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Film and television writer, biographer and Hollywood historian David Stenn discovered the UCLA Film & Television Archive when, fresh out of Yale, he moved to Los Angeles to join the groundbreaking Hill Street Blues writing team in the 1980s. It was a pivotal moment for Stenn, now a valued member of the Archive’s board of advisors, who has personally funded the Archive’s restoration of several motion pictures and leveraged his extensive network to save others.
An early-blooming cinephile, Stenn’s passion for cinema history was cemented at age eight, watching a scene from Way Down East (1920) where silent star Lillian Gish lies helpless on an ice floe hurtling toward a waterfall. The moment struck him “like a bolt of lightning.” “I wanted to know absolutely everything about these people and their films,” he said. It was a feeling that never left him.
Leading Yale’s film society only enhanced Stenn’s passion for film and discovering that the Archive held literally thousands of older films—many long thought lost—was exhilarating, until he realized most would vanish without conservation and preservation.
“Thinking I may be the last person to ever see these films was a powerful motivator to do everything I could to make sure they survived,” he said.
Stenn’s first preservation projects began while he was writing a biography of Clara Bow, cinema’s original “It Girl,” and learned her films were either missing or in urgent need of repair. He felt his work lacked impact if Bow’s artistry could not be viewed. “Imagine if Michelangelo’s work hadn’t survived and we’d have to say, ‘trust me, the Sistine Chapel looked really good,’” he said.
Determined to act, Stenn financed the Archive’s preservation of several Clara Bow films—Parisian Love (1925), Mantrap (1926) and The Saturday Night Kid (1929). He has continued supporting Archive work, recently underwriting the conservation of Slaves in Bondage (1937) and The Wages of Sin (1938), the latter premiering at last year’s UCLA Festival of Preservation. He has also partnered with the Library of Congress, The Film Foundation, the George Eastman Museum, and The Museum of Modern Art, to advance film preservation.
Today, Stenn sounds the alarm for others to safeguard moving image history. “People don’t realize how many films, including 80 percent of silent films, have been lost,” he said. “If there’s a film or a genre that you care about, it’s out there calling for your help.”