paddlewheel boat that was built on a lake on Lot 3 for the musical Show Boat
(1951) and later appeared in Desperate Search (1952), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(1960) and How the West Was Won (1962).
30
Most of these materials were never reused and the
effects of time and weather broke and aged most of them; the studio saw them as junk that
needed to be removed. MGM hired David Weisz, a specialist in auctioning the physical assets of
failed companies, to sell the objects that cluttered the property. Rather than MGM paying a
contractor to remove the contents of their lots, Weisz purchased them from the studio and agreed

29
A.D. [Arthur] Murphy, “Reveal Precise MGM Price Tags on Studio Parcels,” Variety, February 6, 1970.
30
Steven Bingen, Stephen X. Sylvester, and Michael Troyan, MGM: Hollywood’s Greatest Backlot (Solana Beach,
CA: Santa Monica Press, 2011), 245-48.
169
to hold an auction on site. The auction would take place in stages 15, 27, and 30, where The
Wizard of Oz and Singin’ In the Rain, among many others, had been shot.
In advance of the auction, there was almost no coverage of the event in the major trade
papers. The popular press covered the event either in a mournful way focusing on how it
represented an end of Old Hollywood, or as an optimistic, if anxious, look toward the future of
filmmaking. Almost no news accounts discussed what selling these items meant to the business
of filmmaking or how the auction marked an implicit acknowledgement of the changes in how
movies would be made by MGM and all other studios going forward. One article reported that
the studio “expect[ed] professional antique dealers, other studios, and costuming houses to
provide the most spirited bidding.” Contextualizing the sale as an efficient business measure, it
predicted “MGM pictures will be made with some of the props it is selling, returned to the lot on
a rental basis.”
31

Several weeks later, a trade press story reported Weisz paid $1.4 million for the contents
of the blacklots.
32
The article seemed concerned that by acting too quickly, the studio had left
money on the table, based on the $5 million the auctioneer reportedly expected to make. It
explained how the sale of costumes and props “is likened to some early television deals by major
studios under which they sold outright their feature backlog to television. Later deals proved the
wisdom of leasing or renting the features to the then new medium [...t]he difference between
$1.4 million and 80 per cent of $5 million or more is considerable”
33
In other words, the story

31
Vernon Scott, United Press International, “MGM Auctions Properties—Once Largest Film Studio Selling Most of
Heritage,” The Weirton Daily Times [West Virginia], March 12, 1970.
32
Vance King, “$1.4 Million to MGM on Sale of Props etc.; Auctioneer Expected to Take Over $5Mil.,” FilmTV
Daily, May 8, 1970. Weisz only purchased the contents of the material contents of the backlots and stages, which
contained vehicles, props, costumes, and other large industrial equipment like spotlights and cranes. The contents of
the research library were not sold at this time and remained on the lot for several more years until some of the
materials were sold to the Kellam DeForest Research Company in the late-1970s. See Farber, “Before the Cry of
‘Action!’.”
33
Ibid.
170
argued that if MGM had sold the contents of the backlot on commission with Weisz taking a
standard twenty percent commission, the studio could have made $4 million more.
Judging by the profitability of the auction, a commission deal could have been more
profitable for the studio, however this was not the position of management. They held no
nostalgic feelings for the items and certainly saw no value connected to such sentiments. They
simply viewed the sum total of costumes, trucks, boats, and props, as vestiges of a bygone age of
film production that needed to be hauled away so they could sell the backlots as land for real
estate developers. The studio expected the only parties interested in buying old props and
costumes would be other Hollywood studios and antique dealers who would reuse them as props
or resell them as expensive, functional furniture. Considering this, MGM executives were happy
to let Weisz pay them to get rid of their junk.
As the auction approached, journalists covered it by focusing on elements that readers
might find interesting, including celebrity sightings and lists of items that would be sold. Most
articles never mentioned the complicated business elements of the event nor what it meant to the
greater film industry. One story gave a list of some of the more special items going to sale, as if
it were detailing the exotic animals in a zoo, including Dorothy’s ruby slippers, uniforms from
every Major League Baseball team, and Ben-Hur’s chariot.
34
A piece by syndicated
entertainment columnist Shirley Eder expressed concern that props and costumes would be
permanently separated from the actors who wore and used them on screen, and lobbied for Judy
Garland’s blue gingham dress to be given to her children.
35
This was one of the first times the
sale was connected to the audience’s memories and nostalgia for the past. Most articles that

34
Michael Kernan, Los Angeles Times-Washington Post Wire Service, “Swinger’s Bargain: Tarzan’s Loincloth,”
The Boston Globe, April 17, 1970.
35
Shirley Eder, “MGM Auction Site Tour Brings Back Memories,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, April 17, 1970.
171
followed this would touch on both the business and sentimental aspects of the auction.
Two weeks before the auction, the American Institute of Interior Designers hosted a
black-tie fundraiser at the auction preview exhibition to raise money for repairs to the California
governor’s mansion in Sacramento—an office then held by former Warner Bros. star Ronald
Reagan. Long-time MGM director Mervyn LeRoy was interviewed at the event, quipping, “[you
k]now what MGM stands for? Many Gone Memories.” Others were less sad about the event,
with actor Joseph Cotton explaining matter-of-factly, “I’ve seen a few chairs and sofas and
things I’ve sat on,” and actress Irene Dunne saying, “I don’t feel [sad] about it. I think the
furniture I’ve seen represents ages gone by, and we must live in the present.”
36
Neither Cotton
nor Dunne had made many movies at the studio, while LeRoy spent most of his career there.
Clearly many studio alumni felt melancholic over the perceived fracturing of their own
filmographies and biographies. More than simply a metaphor for the loss of a bygone era, the
auction meant these items would be permanently unavailable to them, as Eder had lamented.
While these actors would never visit these objects in storage, on a psychological level they had
known where to find them.
Weisz arranged to have three thousand seats set up for the audience—a major change
from a standard auction that might only sell to a few dozen buyers at most; it took place on three
sound stages on three different backlots. Each day was dedicated to a thematic type of object,
such as furniture, costumes, swords and armor, cars, and costumes with roughly six hundred
items sold each session. Aside from the general furniture and props, including tables, chairs,
sofas, and chandeliers, there were five separate catalogs dedicated to “Star Wardrobe,”

36
Gene Handsaker, Associate Press, “MGM Auction Previewed; Funds to Build Mansion,” Tucson Daily Citizen,
April 23, 1970; Gene Handsaker, “MGM Auction Previewed; Funds to Build Mansion,” Lancaster New Era, April
23, 1970
172
“Miniatures, Weaponry, Vintage Cars,” and then larger items that came from Lots 2, 3, and 5.
The catalogs pictured only a handful of the items and most items featured simple titles with brief
descriptions, such as “Stool,” or “Two Matching Urns, gilded, on square plinths (Ninotchka
1939).”
37
Such modest illustrating and scant descriptions was typical for auctions of the period;
that Weisz did not include more images or more specific titles suggests he was trying to cut
certain costs and that he did not appreciate how significant this auction or its catalog would be.
Weisz did spend money on 11,855 color slides, which would create a spectacle for the
attendees to watch as they displayed each item for potential buyers.
38
While it is now standard to
project pictures of each piece being sold during major auctions, that practice was less common in
that era—especially in the context of a sale with so many items being sold. The expense of
photographing the items would have been enormous, likely costing tens of thousands of dollars
and hundreds of hours of work. Weisz had the mind of an entertainment entrepreneur, beyond
that of a shrewd businessman, and he knew that if the auction spectators could see the items
being sold, they would potentially bid and make the multi-week auction more engaging. The
simple fact that the press reported on this mundane operational—likely the result of his providing
promotional information to journalists—shows how Weisz was marketing the auction as a
spectacle, as much as a place to buy old props and costumes.
Weisz himself managed the catalog and expertise for the furniture and larger set items
including the vehicles, many of which frequently appeared in his industrial auctions. For the
costumes, he hired Kent Warner, a man obsessed with classical Hollywood, who had worked in

37
MGM Auction catalogs, David Weisz Auctions, May 3-May 21, 1970.
38
Bob Thomas, Associated Press, “Auction at MGM Studio Scheduled to Being Sunday,” St. Joseph News-Press,
May 1, 1970.
173
several studio costume departments and knew enough to organize a catalogue of the materials.
39

Fewer than half the items sold were linked to specific films, and only then because labels
indicating productions remained attached to them. Weisz made almost no effort to tie objects to
specific films, which could have potentially helped increase their sale prices. Considering most
props were used and reused for many productions, many labels were lost long before 1970.
Television news covered the sale as a silly Hollywood event that betrayed a serious
change in the film business. On NBC, David Brinkley introduced a report on the auction by
wryly painting the history of the film industry as a world that occasionally ran in a different
direction from the rest of the country. He explained how the studio was selling the items because
it was looking to raise money:
Back in the ‘30s people went to the movies a lot because they didn’t have to go to
work a lot because they were unemployed. And so, MGM, and Paramount, and
Twentieth Century, and Warners, and so on had a lot of money when nobody else
did. […] Now the situation is reversed and a lot of people have money but the
movie studios don’t, and so MGM has begun an auction of a warehouse full of
props.
40

Frank Bourgholtzer, who reported the story, continued in this cynical way, commenting that:
MGM’s new streamlined management is in great pain over the images created by
the auction at which some 20,000 old costumes, models, items of furniture,
chariots, tanks are being sold to the highest bidder. They’ve inadvertently given
the impression that MGM itself is being sold piece by piece.
41

It was true, of course, that the studio was being sold for parts; however, their position was that
this was being done out of a position of strength and that the cuts and the auction would make it

39
Rhys Thomas, The Ruby Slippers of Oz (Los Angeles: Time Weaver, 1989), 33-37 and 77-97. Aside from helping
to organize the “Star Wardrobe” section of the auction, Warner also stole many costumes and shoes he would later
sell privately, including several pairs of ruby slippers and a few blue gingham dresses that had been made for and
used in The Wizard of Oz.
40
David Brinkley and Frank Bourgholtzer, “Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer, Inc. / Auction,” The Huntley-Brinkley Report,
May 4, 1970.
41
Ibid.
174
easier to earn profits. Such a company line was as trustworthy as any exploitation department
marketing line, and many reporters saw it as unbelievable.
ABC News reporter Dick Shoemaker took a more intense tone, explaining how MGM
was selling “genuine make-believe pieces of Americana” in order to be able to keep making
movies, and that, aside from the financial straits the studio was in, these props and costumes had
to be sold because audiences “no longer believe in the make-believe.”
42
In this line, he dismissed
nearly fifty years of filmmaking on the MGM lot, which rarely looked like the real world, but
was always understood as reality. This bitter feeling also likely related to the fact it was the last
report on a news program in April of 1970. That night’s news report featured difficult and
bloody news from Vietnam, as well as other political domestic troubles. The fact that the make-
believe world of Hollywood no longer connected with an audience who had endured the horrors
of the past three decades of turmoil was a particularly incisive realization. In the context of a
news show, the presentation of an inoperable paddle-wheel boat that was built as a simulacra for
a lost era of gentility and peace seemed bizarre and worthy of derision and dismissal.
Once the auction began on May 3, early reports were enthusiastic. Between three
thousand and five thousand attendees payed $100 for admission on the first day, the price of
which was refunded to those who actively bid on items.
43
Most stories listed the stars in the
audience and explained how they were bidding on props and costumes from the famous films
they had been in. Rock Hudson, Nannette Fabry, Shirley Jones, Stephen Boyd, Walter Pidgeon,
Barbara Stanwyk, and Mickey Rooney all attended the sale. Such gossip-style reports made the

