The Man Behind Rock’s Smithsonian : Pop music: Collector Michael Ochs expands his comprehensive Venice-based archives to include the raw materials of movies, pop culture and beyond.

Michael Ochs sat at a table in the yard of his Venice headquarters and proudly fanned out his latest treasures: impeccable, ‘50s-vintage photographs of a boyish Johnny Carson clowning in a pool . . . a bespectacled James Dean sticking out his tongue during a formal dinner . . . a brooding Robert Mitchum . . . a laughing Marlon Brando.

“This was like being a real detective,” Ochs said of the acquisition. “It was a damn near 20-year search for these negatives.”

That tenacity, combined with a photographic memory, a huckster’s spiel, a collector’s appetite and a passion for pop music and film has shaped the Michael Ochs Archives, a budding Smithsonian Institution for the raw materials of movies, rock ‘n’ roll and beyond.

The archives’ compound, including a high-security, temperature-controlled concrete fortress, houses more than 100,000 records, close to 2 million photographs and assorted ephemera.

Archival photographs appear regularly in such magazines as People, Time, Newsweek and Rolling Stone as well as rock fanzines, in video documentaries and in the liner notes of countless album/CD reissues. He’s contributed to all the musical projects of Andrew Solt, the producer-director behind such admired documentaries as “This Is Elvis,” “Imagine: John Lennon” and “Heroes of Rock ‘n’ Roll.”

“I call up and say, ‘Michael, I need some great stills of Elvis on the set of one of his movies in the ‘50s before the Army,” Solt says, “and he’ll suddenly come up with stuff you can’t believe exists. Wherever we tread, he comes up with it. He really is a major source of pop culture and has catalogued it beautifully.”

Ochs, 49, was born in Texas and grew up in Ohio and New York City. His physician father moved the family often, and the teen-age Ochs escaped from his loneliness in rock ‘n’ roll.

“I went to three high schools in four years,” he said. “I’d go to school, didn’t know anybody. I’d come home and play records.”

He was so determined to hear everything that he got a job delivering records to drugstores in Ohio--getting paid in records rather than money.

After graduating in 1966 from Ohio State University in film and television writing, Ochs managed his folk-singing brother Phil for two years, then moved to Los Angeles and became Columbia Records’ West Coast manager of publicity in 1969.

As he saw old records become increasingly rare, he revised his obsession from hearing everything to acquiring everything. He filled out his record collection and began collecting performers’ photos.

The archives grew into the dominant force in the rock image marketplace, and the recent, CD-fueled surge in reissues has boosted business to its highest level ever. Now Ochs--who will conduct a 10-session course on the history of rock ‘n’ roll for UCLA Extension starting April 8--has ventured into non-musical areas, adding movie stars and generic subjects to the collection and publishing books of rediscovered Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley photos.

Whose images are in demand these days?

“There are certain givens that are icons, like Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Elvis Presley. I don’t even know if Springsteen will maintain that status. I know Bowie hasn’t. Beatles and Stones yes. . . . (Punk), surprisingly not. We get regular calls but nothing big. Sex Pistols especially. It’s hard to see a trend or anything. It goes all over the place.”

Scooping up material from estates, photographers, ex-writers, defunct publishers, other collectors, the artists themselves and the garages of retired record company employees, Ochs has generated an irresistible mass and momentum for his enterprise. The bigger it gets, the easier it is to get more.

“I use this concept which could come off as BS, but I use it to talk people out of stuff,” he said. “It’s the greater good concept: ‘It should be in the archives and you know it.’ ”