Monday, July 30, 2007


Jul. 30, 2007 (McClatchy-Tribune Regional News delivered by Newstex) --
When Rick Remmert was organizing a 25-year reunion for the University of Miami's 1982 national championship baseball team, he ordered a slew of memorabilia, including orange, green and white M&Ms.

But what the reunited ballplayers treasured most was a reel of their winning season, partially compiled by the Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archive.

'Seeing yourself as a young man winning the national championship, now that's pretty darn special,' said Remmert, who was the school's assistant athletic director in 1982. 'There's not many places you can go to get your history back.'

Over the years, curator and preservationist Barron Sherer has accommodated many requests like Remmert's -- people seeking film from a time when video cameras were scarce.

He also gets requests from people like Ken Burns. It's where the acclaimed filmmaker went for footage of the historic Hampton House Motel when he was making his 10-part documentary Jazz.

And when fashion and interior designers are searching for Art Deco Miami Beach inspiration, it's one of the first places they contact.

Now the archive has added to its extensive Florida history with a massive donation from WPLG-ABC 10. Five thousand three-quarter-inch u-matic tapes of newscasts from the '70s and '80s will join the eight million feet of film and countless hours on beta, videotape and DVDs stored in the archive.

HOPES OF DIGITIZING

For now, the footage will remain in that format, but the archive hopes to digitize it and all the footage it has in storage.

'There are a lot of dates that are not accounted for, in terms of the news. And even if we have it, this is another perspective,' Sherer said.

The local TV station is gearing up for a move from its headquarters on Biscayne Boulevard to an office on Hallandale Beach Boulevard in Pembroke Park.

'Our new building will be bigger, so we have the space, but this is just a matter of what we need,' said WPLG News Director Bill Pahovey. 'We'll still have access to it, but now the public will also.'

Among the footage in the donation: the station's 1980 coverage of the McDuffie riots and the Mariel boatlift.

The Wolfson archive opened in 1986 and is partially funded by local, state and federal grants. It's located in a 1,500-square-foot room of the main branch of the Miami-Dade Public Library downtown.

Dedicated to film produced in or about Florida, the archive houses everything from county-commissioned videos to promotional videos made for local tourist attractions, like Parrot Jungle, now called Jungle Island.

The footage dates as far back as 1910. Film that runs the risk of deteriorating or holds significant historical importance has been restored to original quality.

Some of it is wacky only-in-Miami images like one-time sideshow, vaudeville and movie stars Violet and Daisy Hilton -- Siamese twins -- operating their snack stand on West Flagler in 1960.

Stacked in reels, the titles alone tell the story of the area -- 1926 Miami after Hurricane; 1955 Overtown Easter Parade; 1961 Dade County Jail.

The Wolfson also collects home videos donated by Floridians, a rarity among archives.

Only about 10 moving image archives in the country collect amateur films, said Rosemary Hanes, moving image reference librarian at the Library of Congress.

'This is video that was shot without financial interest. They tell us a lot about America's history, politically, personally, artistically,' Hanes said. 'It's a record of our culture, our history, our society.'

The archive welcomes all donations and dubs the film into VHS or DVD for the donors.

'When I got here in 1991, we had about an hour of home movies,' Sherer said. 'Now we have thousands.'

Among the 300 families represented in the film are two black Miami families -- one identified as the Hayeses; the other unidentified. The film is of the families spending time at the designated black beach at Virginia Key Park.

'When you think about it, you don't see a lot of that stuff on television from the days of segregation; what you see are white families,' Sherer said. 'We get requests from scholars from all over the world for the footage.'

In addition to the donated material, the archive has been recording and storing every South Florida newscast since 1989.

CLIMATE CORRECT

The archive's main room is climate-controlled to protect the film -- temperature at 68 degrees, humidity at a minimum. Other storage locations exist throughout the city.

For a fee, Sherer will comb through footage and compile reels for clients. Depending on what the footage will be used for, prices range from $100 to $2,000.

'For John Q. Public, it'll probably be $100 to $150,' Sherer said. 'But if it's for distribution, all of the licensing fees can make it go as high as $3,000.'

More than half the footage in Billy Corben's 2006 documentary Cocaine Cowboys came from the archive.

Independent producer Molly Bernstein's documentary on Cuban-American dancer Pedro Ruiz aired on PBS's In the Life in June. She used footage from the archive of his hometown.

'I rarely get to use home footage in my films,' she said. 'But it's more atmospheric. It evokes emotion.'

Requests also come in from Hollywood -- for research .

When Oliver Stone was making Born on the Fourth of July, JFK and The Doors, he requested material. When Michael Mann made Ali, he contacted the archive.

'He wanted to know what the front of his house looked like, what the gym where he trained was like,' said Sherer, who found footage of the boxing legend watering the lawn at his Allapattah house in old WTVJ newscasts. Novelists also come in search of inspiration.

'With a moving image . . . there's a richness to it that you can't get from a still photograph,' Sherer said.

Every month, the archive gets about a dozen calls from people who were one of the 14,000 South Florida children who sat in the audience of The Skipper Chuck Show, the long-running children's television show. But although the show was broadcast for several decades, most of it was not recorded.

The archive has only 10 episodes on file. It also gets many calls from Cuban Americans hoping to find footage of their parents arriving in Miami in the 1960s.

The archive is open to the public by appointment, but only Sherer, another preservationist, Erin Clark, and two interns can handle the film.

'These are one-of-a-kind,' Sherer said. 'They are artifacts. You couldn't ask to hold the first American flag, could you?'

Newstex ID: KRTB-0123-18509603


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