42
Dick Shoemaker, “Hollywood / Prop Auction,” ABC News with Frank Reynolds, April 23, 1970.
43
Gene Handsaker, Associated Press, “MGM Auctions Everything But Leo,” The Daily Journal [Vineland, N.J.],
May 4, 1970; Dial Torgerson, “Dreams Auctioned—Props Become Stars in MGM ‘Spectacular,’” Los Angeles
Times, May 4, 1970; Reuters, “MGM Auction Starts—Stars Big for Memories,” The Gazette [Montreal], May 4,
1970; Harold Heffernan, North American Newspaper Alliance, “Texas Movie Fan Stocking Up at MGM Auction,”
Indianapolis Star, May 21, 1970.
175
stories from Culver City more about the private lives of the stars than the grave financial
situation that had created the need for the auction. For many journalists, this event was not
dissimilar from other spectacles that involved stars off the screen, like award shows or the
charity events. This was an event where you could go and see celebrities, antique furniture
dealers, and film fans overpaying for items that appeared to most to be old junk. The notion that
these items had value because they were in movies was nearly impossible for the studio, the
press, and many gawkers to comprehend.
Debbie Reynolds was one star singled out for her active bidding from the beginning of
the auction. She had spent much of her career to that point under contract at MGM becoming a
beloved star with roles in Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964).
Before the auction she had wanted to buy Lot 2 from MGM to create a movie-themed
amusement park, like Disneyland or what talent agency MCA had done with Universal Studios.
44

She was able to secure a $5 million loan from Citibank for the project, but the studio would not
accept her offer, as it was hoping to sell the 37.5-acre lot for $7 million.
45
She ultimately got a
$180,000 loan from City National Bank to buy pieces in the auction for a future museum.
46

Reynolds was interested in telling a nostalgic history of Hollywood by gripping visitors with
nostalgia connected to their positive associations with the studio’s movies. She later explained
that many of the press and fellow bidders at the auction and others in Hollywood who could have
helped her create a movie-themed amusement park or a museum unfortunately viewed her as a

44
Beginning in 1964, Universal Pictures, which was then a subsidiary of MCA (originally founded as the Music
Corporation of America) under the leadership of Lew Waserman, charged visitors to ride in a tram around the studio
and its backlots. The space for the production of films would become an amusement park with the theme of the
studio’s many productions. For more, see Jane Applegate, “The History of MCA,” Los Angeles Times, November
27, 1990.
45
Reynolds, Unsinkable, 67; and, A.D. [Arthur] Murphy, “Reveal Precise MGM Price Tags on Studio Parcels,”
Variety, February 6, 1970.
46
Debbie Reynolds and David Patrick Columbia, Debbie: My Life (New York: William Morrow, 1988), 311. In
2020, that $180,000 is equal to roughly $1.2 million according to usinflationcalculator.com.
176
“fanatic collector of kitsch.”
47
She saw something that most of them did not see, however, which
was the way movies created reality and how, just as a history museum could teach visitors about
past events in the world, an exhibition or immersive movie experience could reteach the
audience about the many visual details they had previously learned cinematically.
Shirley Eder explained that “watching Debbie at the auction was a show in itself. She
arrived each day with a thermos bottle filled with tea or lemonade, wax-paper-wrapped
sandwiches from home and two pillows” to put on the seat of the uncomfortable chair.
48
While
Reynolds was quite serious in her efforts, the press generally reported on her bidding and buying
as eccentric or silly—likely because they did not yet see the value in Hollywood memorabilia or
her vision of the need for a Hollywood museum. Somewhat surprisingly to those paying
attention to the auction, she did not bid on the ruby slippers offered in the “Star Wardrobe”
section, claiming she did not trust they were the authentic ones worn by Judy Garland
considering they were the wrong size. She would later buy a different pair of sequins shoes in a
private transaction.
49
The pair that sold in the auction went for $15,000 to a private collector, an
enormous amount that was also the highest price paid for any item in the eighteen-day sale.
50
It
seemed that even in a space of Hollywood realism, and much like a holy relic, the question about
whether the shoes were actually worn by Garland was a significant factor for bidders.
Articles continued to note celebrity sightings throughout the auction. In one gossip
column in The Hollywood Reporter, William Tusher wrote that Liza Minnelli, the daughter of
Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli, had hired a proxy to bid on her behalf for the ruby slippers,
which she did not ultimately purchase. The column also explained Minnelli would arrive in Los

47
Reynolds, Debbie: My Life, 311.
48
Shirley Eder, “Were Those Really Judy’s Shoes?,” Detroit Free Press, May 17, 1970.
49
Thomas 138-140.
50
Ibid 40.
177
Angeles on May 25, after the conclusion of the auction, to prepare for an upcoming television
special that would air on NBC at the end of June.
51
That show was simply called Liza and
included a medley of songs that took place in a set designed to look like the MGM auction. In it,
British actor-singer-songwriter Anthony Newley walked around the old objects of the sale with
Minnelli and the “impishly out of place” actor Michael J. Pollard picking up fantasy props and
singing musical numbers they inspired.
52
In one press still, Newley opened an umbrella as he
sang “Singin’ in the Rain,” while Minnelli and Pollard stood in front of a gown on a hanger, a
Victorian hall mirror, and an ornamental column—all items that could have been purchased in
the auction (figure 4.8).
53
So important had the auction become to the popular culture of 1970
that it was an element of a television show made mere days after its conclusion.
54

By the middle of the auction, MGM was more direct about the troublesome business
environment in which it was working. One article quoted studio publicist William Golden
saying:
When Ramon Novarro was winning the first chariot race in Ben-Hur, this studio
was surrounded as far as the eye could see by grass and sagebrush. People thought
it was a long drive from metropolitan Los Angeles to get out here. […] We cannot
afford to keep those backlots. Movies have to be mobile now […] And none of
them will need Esther Williams’ swimming pool, or Jean Harlow’s white dressing

51
William Tusher, “Coast to Coast,” The Hollywood Reporter, May 11, 1970.
52
Sue Cameron, “Television Reviews—LIZA,” The Hollywood Reporter, June 30, 1970.
53
Cecil Smith, “TV Review: Show’s Commercials Compete with Liza,” Los Angeles Times, June 30, 1970.
54
The show has been almost entirely forgotten in the history of television and Liza Minnelli, likely because it was
such a failure of imagination and execution. Reviews were enthusiastic about Minnelli; however, they all mentioned
how lifeless and uninspired the overall event was. One Minnelli biographer described it only in passing and in
negative terms as a “disappointing” production that “lacked focus,” compared to her subsequent special, Liza with a
Z, helmed by Bob Fosse (George Mair, Under the Rainbow: The Real Liza Minnelli [New York: Carol Publishing
Group, 1996], 134). In discussing that later television performance, Fosse biographer Sam Wasson ignored the
earlier special, simply writing that Fosse decided he couldn’t make a “canned, airless” show, but had to present her
on stage where she was more natural—possibly a jab at this special (Sam Wasson, Fosse [New York: Haughton
Mifflin Harcourt, 2013], 276). It is worth mentioning that at the time of this writing, footage of the show is
impossible to find at any television or film archive, including the two locations of the Paley Center for Media in Los
Angeles and New York, the New York Public Library’s Theater on Film and Tape Archive, the UCLA Film and
Television Archive, and internet media platforms including YouTube and archive.org. It is possible it was not saved
because it was such a poor production.
178
room, or the satin evening gowns from The Gay Divorcee.
55

This aggressive “get-over-the-past” attitude emerged from the sense that in order to survive in
the new era of Hollywood, fundamental elements of production would have to change. Golden
expressed deeper sentiments for the event of the auction, explaining, “in a way we are baring the
soul of our motion picture history.” This was true, in a sense, just as the material culture of any
institution or society would expose the core of that group of people. He believed that Hollywood
was more than the sum of its parts and that the price paid for the ruby slippers was irrelevant
because the soul of movies was what emerged in front of viewers on the screen. Many articles
confirmed this point by explaining how buyers connected with movies as they bought items as
souvenirs; for such collectors, old films connected to their souls and these props and costumes
helped reify those feelings.
56

The auction marked the first time the objects that had appeared in Hollywood’s great
films of the past were truly recognized as valuable elements of nostalgia beyond their practical
uses on screen. It signaled the origin of Hollywood memorabilia as a collecting category of
interest.
57
With the auction placing those three-dimensional items in the hands of the audience, it
showed how “concrete material artifacts played (and continue to play) a key role in shaping what
Hollywood is and what it means.”
58
These objects performed a similar service to Old Hollywood
that antiquarians had done for ancient Rome. Movie viewers could finally see how different

55
Peter Brown, Copley News Service, “Studio is selling its Memories,” The Press Democrat [Santa Rosa,
California], May 17, 1970.
56
See Torgerson, “Dreams Auctioned;” Bettelou Peterson, “Garbo’s Gown, Judy’s Slippers: Nostalgia for Sale at
the MGM Auction,” Detroit Free Press, May 10, 1970; Hank Grant, “Rambling Reporter,” Hollywood Reporter,
May 13, 1970; Steve Kline, “Culver City to Bid on ‘Wizard of Oz’ Slippers,” Los Angeles Times, May 14, 1970.
57
Twentieth Century-Fox held a smaller but similar auction the following year with international auction house
Sotheby’s. That auction was specifically called “Movie Memorabilia.” See Sotheby-Parke-Burnet Los Angeles,
“Movie Memorabilia” auction catalog, February 25-28, 1971.
58
Alison Trope, Stardust Monuments: The Saving and Selling of Hollywood (Hanover, N.H: Dartmouth College
Press, 2011), 2.
179
costumes or props looked when removed from movies; buyers connect not only with the finished
films they loved but with the production culture that found or made those objects. This auction
fractured the world built on the studio lot and returned each item to the individual states they had
been as images.
For many film fans the auction was a confirmation of their own love of the high
production values that made the amazing spectacles of old movies. Aside from all its other
qualities, Hollywood cinema functioned as a showplace for collections of objects. As Vivian
Sobchack has explained, the popularity of such objects with viewers, and the fascination with
screen history have similar origins considering both “the stuff of history and the stuff of moving
images seem unstuck in time and space.[…They] intermingle and effluvially layer themselves in
our representations and our cultural and collective memory and historical consciousness.”
59

