Film collection valued at $6.4 million given to Smathers Libraries

November 29, 2006

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — “Dick Tracy,” “Flash Gordon,” “Captain Kidd,” “Li’l Abner,” “Oliver Twist,” – and thousands of other vintage films now have a permanent home in the George A. Smathers Libraries and will be available for research and enjoyment, thanks to vintage film collector Bill Brothers of Stuart, Fla.

Brothers has always loved movies and remembers the wonderful days of the Saturday afternoon matinee at the local downtown theater. Unfortunately, many of the movies and shorts he fondly remembers were destroyed en masse because of storage concerns when broadcasting technology advanced and tape changed to smaller, more compact formats.

Brothers, who graduated from the University of Florida in 1978 with a bachelor’s in business administration, became involved in collecting films six years ago as a result of his career: He is a broadcaster who has owned television stations and currently owns numerous FM radio stations throughout the country.

His moving image library, appraised at $6.4 million, consists of more than 1,200 titles released between 1908 and 1963. The library includes a wide variety of motion picture and film categories such as drama, comedy, war, shorts, thrillers, science fiction, mystery, family, fantasy, westerns, adventures, romance, horror, crime and musicals on one-inch tape, three-quarter-inch tape and film.

Though most of the collection dates from the 1930s through 1950s and is black and white film, some of the early films are from the silent era. There is also a collection of early newsreels from the 1930s and 1940s. Included are a large number of musical shorts that theaters played before the feature film and that helped to sell the latest hit records from the likes of Glenn Miller or Tommy Dorsey. Many of the earliest animations are also included.

Newsreels, musical shorts and cartoons were all shown to entertain movie audiences before the feature film and lengthen the entertainment experience.

Researching, documenting and analyzing the collection to determine its scope took Brothers several years and was an enormous undertaking.

“It was like digging in a mine,” said Brothers. “The more you work, the more you find.”

Brothers wants his library to be protected and preserved for future use and enjoyment and, as an alumnus, UF was a natural choice for him to choose to house the collection. He is hopeful that it will be comprehensively cataloged and as funds are raised, converted to digital format to make it easily accessible for anyone to view and use for research.

Brothers said that faculty can benefit from the collection by examining the moving images of events and using them to illustrate various points in history to their classes. Students will able to look back at history and see the skyline of New York in 1928; see the dress, the language, the mannerism of our society as they changed through the early part of the century.

“Even more,” said Brothers, “it is the projected perception of the times. In something as simple as ‘Flash Gordon,’ it is the past guessing at our future.”

“In these films you can see racism in action, before the impact of civil rights. There is so much to visibly see in these films, if one just takes the time to look. The researcher can see the popularity of smoking, furs, environmental degradation, styles, fashion, propaganda and news of the day. It is life the way we as a people visualized it. It is a large collection that reflects the early history of American filmmaking,” he added.

John Ingram, deputy director at Smathers Libraries, was an active player in having the collection come to UF.

“I echo Bill’s comments on the value of these motion pictures that span two world wars and beyond. They provide enormous amounts of information on societal mores, political attitudes, racial relations, as well as opening windows on material cultures, both real and historically imagined,” said Ingram. “Our greatest challenge now is to raise funds through grants and outright gifts to reformat these materials into digital formats that will be much more easily accessed to all our users.”