A global hub for Hollywood history

If you dream of reading the original screenplay that kicked off the "Jurassic Park" film franchise - leading to this summer's blockbuster "Jurassic World Rebirth" 32 years later - look no further than Box 1, Folder 15, of the David Koepp Papers.

That precious bit of movie history is safeguarded by UW-Madison's Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR). Koepp, a Wisconsin native who attended UW in the early '80s, entrusted it to the center along with many of his other early drafts and final scripts, including "Mission: Impossible" (1996), "Panic Room" (2002), and "War of the Worlds" (2005), to name a few.

One of the top archives of its kind in the world, the WCFTR has for 65 years been preserving - and sharing - resources from the film, theater and broadcasting industries. Although it's located on the UW-Madison campus, some 2,000 miles from Hollywood, the center's rich collection draws scholars, researchers and movie buffs from across the U.S. and around the globe.

And a rapidly growing digital presence means that many of the jewels in this fascinating collection can be accessed from anywhere, for free, 24/7. Through the center's Media History Digital Library, online visitors can view millions of pages of historical books and magazines focused on film, broadcasting and recorded sound.

There are century-old fan magazines; reams of stylish, retro graphic design from the 1940s; and even reviews of the day for movie classics like "Young Man With a Horn" (1950), starring Kirk Douglas and Doris Day.

While federal funding for some WCFTR projects is now in jeopardy, staff continue to add more materials online that put the spotlight on blockbusters and indies alike. Many provide insights into not only film history, but American culture and heritage as well.

"We are doing more than ever before to bring our collections to the world," says Kahl Family Professor of Communication Arts and Director of the WCFTR Eric Hoyt. "We have the physical archives here at UW-Madison, but we also want to get these things out online, which means we are digitizing them so they can be looked at in Green Bay, Fond du Lac, La Crosse - but also in Texas or Portugal."

Overall, the center "is a treasure trove of insight, images and ideas about film and theater," says the filmmaker and film scholar Karen Pearlman, who came from Australia to tap the center's archival riches for her book about the 20th-century American dancer and filmmaker Shirley Clarke. Pearlman and Richard James Allen, who together direct the Physical TV Company, went on to donate their papers and films to the WCFTR as well.

How did a university in flyover country become a premier destination for entertainment history? Top-notch faculty helps. And, according to experts, UW-Madison saw the value of preserving film materials long before other major institutions.

A pioneer of preservation

The Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research's collection was made possible in 1960 by a collaboration between UW-Madison and the Wisconsin Historical Society. In 1969 the center acquired the hugely significant United Artists collection, containing nearly five decades of records from the film production and distribution company founded by movie legends Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith.

Today the WCFTR is part of UW-Madison's Department of Communication Arts and contains an astonishingly wide range of holdings: not only the collections of Broadway greats such as Hal Holbrook, Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, but also rich film and television collections from pioneering late-night TV host Faye Emerson, "Twilight Zone" creator Rod Serling, MGM studio head Dore Schary, blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, and many more.

"It houses one of the best and most useful collections of material for film studies anywhere in the nation," says Thomas Doherty, a noted film scholar and professor of American studies at Brandeis University. Doherty turned to the WCFTR as he did research on blacklisted screenwriters in the 1940s for his book "Show Trial: Hollywood, HUAC, and the Birth of the Blacklist."

"Wisconsin was one of the first universities to realize that the records of the studios and filmmakers were worthy of preservation and cataloging, at a time when snooty universities turned up their noses at collections from Hollywood," he says. Longtime WCFTR Director and Film Professor Emeritus Tino Balio "played a pioneering role here. The upshot was that Wisconsin got in on the ground floor as an archive of choice for all things Hollywood."

Today, the WCFTR's archives are rivaled only by those at the University of California-Los Angeles, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the "Oscars") and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

The WCFTR continues a close partnership with the Wisconsin Historical Society: Paper documents and the center's more than 1 million photographs are housed at the historical society's headquarters and available for viewing there, while delicate reels of priceless tapes, film and other audio-visual materials are stored in climate-controlled conditions in the State Archive Preservation Facility on Madison's East Side.

For doing "the important work of cataloguing, digitizing and processing the collection" to make it accessible to the public, Hoyt credits the WCFTR's "incredibly hard-working staff" based in Vilas Hall, including assistant director Mary Huelsbeck, AV archivist Amanda Smith, part-time database developer Sam Hansen and manuscript archivist Matt St. John. Graduate student employees also help process and digitize the collection, while learning about the industry along the way. The full team meets weekly for project check-ins and to discuss new opportunities and challenges.

The center's materials are often used in the classroom. UW-Madison Communication Arts Professor Jeff Smith, for example, borrows a 16mm print of the nearly forgotten Warner Bros. movie "Nora Prentiss" for his film noir class.

The new funding picture

The WCFTR has been one of the most successful humanities units on campus in terms of receiving federal grants. From 2023 to 2025, it won three separate grants totaling $550,000 in awarded federal research dollars.

"We are world leaders among entertainment archives, and I'm very proud of that," Hoyt says. "That we have had so much success in getting competitive federal grants is a testament to it."

One of the center's largest efforts has been Project Ballyhoo, a five-year initiative to digitize and share motion picture pressbooks. The project also utilizes computational methods to explore the reuse of promotional text and images across American newspapers. The open-access database is intended to help users view the material as well as to see how these early marketing tools made their way into journalistic publications like newspapers and trade magazines.

The innovative technologies and data analytics methods created by the WCFTR team for Project Ballyhoo are designed to also serve as a model for future researchers. To speed up its work, the center has leveraged the high-level computing power of the Center for High Throughput Computing, UW-Madison's core research computing center located in the Department of Computer Sciences.

In January, Project Ballyhoo was awarded a prestigious, roughly $150,000 Digital Humanities Advancement Grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). However, less than three months later that federal grant - plus an even larger grant to digitize the work of video artist Wendy Clarke - was terminated by the government's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. The American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association responded with a lawsuit asking that the NEH funding be restored.

In July, a federal judge issued a preliminary ruling that was supportive of many of the plaintiffs' claims. Project Ballyhoo was one of the NEH awardees referenced in the decision as "among our nation's most significant humanities projects" that holds the potential to contribute something great to "our shared knowledge of America and the world." Nevertheless, the ruling did not order the NEH to immediately restore the grants.

Due to the loss of those and other federal funds, the WCFTR team is putting a greater emphasis on philanthropic fundraising and growing its base of donor support.

Still, some things remain a constant.

"The funding landscape will change," says Hoyt. "Our commitment to access, preservation and history never will." ■