Movie memorabilia mixed with historical events in viewers’ minds and reminded them of the old
movies they loved, returning them to a communal sense of being caught up in a fantasy with
other members of the audience.
Furthermore, these objects reminded viewers of a pastness of film production. Old props
and costumes of classical movies brought a nostalgia for the feeling and production culture of
Old Hollywood to film fans—a sense of “they don’t make ’em like they used to”—which was
something on which many in the press at the time of the MGM auction remarked. Considering
how cinema represented an “eternal present,” and how movie viewers believed what they saw as
happening at the time they saw it, the fact these objects seemed old reminded viewers that these
images were made in the past.
60
Much like the moment in time that confronted Roland Barthes as

59
Vivian Sobchack, “What Is Film History? Or, the Riddle of the Sphinxes,” Spectator 20, no. 1 (Fall -Winter 2000
1999): 17.
60
For more on the eternal presentness of cinema, see André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,”
trans. Hugh Gray, Film Quarterly 13, no. 4 (Summer 1960): 8. For an analysis of this topic, see Vanessa R.
180
he looked at a photograph, which he described as “a pose” that was “swept away and denied by
the continuous series of images,” these props and costumes emerged into the physical world as
stabile objects arresting the cinematic image as they entered present-day space and showed their
age.
61
Such objects represented “events whose materiality escaped us, events that thereby exit
only through invention of narrative.”
62
That is, following Barthes’ argument about photographs,
these objects were posed items denied an escape from time and were unlike cinema that showed
events only passing a lens as they move and maintain their temporal freedom. As such, when
these objects returned to a three-dimensional context in space after the auction, they retained the
mark of the moment when they were used in movies. Sobchack has called these items “fossils,”
which were “not about the future; [their] value is presently invested in the past.”
63
The objects
that reemerged into the world at the auction authenticated the film world as a space of reality,
regardless of its fabricated nature and inauthentic origins.
The response to the auction by film viewers excited to possess these physical elements
was surprising to everyone including Weisz. While exact figures were never published, it can be
estimated the auction made more than $5 million, which was an excellent return on the $1.4
million initial investment.
64
There seemed to be an endless supply of costumes and props to sell
even after the eighteen-day auction, and there remained a continuing interest for them from
buyers. Weisz quickly arranged for another auction on June 19 that included more props,

Schwartz, “Film and History,” in The Sage Handbook of Film Studies, ed. James Donald and Michael Renov
(Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE, 2008), 199–215.
61
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography [1979] (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2010), 78.
62
Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham,
N.C: Duke University Press, 1993), 135.
63
Vivian Sobchack, “Chasing the Maltese Falcon: On the Fabrications of a Film Prop,” Journal of Visual Culture 6,
no. 2 (August 1, 2007): 238.
64
Following the auction there were no sale totals published in the press, however if one estimates the average sale
price of $500, the auction would have earned roughly $5.5 million.
181
costumes, and ephemera.
65
Considering how much had already been sold, much of what was
offered in this sale was seen as being of a second-rate quality and was described by one writer as
“a glorified junk sale.”
66
Richard Carroll, who was Weisz’s son-in-law and operated a designer
fashion boutique in Beverly Hills, set up a retail shop in one of the studio’s sound stages for the
remainder of the summer where he sold more costumes. He referred to it as a “hippie sale,”
referring to the young people who would be the most enthusiastic buyers of the items all priced
at one dollar.
67
Considering the low quality of items being sold and the suggestion most of the
buyers were looking for a deal, it is clear that most of the purchases in that store related to their
low prices rather than anything the shoppers saw on screen. Once all these auctions and shops
were over and closed, Weisz returned the remaining costumes and props to the studio, who later
sold them in the gift shop of the Las Vegas hotel it would open at the end of 1973.
68

There were nearly as many reasons for purchasing items from the auction as there were
individual buyers, from sentimental attachments to the objects that had appeared on screen to
experts who saw potential resale profit in undervalued furniture and objects. One set of
purchases followed MGM’s pre-auction belief that filmmakers would want to purchase items for
their films. Production designer Leon Ericksen purchased several costumes originally made for
MGM’s melodrama The Good Earth (1937) while preparing Robert Altman’s revisionist western
McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) at Warner Bros. The yellow-face adaptation of Pearl S. Buck’s
1931 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, starring Paul Muni and Louise Rainer as peasant farmers in
early-twentieth-century China, had received thorough and careful research on its costumes and

65
Joyce Haber, Los Angeles Times Wire Service, “Another MGM auction this month,” Arizona Republic, June 16,
1970.
66
Aljean Harmetz, The Making of the Wizard of Oz [1977](Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2013 edition), 303;
Thomas, 160.
67
Haber, June 16, 1970.
68
Aljean Harmetz, “Film History Being Lost By Oversight and Plan,” New York Times, March 24, 1987.
182
sets as a result of its prestige status. The costumes were “authentic all right, […],” Ericksen
explained to the press. “They looked old and aged enough to be just right for our picture.”
69

From this quotation, it seems that he conflated the age of the physical costumes with the age of
the setting of the film, which were not actually that far apart and was ultimately the goal of
filmmakers in the 1930s and the 1970s. The realism of the old costumes even made this film
worker believe in the truthfulness of the inauthentic items he purchased in auction.
To make matters even more unusual, the Chinese characters in McCabe could have
emigrated from a similar region of their native country in a similar time period as the characters
in The Good Earth. He explained his good luck finding the costumes, remarking that they
“looked old and aged enough to be just right our picture,” as a result of being stored in a
warehouse for three decades.
70
On screen these costumes appeared authentic both because they
were tattered and worn, but also because they might have reminded viewers of the costumes in
The Good Earth—considering they were those very items. For filmmakers and audiences,
familiarity with image culture, whether printed on paper or projected on a screen, was always the
most important element of believability.
One important element of this story was the fact that Ericksen worked as a production
designer on McCabe for which he supervised the look of the film including costumes and sets.
After the position was originated in 1939 for the creative-managerial work of William Cameron
Menzies, who oversaw the visual style of Gone with the Wind, most studios avoided using such a
thematic controller. Ericksen’s work on McCabe showed how by the early-1970s, some
Hollywood productions began to reintroduce the job into the filmmaking process. The rise of

69
Thomas Blakley, “‘Presbyterian Church Wager’ Offers Odds for Realism,” The Pittsburgh Press, March 22,
1971. The film was originally called The Presbyterian Church Wager until late in the production process.
70
Ibid.
183
these managers in this era would ultimately make it easier for studios to eliminate their research
departments who had previously curated a single look for the film setting through their careful
sorting and distribution of visual media in research bibles.
Beyond reuse in new movies, other auction buyers placed the costumes and props they
purchased into a wide array of museums and exhibitions. One such purchaser was the Musée du
Cinéma—Henri Langlois, which would open in Paris in 1972. The museum bought a dress worn
by Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind, a dress worn by Elizabeth Taylor in Little Women
(1949), and a costume worn by the eponymous character in Billy the Kid (1930).
71
Langlois, who
had co-created the Cinémathèque Française in 1936, had a pedagogic goal for his collection,
hoping to create a space where visitors could walk through the physical objects from cinema
history, including props, costumes, sets, and proto-cinematic media such as stereograms and
zoetropes, to learn about film history and culture. While nostalgia was inevitable in such a
setting, this collection was different from many of the period as it was meant to be a museum of
the science of filmmaking rather than a walk down memory lane.
72

Other buyers also put their purchases into other sorts of middle- and low-brow
exhibitions. Martin Libuser, a Los Angeles retailer of discount appliances and housewares, spent
more than $50,000 on objects he put on traveling exhibition at county and state fairs across the

71
Invoice and delivery papers of items purchased in the MGM auction to the Cinémathèque Française, 32-f.649,
Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer, 1970, Curtis Harrington papers, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts
and Sciences, Beverly Hills. Curtis Harrington was a Los Angeles-based filmmaker who became known as a
collector of costumes, props, and prints of classical Hollywood movies and bid in the auction for Henri Langlois of
the Cinémathèque Française, whom he had known since the early-1950s. Several years later, Diana Vreeland asked
Harrington if the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art could borrow several other dresses he had
purchased in the auction for her exhibition “Romantic and Glamorous Hollywood Design” (1974) (f.522, V
miscellaneous, Curtis Harrington papers, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,
Beverly Hills). Coincidentally, only weeks after the auction, Harrington began filming the schlocky thriller What’s
the Matter with Helen?, which co-starred Debbie Reynolds, whom he had first met at the auction.
72
For more on the Musée du Cinéma—Henri Langlois, see Thierry Lefebvre, Guide Du Musée Du Cinema Henri
Langlois (Paris: Maeght Editeur Editions, 1995) and the documentary Henri Langlois: Phantom of the
Cinémathèque, dir. Jacques Richard. Les Films Élémentaires, Paris, 2004.
184
country.
73
The creators of the Worlds of Fun theme park in Kansas City, which featured five
different regions of the world borrowed from the narrative of Jules Verne’s novel Around the
World in Eighty Days, purchased the Cotton Blossom paddle wheel boat to be a major attraction
in the park. In another case, investors for the Land of Oz theme park in North Carolina bought
many costumes and smaller props from The Wizard of Oz (1939) to be used by performers and to
decorate sets for its stage.
74

One of the most significant examples of incorporating individual items from the auction
into an exhibition or museum of the material culture of Hollywood were the many efforts of
Debbie Reynolds to make such a space for film fans to enjoy their memories of old movies.
After failing to find investors interested in supporting a museum of cinematic nostalgia in
Hollywood, Reynolds spent two decades finding the proper location and context for her auction
purchases. She ultimately bought a hotel off the Las Vegas Strip in 1993 where she displayed her
large collection, what she called her “dream come true.”
75
Her eccentric space appeared to
visitors as quite different in its presentation from Langlois’ high-brow intellectual museum.
76

After the hotel closed in 1999, due to cost overruns, she made an effort to build another hotel and
museum in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, home of Dolly Parton’s Dollywood theme park. This
second effort also fell apart, so she ended up auctioning most of her collection in 2011 and 2014,
with a final, posthumous sale in 2017.
77

