February, 1999: On February 24, as part of the nation's celebrations for the year 2000, the National Endowment for the Arts announced $500,000 in Millennium funds for the Treasures of American Film Archives initiative. Organized by the National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF) and twelve film archives from coast to coast, this is the most ambitious cooperative venture ever undertaken by the U.S. film archive community. The initiative targets "orphan films," newsreels, silent films, home movies, experimental works, documentaries and other independent productions not protected by commercial interests.

UCLA is one of twelve archives participating in the project, including: Alaska Film Archives, Anthology Film Archives, George Eastman House, Japanese American National Museum, Minnesota Historical Society, Museum of Modern Art, National Center for Jewish Film, New York Public Library, Northeast Historic Film, Pacific Film Archive and West Virginia State Archives. Together these film archives will be preserving examples of virtually every type of American filmmaking over the past one hundred years.

The UCLA Film and Television Archive has identified a number of important preservation efforts as part of its Millennium project. Newsreel footage of Marian Anderson's 1939 Easter Sunday concert in Washington, D.C. is the most ambitious. Denied the ability to perform at Constitution Hall because of her race, Marian Anderson ultimately sang before a crowd of 75,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial. Using a recording of NBCís broadcast of the concert as a guide, preservationists will combine preserved newsreel footage of her performance with crowd coverage, shots of notables like Hugo Black, Harold Ickes Sr. and Eleanor Roosevelt, and various Washington, D.C. locations to create an edited concert film of this historic event.

In another project, UCLA will preserve a group of animated shorts by Ub Iwerks, an animation pioneer who headed his own studio in the early 1930s. A third group of films to be preserved are one and two reelers from the Vitagraph Company (a leader in motion picture production between 1896 and 1925). Three silent features will be preserved with Millennium funding: ìLena Riversî (1914), one of the few pre-World War I features to survive in complete form; "Peggy Leads the Way" (1917), starring Mary Miles Minter; and "The Hushed Hour" (1919), a film about children fulfilling a dying parent's wish. A final preservation project undertaken by UCLA will be "Vanity Fair" (1932), an independently produced Hollywood feature now in the public domain, starring Myrna Loy as a modern-day Becky Sharpe.

The UCLA Film and Television Archive is the largest university-based collection of motion pictures and television programs in the world. Its holdings comprise more than 200,000 feature-length, short-subject and animated films, television shows, news programs and the entire 27 million foot collection of Hearst Metrotone Newsreels. The Archive is internationally acclaimed for its painstaking work in film preservation, and has led the archival field in such areas as color, tinting and sound restoration. It is equally known for its commitment to making the collection accessible to students and scholars, and for its ambitious year-round public screenings of the best in American and international cinema.