 "Photo: Bruno Morlan")
Editor's Note: This is the second part of a series on the various resources available to students at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. This article is an overview of the film and manuscript collections.
A curious student walking into the Harry Ransom Center is like a kid walking into a candy shop; there are more treats than you could imagine, but it's overwhelming to the point of intimidation.
With 36 million manuscript pages, more than one million rare books, five million photographs and an extensive film collection, it is no surprise that some UT students bypass the center's entrance, never to take advantage of the experience that goes with handling an original movie script or reading authors' letters.
"The biggest hurdle is getting in the door," said Molly Schwartzburg, curator of British and American literature. "But that's the same with everything you do. You have to take initiative."
Beige and gray archival boxes line the center's seventh floor hallways, each filled with materials from literature and film. Schwartzburg said students have to walk in, admit they do not know what they are doing and ask questions.
It is the job of the staff to help students find what they need, but students have to come in with an idea of what they are looking for, said film curator Steve Wilson.
"Contact the curator, for whatever department or subject area," Wilson said. "It's our job to help you get access to the stuff. We know it's intimidating. Our number one constituency is UT students, so we want you to come in and see this stuff."
The largest archive at the center is that of David O. Selznick, the Hollywood producer of Oscar-winning movies such as "Gone with the Wind" and "Rebecca," according to the center's collection guide.
The archive, which was acquired in the early 1980s and took two years to catalog, contains 5,000 boxes and hundreds of paintings, Wilson said.
The room devoted solely to Selznick's archive has drawers full of original storyboards for "Gone with the Wind," some of which were taken out of the movie, Wilson said. The production design on the film was very radical for that time period, which is evident from the intense colors painted on the storyboards, he said.
Wilson said his favorite aspect of studying archives is reading all of the correspondence between the writers, directors and actors because the thoughts and feelings that were going through their minds become tangible.
"Selznick issued hundreds of memos every day," Wilson said. "Consequently, his every thought about the film and process is in writing. What is Steven Spielberg doing with his e-mails now? Everybody e-mails, but is anybody saving them?"
Robert De Niro's collection, acquired in 2006, gets people excited because of the name recognition, he said. The center is working to have that open for research, but Wilson said they are having special problems that do not normally come up because De Niro is a working actor and the people he has worked with are still around.
"In the case of De Niro, it's like swallowing a watermelon," he said. "There is so much stuff to take in at one time. We go through papers and find Francis Ford Coppola's home phone number. We can't let that type of private information out."
The center's director, Thomas Staley, said he is partial to manuscripts because they are so unique.
"The greatest frustration in my job is here I am, amidst all of these fantastic resources, and I don't get time to write as much as I would like," Staley said. "I used to write about James Joyce and a number of other writers."
Schwartzburg said she teaches a senior seminar in the English department about poetry and her students have the opportunity to look at any poetry collections they want, so they have been thumbing through the center's manuscripts.
The center has an extensive archive of Don DeLillo's work, which she said students have shown a lot of interest in because of his significance as a writer and his correspondence with many other important writers.
"If there is a writer that you're passionate about, just because their name doesn't appear on the center's list doesn't mean we don't have interesting material," she said. "Sometimes there are letters in another writer's archive by a writer you're excited about, which is really fascinating and wonderful."
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