73
“Plan Traveling Show from MGM Props, ‘Pic Memories,’” The Hollywood Reporter, June 26, 1970.
74
Interview with Blake Lamar, November 16, 2014. Lamar was a Los Angeles-based pilot whose wife worked as a
choreographer for the Oz park. Once its owners realized he could attend the auction, they hired him to bid on items
for them.
75
Reynolds, Unsinkable, 73.
76
Top Cameraman, “DEBBIE REYNOLD'S HOLLYWOOD MOVIE MUSEUM LAS VEGAS JAN 1993” [sic],
filmed January, 1993, 6:34, accessed May 5, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP2GSSK03kw.
77
Hilary Weaver, “Debbie Reynolds Protected and Preserved Hollywood’s Most Precious Relics,” Vanity Fair,
December 29, 2016; and Adam Gabbat, “Carrie Fisher’s and Debbie Reynolds’ Hollywood Memorabilia to be
Auctioned,” The Guardian, June 1, 2017.
185
A common difficulty each of these exhibits and museums had was that they were not like
Universal Studios or Disneyland, considering they were not embodied experiences where visitors
felt like they were part of the world of movie making through a ride or a colorful set. The curated
experiences these auction buyers created were limited in how much the audience would see
themselves inside the cinema fantasy. As these objects highlighted the pastness of movies, they
made it difficult for viewers to relate to them in their present. The question for visitors was not
whether they were concerned about the authenticity of the objects but the gap between those
material elements and their experiences walking through the shows.
Following the auctions of the studio’s material history, MGM began selling its backlots
to real estate developers.
78
In October, it sold Lot 3, at the southeast corner of Jefferson
Boulevard and Overland Avenue for $7.25 million to Levitt & Sons, the East Coast residential
development behemoth who created the Levittown planned communities.
79
The remaining four
backlots were subsequently sold over the next two years to Levitt and another shopping mall
developer for an estimated $28 million.
80
“We’re in the real estate business now,” Aubrey wryly
told Debbie Reynolds.
81
This was certainly true considering the studio had made more than $35
million in land sales in a short time, but also because it was about to embark on something
entirely unprecedented in Hollywood—or outside of Hollywood, as it turned out.
Kirk Kerkorian’s MGM Grand Hotel, which was named for the studio’s 1932 prestige

78
Robert W. Welkos, “Frankly My Dear, It’s All Gone: Most of MGM’s Fabled Heritage Has Benn Sold Off or
Can’t Be Found,” Los Angeles Times, January 13, 1994.
79
“1
st
MGM Backlot Land Sale—68 Acres Bring $7 ¼ Mil, Will Be Developed into Luxury Apartment Complex,”
Variety, October 1, 1970. Once Levitt & Sons was announced as the purchaser of Lot 3, the studio’s rejection of
Debbie Reynolds’ offer of $5 million for Lot 2 earlier in the year made more sense. Not only was her offer almost
30 per cent lower than it had wanted, but selling it to her would have done nothing to boost the value of the
remaining parcels of land. When Lot 3 was sold to Levitt, the transaction was respected in the trade press for helping
to raise the value of the remaining tranches, considering it was widely viewed as an esteemed real estate developer.
80
Steven Bingen, Stephen X Sylvester, and Michael Troyan, MGM: Hollywood’s Greatest Backlot (Santa Monica,
CA: Santa Monica Press, 2011), 275-276.
81
Debbie Reynolds, Unsinkable (New York: William Morrow, 2013), 66.
186
film Grand Hotel, created an experience for guests that placed them inside the fantasy world of a
motion picture for the course of their stay. Following the studio’s unofficial slogan of “do it big,
do it right, and give it class,” the 2100-room hotel would cost $125 million to build and was the
largest resort hotel in the world at the time of its completion.
82
Every public part of the hotel was
dedicated to the studio, its films, and its stars. At the groundbreaking ceremony in April 1972,
Cary Grant was the master of ceremonies, directly evoking the good-old-days of the studio.
83

Construction on the massive building lasted two and a half years, and a week before the
December 5, 1973 opening, a full-page advertisement for the hotel in Variety showed the hulking
edifice from below with the words “MGM Grand Hotel” carved out of stone (figure 4.9) in a
similar fashion to the posters for two of the studio’s biggest peplum epics Ben-Hur and King of
Kings (1961) (figures 4.10 and 4.11). Whereas both film posters showed the material culture of
ancient Rome littered at the bottom of the title mound, the ad featured an array of iconic
elements and scenes from several MGM films, including Gone with the Wind, Ben-Hur, The
Dirty Dozen (1961), and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The text above the image read in capital
letters, “The folks who conquered the Roman Empire, lost the civil war, smashed the Third
Reich, and charted the universe…now give you Las Vegas.”
84
Its peplum-epic art direction
thumbed its nose at the Caesar’s Palace hotel across the street, which had opened eight years
earlier and had been at least partly inspired by the successes of MGM’s Roman films of the
1950s and early-1960s. The ad was doing in print what the auction had done with physical media

82
Aljean Harmetz, Making of the Wizard of Oz [1977] (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2013), 303. The cost of
constructing the hotel was initially reported in the press as $106 million (see Charles Hillinger, “New Grand Hotel,
A High Roller’s Heaven,” Los Angeles Times, November 27, 1973), however that figure was later adjusted. The
secondary motto of the studio was used in That’s Entertainment! (Haley, 1974) and was frequently evoked in
reviews of that film.
83
Letter from Charles M Powell, MGM director of Advertising, Publicity, and Exploitation, to Cary Grant, April 20,
1972, Cary Grant papers, folder MGM f.639, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences, Beverly Hills, California.
84
MGM Grand Hotel advertisement, Variety, November 28, 1973.
187
by cracking apart the studio’s history and conflating it with world history.
The entertainment centerpiece of the MGM Grand Hotel was the Ziegfeld Stage, named
for musical entertainment empresario Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. His relationship to the studio existed
in name only, with the posthumous production of the biopic The Great Ziegfeld (1936), the
omnibus musical review The Ziegfeld Follies (1945), and the adaptation of the musical Show
Boat (1951), which he originally produced on Broadway. In the spring of 1974, its first show on
that stage was Hallelujah Hollywood!, a spectacle created by master Las Vegas producer Donn
Arden. It was a massive eleven-act review that contained twenty-seven scenes, seven hundred
costumes for the one hundred twenty frequently topless dancers and singers.
85
One critic
explained that the hotel and show were “designed to be fraught with firsts and mosts and
biggests. The result is a spectacular grossness.”
86
It reminded spectators of the grand scale of
MGM’s great musicals and their imaginative modes of storytelling—and it did so with sounds,
lights, sequins, and feathers, including costumes by film and television designers Ray Aghayan
and Bob Mackie.
The show featured several vignettes inspired by MGM films including a series of
numbers from Vincente Minnelli’s musical Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), featuring a “valentine”
to Judy Garland and “The Trolley Song.” There was a sequence celebrating Minnelli’s film The
Pirate (1948) with an ode to Gene Kelly, and one called “With Love to Fred and Ginger and
Gene,” celebrating the dancing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The duo made most of their
beloved films at RKO, but shot their last reunion for MGM with the Technicolor musical The

85
Beth Ann Krier, “Wrapping Up Hollywood in 700 Costumes,” Los Angeles Times, May 1, 1974; and “Hallelujah
Hollywood: programs, 1970s,” box 6, folder 16, Donn Arden Papers, 1910s-1990s, MS-00425, Special Collections
and Archives, University Libraries, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Nevada.
86
Krier May 1, 1974.
188
Barkleys of Broadway (1949).
87
All of these numbers were based on the visual style of MGM
films and connected with viewers who were fluent in the language of these iconic fantasies.
Much like the printed images that movies had previously cited on screen with which viewers
understood from their experiences in the “Republic of Images,” this stage spectacle cited past
film productions that audience members trusted as reality.
In a similar way to how researchers found printed media for craftworkers and filmmakers
in order to include those images in movies, Arden was also interested in some of the antiquarian
details of classical cinema to help build his show. These included references to musical numbers
and dance sequences, of course, but also to more specific elements of sets, lighting, and
costumes for chorus members. The show’s planners looked at images from many of MGM’s
films, including two Jeanette MacDonald musicals The Merry Widow (1934) and Rosalie (1937)
(figures 4.12 and 4.13), for guidance on the look of the dancers and the patterns created through
their choreography and gowns (figures 4.14 and 4.15).
88
They also looked directly at the Quo
Vadis research bible for direction on Roman costumes and other material culture.
89

Arden knew the audience was intimately familiar with the many movies and musicals of
the studio and that referencing such productions would make the show more enjoyable. As
Hollywood had become more self-aware and as audiences understood how its movies were
fabricated from collections of costumes, props, and sets—many of which had been sold at

87
“MGM Presents Donn Arden’s Hallelujah Hollywood!” program, 1974.
88
“Hallelujah Hollywood: movie stills, undated,” box 6, folder 12, Donn Arden Papers, 1910s-1990s, MS-00425,
Special Collections and Archives, University Libraries, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Nevada.
89
Quo Vadis Research Bible, “Received from London Studio, December 1950, v. II,”, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
(MGM) Research Department files, Collection number 323, University of California, Library Special Collections,
University of California, Los Angeles. The six volumes of the Quo Vadis research bible include check-out cards; the
card for volume II, which included images of clothing for Roman men, women, children, gladiators, military, and
slaves, shows that Arden borrowed it in 1977. Considering this date, it is unclear if Arden was researching costumes
for a revision on Hallelujah Hollywood! or for his next show, Jubilee!, which ran from 1981 to 2016. It is also
possible Arden’s production team looked to research bibles from other films, however no others have been found.
189
auction several years earlier, some of which were available for sale only yards away in the
hotel’s gift shop—Arden’s spectacle had to look like classical movies even more than it had to
look like any other images of the world found in printed magazines and books. The auction and
the hotel, through which the audience would walk as if inside a Hollywood movie, helped make
the fantasy world of cinema into fact. It effectively achieved what Debbie Reynolds had wanted
to create in 1970—a theme park experience on the studio’s disused backlot. The auction and the
hotel showed how Hollywood films had become a picture collection of the world, as rich as
those of printed media.

“Boy! Do We Need it Now!”: Archive and Compilation
Soon after the auctions, MGM executives recognized that another way to earn money for the
still-struggling studio would be to pump new life into its library of films it had produced. Unlike
remakes of beloved titles, such as Cimarron (1960), King of Kings (1961), Mutiny on the Bounty
(1962), The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962) and Goodbye Mr. Chips (1969), all of
which had been expensive to produce and performed poorly with audiences, a compilation film
that showed scenes from the studio’s collection of musicals was cheap to make and proved to be
more popular with viewers. The film they created, That’s Entertainment!, showed how great the
studio had been only a short time before. The advertising slogan the studio used to promote the
film, “Boy! Do we need it now!,” acknowledged not only the creative difference between new
films and older ones, but also the desperate financial state of the film industry.
90

By the mid-1970s, a handful of feature-length compilation films had been produced in
Hollywood, the most famous of which was the 1939 production of Land of Liberty, which was

90
That’s Entertainment! film trailer, Jack Haley, Jr (Culver City: MGM, 1974), and That’s Entertainment!
advertisement, Los Angeles Times, May 24, 1974.
190
distributed by MGM. It showed the history of America through clips of Hollywood movies,
conflating Hollywood films with true footage of the events. It was not made by one studio, but
was a production of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributor’s Association (MPPDA), the
governing consortium of the major Hollywood studios, and was edited by Cecil B. DeMille.
Originally made for the 1939 World’s Fairs in New York and San Francisco, the film became a
hit with audiences who not only enjoyed the entertaining portrayal of history, but also relished
revisiting their favorite stars in scenes from beloved films. Most significantly, it conflated fact
and reproduction by suggesting the audience that what they saw on screen were images of real
history rather than the recreated events of Hollywood.
91
Of course, for most in the audience, that
confusion of fiction becoming fact was the very nature of their experience watching movies.
Two decades later, television producer David L. Wolper used this mode of history
presentation when he set out to make a documentary about the history of Hollywood. Like
DeMille before him, Wolper used clips from old fictional movies as his visual sources to present
factual events.
92
As a relatively young producer with few credits to his name, he made an
agreement with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)—as the MPPDA had been
renamed in 1945—to assist him in securing the rights to footage from major studios. He called
on Jack Haley, Jr., the son of Jack Haley who had been a vaudeville entertainer and played the
Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, to assist him on the project. Wolper and Haley made three hour-

91
For more on Land of Liberty, see Phil Wagner, “‘A Particularly Effective Argument’: Land of Liberty (1939) and
the Hollywood Image (Crisis),” Film & History 41, No. 1 (June 2011): 7–25.
92
Wolper had scored a great success making the television documentary The Race for Space in 1959. It was made
with the participation of United States Department of Defense and featured exclusive footage of the Sputnik satellite
launch, which Wolper had purchased from the Soviet Ministry of Culture. It was narrated by CBS newsman Mike
Wallace. No network would agree to show it because they did not like the idea of airing a news program produced
outside their own news divisions. Because of this, Wolper made individual arrangements with 109 NBC network
affiliates to preempt their network news and show his documentary. For more, see, David L. Wolper with David
Fisher, Producer: A Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 34-39. The film was nominated for the
Academy Award for best documentary feature, but lost to the German nature film Serengeti Shall Not Die.
191
long films, Hollywood: The Golden Years (1961), which told the story of cinema from 1895 to
the advent of sound in 1927, Hollywood: The Fabulous Era (1962), which told the story of sound
cinema up to 1960, and Hollywood: The Great Stars (1963), a non-chronological tribute to the
great performers throughout film history. According to Wolper, while the first film “expand[ed]
the documentary form” by showing how such a compilation film could be entertaining and
informative, the second two films were merely “clip shows.”
93
This trilogy created a format for
making movies that told a clear story about Hollywood largely complied from classical studio
productions. Whereas most movies relied on research drawn from printed sources, the
background materials for these films were the older films the industry had previously produced.
Arriving in the early-1960s—at a moment when studios were beginning to feel the financial
pressures of a fracturing audience and a more complicated entertainment space that included
television, sports, and suburban sprawl—these films showed how research could shift away from
prioritizing printed images to one that collected clips from older movies that the audience already
trusted as being real.
All three films were optimistic about the film industry. They each engaged formal
elements from Classical Hollywood movies to generate a feeling of past cinematic grandness.
They all featured the same score, written by Elmer Bernstein, who had made a name for himself
in the previous decade with several award-nominated scores, and the same title format that
scrolled across the screen in a large font designed to look like the titles of Gone With the Wind
(figures 4.16 and 4.17). They used the audience’s love of Hollywood and its knowledge of such
iconic elements to their advantage. Not only were these titles a reference to the Civil War epic

93
Wolper, 46 and 50. In his memoir, Wolper suggests The Golden Years film was a harbinger of the cable television
documentary shows that would dominate television in the 1990s.
192
but an invocation of the grandness and cinematic precision that it represented.
94
The first two
films had similar structures opening with an iconic scene, followed by an on-camera introduction
by a star host-narrator—Gene Kelly, and later Henry Fonda—who would remain in voice over
through the chronological film, finishing with a montage of clips in the last ten minutes. The
third film was not structured chronologically, but haphazardly focused on a series of performers,
giving each one a three- or five-minute section with clips from their films. Realizing he had
secured the rights to enough footage to make more films, in 1962 and 1963 Wolper produced
Hollywood and the Stars, a television series of thirty-minute episodes that ran for thirty-one
episodes, each focusing on a thematic topic, such as war movies or swashbucklers, or individual
stars, such as Bette Davis or Al Jolson, many of which were narrated by Fonda.
The end of the 1960s found veterans of Wolper Productions making two other significant
television documentaries that also spoke to the grandness of Old Hollywood along with an
anxiety for the era to come. In 1969, Marshall Flaum, who had worked on The Fabulous Era and
The Great Stars, directed the film Hollywood: The Selznick Years, which was also narrated by
Fonda, and examined the independent producer within the greater culture of Hollywood from the
1920s through the 1950s. In 1972, filmmaker Irwin Rosten, who had worked on six episodes of
Hollywood and the Stars, wrote and directed Hollywood: The Dream Factory. It made an
important step in verbalizing the anxiety of the film industry of the era as it took the 1970 MGM
auction as a starting point for a reminiscence on the greatness of the elements of old movies that
were sold. Dick Cavett narrated the film and was a perfect fit for the role considering he knew
many of the stars featured in the film from writing, producing, and hosting his talk show, but he

94
The title sequence for That’s Entertainment, Part II (1976) was created by Saul Bass, the great designer of
postwar Hollywood posters and graphics. It featured many similar visual references to the title sequences of great
Hollywood movies of the past. It is possible he was inspired by the titles for these films.
193
also maintained a distance from that world. His wry tone helped to remove the film from the dire
situation of the auction and the studio’s imminent collapse, and pronounced a break from the
sweet, nostalgic sentiment that had become typical of such films.
95

All these films led up to the production of That’s Entertainment!, which borrowed style
and structure elements from those movies and became the apotheosis of the Hollywood history
compilation format. Like those earlier productions, this film relied on sorting and organizing
clips from MGM movies rather than printed images. In all, editors watched 208 MGM
productions and considered 179 musical numbers they found in them, ultimately using 84 of
them in the finished film.
96
Just like how the MGM research department had gathered printed
images and distributed them to production crews for each of the studio’s original movies, the
MGM film library gathered and distributed clips from older films, allowing producers and
editors of That’s Entertainment! to carefully reassemble those screen spaces into a new context.
Its pre-production began in 1972, when Aubrey hired Daniel Melnick to run film
production for MGM—a dubious position in a period of extreme contraction. Melnick, who had
spent nearly a decade working with television producer and talk show host David Susskind, was
a man who could “jump from one prestigious creative position to the next,” and one “who did
not subscribe to the trash-can demolition derby that was being staged by James Aubrey.”
97

95
British architecture scholar and critic Reyner Banham followed up his 1971 book Los Angeles: The Architecture
of Four Ecologies (New York: Harper & Row) with a television documentary of his own called Reyner Banham
Loves Los Angeles (d. Julian Cooper, BBC, 1972). In the film, Banham drove around Los Angeles marveling at the
freeways of the city, the unusual buildings, and different beach spaces he passes. In one sequence he walked through
MGM Lot 3, where he showed a western street abutting a pirate ship, as he explained how “Hollywood, through the
big screen and the little screen, and the long playing record is the medium that has transmitted all that Los Angeles
high style to the world.” It seems likely Banham and the film’s director had seen Rosten’s Hollywood: The Dream
Factory and were alluding its wryness and the sight of a failed cinematic dream in this sequence.
96
Bud Friedgen and David Blewitt, “Putting it All Together for That’s Entertainment!,” American Cinemeditor 24,
no. 2, Summer 1974, 12.
97
Douglas Martin, “Daniel Melnick, Hollywood Producer, Dies at 77,” New York Times, October 16. 2009; and Rex
Reed, “Stars Shine Again for Two Men with a Dream,” New York Daily News, May 19. 1974.
194
Melnick’s experience in television led him to immediately hire Jack Haley, Jr., whom he and
Aubrey knew from Wolper Productions, as the studio’s creative director—a title that lacked any
specific duties but allowed him a wide berth in digging into the studio’s film library as he had
done in his previous work on television documentaries.
98

Bud Friedgen and David Blewitt, the two editors of That’s Entertainment!, later wrote
that many people in Hollywood had “been advocating for a [compilation] film of this type for
years, but most major studios were unable to see the possibilities of such a film, without a
definite plot, attracting a large audience.”
99
MGM, which had “begun phasing itself out of
feature film production and distribution,” as critic Gene Siskel cynically commented, was
perhaps the perfect home for such a project not only because the feature would cost little to
produce but also because its film library was full of musicals the audience adored like those of
few other studios.
100
Having worked on Wolper documentaries for more than a decade, Friedgen
and Blewitt understood the power of montage in telling a story, and how the cuts they would
make could show Hollywood history in a compelling and efficient way. Haley had previously
worked with both men and knew they could manage the footage from more than two hundred
films to construct their own.
The production team approached old movies in a way resembling how antiquarians
approached the visual and material sources they examined, and how Aby Warburg engaged with

98
In his memoir, Mickey Rooney claimed to have given the idea for That’s Entertainment! to Haley when he called
the studio exec to ask for footage and the rights to several of his old movies, with the idea of making his own
compilation film about his career. According to his account, Haley initially rejected his request before calling him
back months later to pitch him on the co-hosting role in That’s Entertainment! (Mickey Rooney, Life Is Too Short
[New York: Villard Books, 1991], 298-299). The notion that Rooney gave the idea of the compilation feature to
MGM is highly doubtful, if not for the timeline of events with the studio hiring Melnick and Haley before his call,
then because Rooney had likely seen one or more of the Wolper-Haley documentaries, which were the true
inspirations for that film.
99
Friedgen and Blewitt 8.
100
Siskel.
195
the images he harnessed. Each of these still or moving picture compilations fundamentally
revolved around the grouping of images by themes that connected materials across time and
space to make visual arguments. Similar to Warburg’s method of connecting depictions of the
goddess Fortuna through time, That’s Entertainment! showed how the use of the musical number
“Singin’ in the Rain” in four films from 1929, 1932, 1940, and 1952 connected them through a
similar sentiment of optimism in difficult times. Similarly, through the use of montage, the banal
narratives of Esther Williams swimming musicals were ignored and their visual magnificence
was highlighted to show how such productions echoed visual patterns used by Busby Berkeley,
another musical producer featured in the film (figure 4.18 and 4.19).
At 135 minutes, That’s Entertainment! was the longest of these historical compilation
documentaries and followed a non-chronological format similar to Hollywood: The Great Stars.
It began with a three-minute overture (figure 4.20), invoking some of the studio’s greatest
peplum films including Quo Vadis and Ben-Hur (figures 4.21 and 4.22); the size of this
compilation was similar to such classical productions. Not only did this formal flourish remind
the audience of those epics, but it also boldly pushed the musical subjects that followed into a
similar position of honor held by Roman spectacles. Following the overture, the studio’s famous
lion logo appeared with a slight but significant adjustment. For this film only, the iconic design
featured the words “Beginning Our Next 50 Years…” printed in the central lozenge from which
Leo would roar (figure 4.23). Slowly the big cat faded in and gave his signature growl. The
screen appeared almost entirely the same, but with the standard “Trade Mark” phrase bracketing
the sides replaced by the words “Golden Anniversary” (figure 4.24). While it was true the studio
was in its fiftieth year, it was forced optimism to imagine it could last another half century
considering its current losses.
196
The first segment of the film presented a nostalgic journey through the early days of
talkies rather than sober dates and names. It opened with a song and dance number from the
musical The Hollywood Review of 1929 and a voice-over by Frank Sinatra, explaining that ‘it
[was] the first all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing movie ever made.” In actual fact, it was not the
first such musical, though it was among the first; it was the first time a film had used the song
“Singin’ in the Rain,” which, as this introduction showed, became a “theme song for MGM
musicals” and one of the most significant to emerge from Hollywood. This factual error did not
matter in the film’s overall context, though it showed a clear example of how Hollywood
movies, including non-narrative ones, have always been more concerned with telling a story that
fits a theme rather than worrying about the details of history. Much as Quo Vadis changed
certain visual details to better fit the expectations of the audience, this film’s introduction
swapped truth for a good story knowing viewers would not be concerned with such details.
Subsequently, thematic segments of five or ten minutes dedicated to certain topics were
introduced and narrated by stars, including Elizabeth Taylor, Gene Kelly, Fred Astiare, Bing
Crosby, standing or walking in different locations of the studio’s backlots to reminisce about
making old movies and encountering one another during the old days. These introductions
functioned like the subject headings into which researchers and antiquarians would have sorted
their images, explicitly telling the audience the theme of the following segment. Much like an
archive, in which a set of files dealing with one topic might not relate to another set, there was a
randomness to the order in which these thematic packages appeared. In one, Debbie Reynolds
gave her introduction from the dressing room of a Broadway musical (figure 4.25).
101
In another

101
At the time of the production of That’s Entertainment!, Reynolds was appearing in her first Broadway musical, a
revamped version of the 1919 Harry Tierney and Joseph McCarthy show Irene. The book of music for the show
appeared in the left corner of the screen.
197
Liza Minnelli, who was not an MGM star in her own right, despite Fred Astaire introducing her
as Hollywood’s “crown princess,” posed in a dilapidated European courtyard set sporting a mod
pixie cut and silver Elsa Peretti-Tiffany necklace and bangles.
102
She looked like a chic
contemporary woman full of life, and nothing like the graying contemporaries of her parents
(figure 4.26). She was visible evidence of the endurance of Hollywood cinema, which was in no
way dead. Peter Lawford discussed Hollywood in the 1940s before James Stewart presented a
segment on the early talkie years of the 1930s (figures 4.27 and 4.28). At the end of each section
the host of that sequence would introduce the following star for the next chapter.
The film clearly showed how amazing the studio had been and, as a result, how far it had
fallen physically and as a business from that glorious era. Siskel described the film as showing
“former MGM stars as they walk[ed] through the decaying grounds of the once-bustling
studio.”
103
The shabby state of the backlot sets and buildings was remarkable, with Gene Kelly
walking down the New York Street that revealed chips to the painted façades (figure 4.29),
Donald O’Connor standing on the edge of the drained and dirty swimming pool (figure 4.30),
and Fred Astaire strolling down the platform of a train station whose glass roof appeared to be
entirely removed, with peeling paint on the train cars, and leaves blowing around the ground
(figure 4.31).
104
The backlots could have been superficially improved with a paint brush or a
broom, which had been the standard practice for productions during the studio’s heyday; this
presentation of decay showed how it was moving past the old material culture—after selling off

102
The iconic jewelry line debuted in 1974 and it is likely Minnelli, who was seen as the legacy of her parents and a
connection to “Hollywood’s past,” was given the pieces to market them to the movie audience.
103
Gene Siskel, “MGM: Magnificently Gaudy Musicals,” Chicago Tribune, June 28, 1974.
104
In his introduction, O’Connor claimed the pool was one where Esther Williams swam in films; however, its
modest size suggested that might not have been the case. The pool looked much more like the location of any film
that involved a private pool behind a house, but not one of the grand water tanks in which Williams was known to
have dazzled the audience. Even in this minor interstitial segment, there might have been some stretching of the
truth.
198
literally every scrap of fabric and wood—into a new age of streamlined production. The view of
Old Hollywood in this film showed that while the old movies looked sleek, they were frequently
made of cheap, inauthentic materials that degraded in time. As with the props and costumes from
the auction, foregrounding the deterioration of the sets and backlots in this film helped to
acknowledge the pastness of cinema and its materiality and the end of a chapter of history.
The juxtaposition of the clips of old movies with sparkling sets and young actors with the
aged stars walking through decrepit backlots that stood as near-ruins was stunning. This
disconnect was clear to many in the audience at the time, as MAD magazine made clear with its
“movie satire” that showed cartoons of the actors singing about how they used to have hair
(Frank Sinatra), how they used to be professional rivals (Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire), and how
they were well known for certain work at other studios (Elizabeth Taylor, most notably for her
role in Cleopatra at Twentieth Century-Fox in 1963) (figure 4.32 and 4.33).
105
The sardonic
comic, which was pitched to the magazine’s young readers, showed how the fantasy of Old
Hollywood was something current audiences no longer wanted but had to watch considering
movie studios had not made many excellent films in recent years. The cover image implied this
with the impish Alfred E. Newman shrugging as he stood out from dozens of black umbrellas
representing Singin’ in the Rain and the conservative worldview of classical Hollywood (figure
4.34). With That’s Entertainment!, MGM made clear that it was more interested in turning
backwards to its library than moving into the future with productions of new material. These
business goals were clear, as was the fact that a compilation film seemed like a strange fit for a
studio previously known for capably producing grand and thrilling narratives. While the

105
Frank Jacobs and Mort Drucker, “What’s Entertainment?,” MAD magazine 175, June 1975, 4-10. Steven Cohan
has also examined this issue in his analysis of the popularity of camp in Hollywood musicals. See, Steven Cohan,
Incongruous Entertainment: Camp, Cultural Value, and the MGM Musical (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
2005), 246-286.
199
audience likely understood the studio was potentially past its prime, the presentation of the film
with aging stars and sets was still a surprise to many viewers.
In an era before home video, That’s Entertainment! provided audiences with one of the
only ways to watch the most important numbers from these classic films outside of revival
houses, studio reissues, or late night television—all of which would have shown tired and
scratched prints that might have been in circulation for decades. Part of the audience was thrilled
to see these films again in such a grand presentation, as it reasserted the importance of
Hollywood to their understandings of the world; another group of viewers watched this film and
was introduced to many of these performers and numbers for the first time, seeing how the visual
space of cinematic spectacles contained many details they were familiar with from their
subsequent representation off the screen.
Most critics enthusiastically endorsed the film, noting how audiences would enjoy seeing
such an esteemed group of musical segments. They commented on the high production values of
such old films, though they never mentioned that such detail emerged from visual research.
Variety’s critic extolled the film as “an outstanding, stunning, sentimental, exciting, colorful,
enjoyable, spirit-lifting, tuneful, youthful, invigorating, zesty, respectful, heart-warming,
awesome, cheerful, dazzling, and richly satisfying feature documentary commemorating its
filmusicals [sic].”
106
Several other critics argued it was a particular pleasure in an era when
newer films were too frank and violent and lacked the safety and neatness of classical films made
on a stage—an invocation of the film’s marketing line.
107
The critic for the Boston Globe,

106
Arthur Murphy, “That’s Entertainment!,” Variety, April 17, 1974.
107
This line appeared on the main poster for the film, in an advertisement in the Los Angeles Times on May 24,
1974, inside an out-of-context balloon at the bottom right corner of the page, and as the final line spoken by an
announcer in the film’s trailer. This pitiful effort to sympathize with the audience was ridiculous when making better
movies had been entirely in the hands of MGM for the previous decade and more.
200
lamented that in showing the spectacles of the decaying backlots and the aged stars, the film was
an admission by MGM and other studios “that they don’t make them the way they used to.”
108

Critic J.C. Ruben took a middle-of-the-road position in the French cinema journal
Cinéma, arguing the film would be useful to French audiences who, in his view, were sometimes
unaware of how excellent Hollywood musicals had been. “[The French] public who, without real
knowledge of them, is often inclined to judge these works through the deforming prism of its
prejudices... and the television which reduces to nothingness the notion of spectacle which they
contain.”
109
He went on to say that even though these films were shown in their grandest glory
on the big screen, they were still cut from their original contexts and individual numbers were
cut for time. “The one regrettable thing about That’s Entertainment! is that it only gives a
touristic vision of the musical comedy: a bit like discovering Paris from a bus.” This feeling of
abridgement was difficult to argue against, though it ignored the fact that many seeing the film
only wanted such excerpts as a means of remembering those movies rather than as a crash course
in the history of cinema—much like how many tourists would prefer seeing Paris through a
window rather than reading a book about the history of the city. His comparison of old musicals
to a tourist’s view of Paris also shows that the research work that helped to create those
productions was thorough and believable. This documentary was intended to allow viewers to
take their favorite musical numbers with them after they left the theater—again, more like
tourists than academics. As Ruben himself had argued earlier in his review, “it is not trying to
explain or argue, but is content to exhibit its finest toys in a vitrine.”
Other critics inserted their own feelings and prejudices into their reviews, offering their

108
Richard Dyer, “Art of Movie Previews—That’s Entertainment,” Boston Globe, July 14, 1974. While they share
the same name, this is not the same man as the British film scholar and critic. This Richard Dyer spent most of his
33 years at the Globe writing music criticism.
109
J.C. Ruben, “Il Etait Une Fois Hollywood,” Cinéma, February 1975 (translation by the author).
201
readers insights into their own worldviews more than commentary on the film. The critic for the
Miami News took an emotional and psychological approach and compared his personal
experience of watching the film to “looking at pictures of ourselves as children. They were
magic times, but they are gone forever, and they leave us feeling just a bit older?[sic]”
110
This
forlorn feeling was likely influenced by the decaying sets and graying stars. Of course, watching
That’s Entertainment! was actually like looking at all of the pictures the MGM research
department had gathered and sorted before the productions of each musical. Alan Rich of New
York magazine wrote that “there is a little sadness flickering around the edge of this movie. It
celebrates an art form […] which showed incredible ingenuity and even greater promise at its
inception… and which has gone, for the most part, nowhere.”
111
Roger Ebert of the Chicago
Sun-Times was perhaps the most direct in his sorrow, writing that the film was “a eulogy for an
art form that will never be again.”
112
Siskel, who would begin his tenure on television with Ebert
the following year, scornfully claimed, without citing a source, that the profits from the film
would go “toward repaying the enormous debt incurred by MGM while building a resort hotel in
Las Vegas.”
113
This comment was possibly true as an overview of MGM budgets, however it
clearly related more to his distrust and dislike of Kerkorian, who was not as engaged in making
excellent films as other studio owners.
That’s Entertainment! joyfully cracked apart the Hollywood musical, removing dull
segments while only showing the most superb performers and numbers for its viewers, both old
and new. While this production represented an early effort by Kerkorian to capitalize on the

110
Alex Ben Block, “This Movie Has More Stars than the Heavens,” Miami News, July 31, 1974. Strangely, this
sentiment of photographs highlighting the pastness of things and the passage of time was almost identical to that of
Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida, an essay he wrote five years later. See, Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida:
Reflections on Photography [1979] (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).
111
Alan Rich, “What’s Entertainment?,” New York, July 15, 1974.
112
Roger Ebert, “When Musicals Were Musicals,” Chicago Sun-Times, June 25, 1974.
113
Siskel, June 28, 1974.
202
studio’s older films as reusable commodities, the fracturing and repackaging of movies also
showed the audience how cinema had always been stitched together from many material and
visual elements.
114
In making it, MGM invoked and addressed an aging audience and traded on
the nostalgia those viewers felt for classical Hollywood film productions—in the same way it
had done with its props and costumes in the auction and the opening of its resort hotel.
115
Unlike
those objects, in which the executives saw no value, the studio realized such screen images were
already iconic and required no time to enrich their appeal. Beyond all other significant details
about the film, it represented a moment when Hollywood acknowledged how its own creations
had become icons that needed only minor introduction to resonate with the audience.
116
This was
the same understanding that went into the MGM Grand Hotel’s peplum-style advertisement, as
well as the Gone-With-the-Wind-style titles of Wolper’s three television documentaries. Classical
Hollywood films had become recognizable and important visual sources for the audience.
For the studio, That’s Entertainment! represented a recognition that its best days were
behind it. Rather than being a movie inspired by existing movies, this was a movie about older
movies made almost entirely by recycling their footage. The dilapidated streets and buildings the
stars walked through were part of the old system the studio—and Hollywood in general—was
trying to shed. The film was for the mythos and iconography of the studio what the auction had
been for its physical plant: the final chapter of a book. From the point of view of a movie-making

114
The ownership of the MGM film library has changed several times since Kerkorian first purchased the company
in 1969. For many years Ted Turner owned it as part of his greater television, news, and film company, and it was
with that collection that he created the Turner Classic Movies cable channel in 1994. For a detailed chronology of
the different owners of the library, see Tino Balio, MGM (New York: Routledge, 2018), 228-285.
115
In his writing, Steven Cohan has tied the nostalgia for the past found in That’s Entertainment! to a curiosity in
camp culture by audiences. See Steven Cohan, Incongruous Entertainment: Camp, Cultural Value, and the MGM
Musical (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 247.
116
Martin Kemp has written that the defining characteristic of icons is that they achieve “wholly exceptional levels
of widespread recognizably and […] come to carry a rich series of varied associations for very large number of
people across time and culture,” (Martin Kemp, Christ to Coke: How Image Becomes Icon [Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012], 3).
203
company this film served as a farewell to the old ways with a nervous retrospective featuring
aging stars who had moved on from their dream-factory days. It had become a memory factory,
where its past mattered more than its present or future. The film was created to reorganize the
archive of the MGM film vault as well as the archive of memories each viewer had.
117
Such a
refiguration simplified Hollywood history into a joyful, entertaining, and thrilling space without
any of the duds of the previous decade the studio had recently produced. The backlots would be
sold in the following three years and this film glamorously sent these films away where they
would be recombined into clichés and inspirations for later movies; they could exist as relics of a
past era, much like the old props and costumes the auction had distributed.
The compilation film and the auction fragmented old movies into a collection of stars,
amazing performances, sets, props, and costumes in a way the audience could understand and
fondly remember. These events did not dampen the excitement of classical films—indeed, there
was so much thrilling footage that MGM made two other That’s Entertainment! films—but they
reminded audiences that Hollywood was a system in which many elements added together to
make films. In a moment when the film industry seemed to be falling apart, this movie and the
auction played the role of antiquarian, saving the individual material and visual cultural elements
of past productions to present to later viewers. Much as research departments had presented
filmmakers and craftworkers with images of the world to help them create believable movies, the
material and visual details from the auction and this film showed cinemagoers the manufactured
spaces of Hollywood that seemed real.

117
Film scholar Catherine Russell argued, the compilation film created “a new role of the moving image in the
refiguration of filmed history and the history of film,” essentially by turning memory into “a kind of archive.”
(Catherine Russell, Archivology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices [Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 2018], 17 and 13). This conflation of memory and archive would be important for the audience who would
now see these movies as real historical events, and possibly confuse their own experiences with those from the
screen worlds they had watched.
204
The closing credits of That’s Entertainment! surprisingly contained the name Mort
Feinstein, the head film librarian for MGM. The work he did to find and sort the clips in the
studio’s film library was certainly significant enough to earn him such a credit; however, it was
unusual to have the name of an administrative worker appear on screen.
118
His management of
footage was as important to the producers and editors of this movie as the work of picture
collectors and librarians including Aby Warburg, John Cotton Dana, Romana Javitz, Otto
Bettmann, Frances Richardson, and Bessie McGaffey had been to the art historians, visual
artists, public patrons, and Hollywood craftworkers who preceded them. Hollywood studios
themselves had become massive and diverse picture collections similar to studio research
libraries, the Bettmann Archive, the New York Public Library, and the Warburg Library. From
these picture collections filmmakers and viewers would learn about near or distant places in the
world from the past or present. Just like the auction and the opening of the Las Vegas hotel
before it, That’s Entertainment! showed how audiences knew how the world looked by watching
movies on cinema screens around the globe. The movies, which contained many visual elements
from other forms of artistic representation, had become a picture collection in their own right.

118
Feinstein was also singled out by the Variety film critic in his positive review of the compilation (Art Murphy,
“That’s Entertainment!,” Variety, April 17, 1974). It is significant that Murphy reviewed the film as he was known
for his interest in the business of Hollywood and compiling box office figures, and this film heralded a change from
an old business model to a new one.
205
Epilogue: Collecting Treasure and Sharing Knowledge
In 1975, facing a changing production landscape caused by physical production moving
off the lot, Warner Bros. donated its research library, consisting of forty thousand books, thirty
thousand magazines and more than five million clipped images and other ephemera to the
Burbank Public Library where it became its own distinct department.
1
As individual film
workers made use of the collection, it became a drain on financial and organizational resources
of the city. Burbank found it difficult to justify an expense between $30,000 and $100,000 each
year to publicly subsidize a collection primarily accessed by private production companies, so it
gave the collection back to the studio in 2000.
2
Warner Bros. initially planned to make it
available again in a new library format, however that never happened and the research collection
has remained in storage ever since, unused by filmmakers outside the studio.
3

Over and over again from 1970 through the 2010s, as studio collections became available
for limited use by craftworkers who had an antiquarian interest in rare details from the past,
visual research was tested and reappraised, ultimately becoming either an outmoded object
without a modern-day use or a treasure to covet and protect, rather than a practical resource of
knowledge to share between craftworkers and filmmakers. With the exception of the failed effort
in Burbank, each collection since the 1970s has limited who could access their materials; the
collaborative ethos that defined research in the mid-twentieth century has never returned.
4

1
Paul Clinton, “City defends turnover of Warner Research Collection,” Burbank Ledger, August 26, 2000.
2
Ibid; and Gib Johnson, “Special Arm of Burbank Library Fills Hollywood’s Unusual Requests: Research—Warner
Collection has 38,000 exhibits to draw from,” Los Angeles Times, November 16, 1989. The library initially charged
users $50 per hour, with a minimum of fifteen minutes at a cost of $12.50. That fee went up to $70 by the late
1990s, however it was never enough to cover the costs of maintaining the collection.
3
Clinton.
4
Twentieth Century Fox and Universal maintained their research libraries, however they dramatically scaled back
their respective work. Fox has only used their library for feature film productions, entirely avoiding research for
television productions (interview with Fox research director Lisa Jackson, April 15, 2015). Universal kept its
department open with a skeleton staff of two, also working only on feature film productions, until 2000 when it
206
The few old-guard studios that retained such departments shifted to a mode of protecting
their research materials rather than sharing them. The Walt Disney Studios has continued the
tradition of visual research to the present day. The company’s visual archive, the ARL, has
supported its production staff by offering access to visual resources that included the thousands
of illustrated books and printed images that were originally gathered for use by its research
library.
5
Beginning in the 1970s, the ARL became the access point for Disney artists to consult
both external images and millions of sketches, backgrounds, cels, and other visual materials from
the studio’s productions since the 1920s.
6
Any artist working on designs for a new character
could refer to this internal artwork for reference and inspiration. The library has only been
accessible to internal workers or to those developing authorized satellite projects such as
sponsored histories or licensing projects. It is interesting that ever since the late-1970s, the studio
has mostly stopped referring to the non-Disney sources of its films and related creative projects.
Instead, the studio has focused marketing almost entirely on the ARL as the primary visual
resource for its staff; according to the studio’s publicity, the images created by past Disney

decided the losses related to its upkeep were too great (Amy Wallace, “A Collection Gets Shelved,” Los Angeles
Times, March 5, 2000).
5
For more detailed information on some of the books and illustrations Disney brought back from his European
vacation in 1935, see Robin Allen, Walt Disney and Europe (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1999),
31-33; and Robin Allen, “Disney’s European Sources,” in Bruno Girveau, ed., Once upon a Time—Walt Disney:
The Sources of Inspiration for the Disney Studios (München: Prestel, 2008), 100-112. The ARL had been referred to
as the “morgue,” until the 1970s, when it was organized into a formal archive and rebranded. For more information
on the original Walt Disney Studios research library, see Janet Martin, “Librarian to Walt Disney,” Wilson Bulletin
for Librarians, December 1939, 292-293. In the article, Martin explained that up to 1935, the department had
roughly 200 books and that they were difficult to use; in that year, presumably after he returned from holiday with
hundreds of books, Disney hired librarian Helen Hennessey to manage the collection. By 1939, the collection had
grown to more than 2000 books.
6
Corporate lore tells of Walt Disney originally saving all creative materials for each short and feature in the studio’s
morgue. In the 1970s, that collection was reorganized as an archive and renamed the ARL. For more, see “From
‘Snow White’ to ‘The Fox and the Hound’—Animation Research at Work,” Disney Newsreel, December 19, 1980;
and Leila Smith, “The Collections and Origins of the Animation Research Library,” in Bruno Girveau, ed., Once
upon a Time—Walt Disney: The Sources of Inspiration for the Disney Studios (Munich: Prestel, 2008), 38-58. In
1970, librarian Dave Smith also organized the studio’s corporate paper collection, creating the Disney Archive. For
more on the Disney Archive, see Geoff Boucher, “Column One: Pack Rat in the Mouse House,” Los Angeles Times,
June 24, 2010.
207
workers are some of the most important sources for recent artists working on new productions.
7

As the structure of Hollywood studios changed in the late-1960s, many of the young
directors of the so-called “New Hollywood” rejected many of the new corporate controls over
their creative work. Some of them maintained an interested in visual research, which they viewed
as essential to filmmaking, to retain their own management of the films on which they worked.
In one case, Francis Ford Coppola hired Lillian Michelson in 1979 and placed her independent
research library in a bungalow on his Zoetrope Studios lot in Hollywood.
8
He hoped to create an
idyllic studio in which artists, directors, writers, and actors could make films based less on a
profit motive and more oriented toward their collective creative expression.
9
Michelson
remembered how he once looked at her research library and proudly proclaimed, “I’m so happy
there’s a library on my studio lot.”
10
He believed that having access to such a department
promoted his appreciation and understanding of old production methods, which he viewed as
more concerned with creative expression than the multi-national corporate and legalistic mode
that he perceived as dominating filmmaking. His admiration for such a collection along with his
focus on the aesthetics of cinema also showed that he brought an antiquarian orientation to his
work as a filmmaker.

7
Press reports have all but totally eliminated any mention of research involving non-Disney images over the past
forty years; at the same time, the ARL has been featured in many articles and videos. Among those are, Tara
Bennett, “Behold! The Secrets of the Disney Animation Research Library,” SyFy Wire, accessed May 20, 2020,
https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/disney-animation-research-library; “Disney Animation Research Library,” I Love
Libraries: An Initiative of the American Library Association, accessed May 20, 2020,
http://www.ilovelibraries.org/article/disney-animation-research-library; “Expert Witness: Inside Disney’s Animation
Research Library,” The A.V. Club, accessed May 20, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otxusP5eP7I;
“Inside Perspective: Disney Animation Research Library,” Walt Disney Company, accessed May 20, 2020,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWH7ac99CgI; “Disney Secrets Revealed: Inside the Animation Research
Library,” Disney Live, accessed May 20, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQoGpnLB6jg.
8
Lillian Michelson interviewed in the documentary Harold and Lilian: A Hollywood Love Story, dir. David Raim,
Adama Films, Los Angeles, 2015.
9
For more on Coppola’s studio and vision for creative collaboration see “Forerunner to DreamWorks, Coppola’s
risky Zoetrope Studios bucked system,” Variety, November 10, 1997, and Gene D. Phillips and Rodney Hill,
Francis Ford Coppola: Interviews (Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), vi-xvi.
10
Michelson interview.
208
Following the massive losses related to the film One From the Heart (1982), Coppola’s
studio proved financially nonviable. As a result, he shuttered the physical production operation
and returned to his San Francisco production office, leaving Michelson without a patron or
corporate home.
11
Coppola’s goals in owning a research library remained ambitious and when
the opportunity presented itself, he purchased the research library of RKO Radio Pictures, which
had been in storage for decades; he later bought the Universal research library after the studio
closed it in 2000.
12
For Coppola, a man typical of his generation of filmmakers who admired and
obsessed over the history of cinema, a research library became an essential element of a
Hollywood studio. Owning such a collection became a way of imitating the studio moguls before
him who had paid to build such libraries in the first place. Unlike those executives, however, he
worked hundreds of miles north of Los Angeles, which meant few films ever used his materials.
Much like Coppola, George Lucas also had an interest in the history and connoisseurship
of film and cinephilic culture, and hoped to support the productions of his independent
LucasFilm studio by purchasing the Paramount research library, which had been in storage after
the studio permanently closed the department in 1968. Lucas installed the collection at his
Skywalker Ranch production facility in Marin County, California. The grand, wood-paneled

11
“Forerunner to DreamWorks.” After purchasing her collection from the Samuel Goldwyn Studio in 1969,
Michelson would move it several times searching for a base of operations. In all, she found temporary space at the
American Film Institute, Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios, Paramount, and DreamWorks Animation. In 2014, she
handed ownership and management to the Art Director’s Guild, who continues to search for a landing place for her
materials; the collection remains intact and in storage where users cannot presently use it as a reference tool
(interview with art director and former head of the Art Director’s Guild Tom Walsh, April 15, 2019). For more on
this collection, see Steven Bingen and Marc Wannamaker, Paramount: City of Dreams (Guilford, Conn.: Taylor
Trade Publishing, 2017), 236; also see, “The Michelson Library 2020” The Michelson Library, accessed May 12,
2020, https://www.michelsonlibrary.org/library-overview.
12
Anahid Nazarian interviewed in the documentary Harold and Lilian: A Hollywood Love Story, dir. David Raim,
Adama Films, Los Angeles, 2015; and “Forerunner to DreamWorks.” It seems likely Lucas bought the RKO
collection around 1986 after Ted Turner’s Turner Broadcasting System purchased MGM, which owned RKO and its
corporate archive, from Kirk Kerkorian. At the time of the closure of the Universal research library, the company
also spoke to Stephen Spielberg to see if he would buy their materials considering he had a similar interest in such
visual history. He did not take them and Lucas got them instead. (Interview with former Universal research director
Margaret Ross, April 10, 2016; see also, Wallace, “A Collection Gets Shelved”).
209
library featured a stained glass, domed ceiling (figure 5.1), calling back to the era of the first
public libraries of the early-twentieth century, like that of John Cotton Dana in Newark (figure
5.2).
13
The fittings of the space gave the collection the feel of an old-fashioned gentleman
scholar’s library, and was rather reminiscent of the Warburg Institute in Hamburg that also
featured an illuminated circular glass ceiling (figure 5.3).
LucasFilm produced so few films (only twenty-three features in the forty-one years from
1971 through 2012) that the library became a jewel to show the press and visitors more than it
was a resource to find information in the images it contained. By placing their libraries far away
from most Hollywood filmmaking, Lucas and Coppola have shown themselves to be more like
hoarders of visual materials than stewards of the valuable information they contained. They have
treated these collections as treasures that would help them transitively touch history through the
visual resources that helped construct classical screen spaces, much like the props and costumes
from the MGM auction that held near-sacred esteem with their buyers. Just as those collectors
would never have dared wear the ruby slippers and many of the other significant items they
purchased, the research libraries of Lucas and Coppola would never circulate their images and
have seldom been consulted.
The fate of each of these collections reflects how the thoughtfully curated studio research
libraries have evolved from being part of the “Republic of Images,” that spread visual knowledge
from the printed page to the screen, to merely being pictures and books that filmmakers
happened to own but never shared. Meanwhile, and perhaps ironically, George Lucas seemed to
envision himself as a latter-day Aby Warburg, who wanted to understand and trace the history of

13
When planning the library, Lucas “asked artisan Eric Christensen to create stained glass ‘reminiscent of the work
of Greene and Greene’” (Patricia Leigh Brown, “Tour George Lucas‘s Office at Skywalker Ranch,” Architectural
Digest, October 7, 2016). It seems likely he was referring to one of the most noteworthy designs of the architects,
the Gamble House in Pasadena, which features an entryway of stained glass trees in wood frames.
210
humanity though images. One major difference between them was that the great research library
Warburg created, which was the result of his trading of his family’s fortune to buy thousands of
books and images of art and architecture, was available to help scholars engage in similar
investigations of visual cultural connections through time, while the library Lucas assembled
offered only limited access.
14

This view of protecting visual culture rather than sharing it changed in January 2017,
when Lucas announced plans to build his Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles. One
critic dismissed the institutional concept as a “terrible idea” partly because “‘[n]arrative art’ is a
made-up category,” however he failed to acknowledge how this classification, which includes
fine art, commercial art, and cinema, alternatively can be thought of as storytelling through
pictures, a goal quite similar to Warburg’s project.
15
Lucas seeks to collect, organize, and display
representational images in order to understand the world. In his post-filmmaking career, Lucas
has amassed one of the greatest collections of vernacular narrative art, especially works by
nineteenth- and twentieth-century illustrations. His museum will expose visitors to many of those
pictures as it imparts visual knowledge and reveals connections between image-makers from
different periods and origins.
Informal plans suggest Lucas will relocate his research library from Marin to his museum

14
Warburg came from a family of prominent and wealthy bankers who supported his interest in book collecting
from an early age. In 1914 he and his colleague Fritz Saxl opened the growing library to scholars interested in an
archaeology of visual culture. As the collection continued to grow and the institute took root in the early-1920s,
there was a specific effort to have a “personal and private character [to the library space] in spite of its public
functions” (Fritz Saxl, “The History of the Warburg Library [1886-1944],” in E. H Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An
Intellectual Biography [Oxford: Oxford University, 1986], 333). Lucas had a similar goal for his library at
Skywalker Ranch, despite his collection being less open to outside scholars. With Warburg’s death in 1929 and the
rise of Hitler, the Saxl moved the institute to London in 1933, where it became an independent faculty of the
University of London. For a more complete history of the Warburg Library, see Saxl, 325-338.
15
Christopher Knight, “Critic’s Notebook: The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is a bad idea. Here’s why,” Los
Angeles Times, January 20, 2017.
211
in Los Angeles where it could once again be useful for filmmakers.
16
Connecting a picture
collection to a museum of narrative art not only aligns it with Warburg’s efforts, but also with
John Cotton Dana’s creation of the Newark Museum in the top floor of the Newark Public
Library in 1909. The Progressive-Era movement to educate citizens with words and pictures, and
to improve their participation in their communities, also seems part of the forthcoming Lucas
museum. Dana explained how the relationship between his museum and the picture collection
depended on the ability to easily find information in images across many media forms as it
created a visual literacy in visitors; there could be a similar alliance between the narrative art
images of the Lucas Museum and those of his research library.
17
He hopes to gather the archive
of the world through the “universal art of visual storytelling,” and, like Dana and researchers
from Hollywood’s studio era, sees the museum as a space “where artificial divisions between
‘high’ art and ‘popular’ art are absent.”
18
This will be a museum of pictures that tell stories, and
will show how images can inform viewers about the world when properly assembled and
displayed. Echoing the belief of Illustrated London News editor Mason Jackson, who argued that
the thousands of pictures in the popular press of the nineteenth century would serve as an
“inexhaustible storehouse for the historian” and thereby a valuable resource for viewers, the
Lucas Museum will show visitors images and stories that will inform them and create a greater
understanding of the past and present from a wide field of visual culture.
19

16
Interview with Director of the Lucas Research Library Miki Bulos, February 7, 2020.
17
John Cotton Dana, “The Museum and Library Combination in Newark [1909],” John Cotton Dana Papers, Box
13, Charles F. Cummings New Jersey Information Center, Newark Public Library.
18
“About the Museum,” The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, accessed May 17, 2020,
https://lucasmuseum.org/museum.
19
Mason Jackson, The Pictorial Press: Its Origin and Progress [1885], reprint (Detroit: Gale Research, 1968), 361.
212
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figure 0.1
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Appendix A: Figures
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h
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figure 4.4
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Creator Rich, Aaron (author)

Core Title The Hollywood research library: visual knowledge in the Republic of Images

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinematic Arts (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 07/21/2020

Defense Date 07/21/2020

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag antiquarianism,Hollywood history,LAPL history,library history,material culture,MGM auction,OAI-PMH Harvest,visual culture,visual history,Visual Studies

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Schwartz, Vanessa (committee chair), Ross, Steven (committee member), Serna, Laura Isabel (committee member)

Creator Email aaronr@usc.edu,richaaron@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-337338

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