Buyer Donates Silent Movies to UCLA Archive

The only thing missing Monday was the triumphant booming of the Wurlitzer organ as one silent movie cliffhanger was resolved.

Film curators in Westwood announced that the movie buff who purchased most of the inventory of the nation’s only silent movie theater last month has decided to place them in UCLA’s Film and Television Archive.

The donation by David W. Packard brings to nearly 2,500 the number of old-time silent movie features and shorts from Hollywood’s Silent Movie Theatre that are housed at the UCLA archive. It also ends a mystery over the fate of the movie house’s one-of-a-kind collection.

Packard, son of Hewlett-Packard computer pioneer Bill Packard, bid by telephone to purchase 500 titles during a May 23 auction of the ill-fated theater’s film collection. At the time, his identity was kept confidential by auction officials.

The collection had been considered the centerpiece of the Fairfax Avenue movie house, whose 74-year-old owner and operator, Laurence W. Austin, was murdered in 1997.

UCLA officials said the films acquired by Packard during the auction will be added to about 2,000 silent movies that Packard purchased in 1987 from the Silent Movie Theatre’s founder and deposited with the archive.

Packard, of Palo Alto, is a movie fan who has operated his own movie revival house, the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto, since the late 1980s. As part of his film preservation effort, he runs the Stanford Theatre Foundation.

UCLA officials said they are not certain how much Packard paid Austin’s estate for the 500 films. He could not be reached for comment.

But Packard’s latest acquisition includes such classics as the 1928 “The Dove” starring Norma Talmadge and Gilbert Roland, a 1926 Laurel and Hardy film called “With Love and Hisses” and a portion of a rare 1916 serial starring Pearl White called “Pearl of the Army,” said UCLA film curator Eddie Richmond.

Packard’s “great generosity and leadership in the areas of film preservation and exhibition of classic films” was praised by Robert Rosen, dean of UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television.

The deposit of the 500 additional films means that UCLA now has about 80% of the silent movies collected by Silent Movie Theatre founder John Hampton.

That drew praise Monday from old-time movie fans such as Michael Krumme, who had bemoaned the breakup of the collection after last month’s auction.

“I’m delighted. It would have been awful to lose those films,” said Krumme, a Los Angeles paralegal. “And as a UCLA alum, I’m tickled.”

Packard has long had ties to UCLA. Before creating his film foundation, he served on the Westwood campus as a humanities professor who specialized in literary classics.

In a 1990 interview, the Harvard-educated Packard compared silent movies with some of the Greek classics.

“Perhaps this is lost in a time of cynicism, when the focus is all on stars and budgets and the commercial consideration of marketing,” he told a San Francisco newspaper at the time.

Charlie Lustman, a local film buff who recently purchased the Silent Movie Theatre building and sought unsuccessfully to buy much of its inventory at last month’s auction, said Monday that he hopes to strike an agreement with UCLA to return some of the movies to Fairfax Avenue for screenings.

UCLA officials said they routinely show archival films for scholars and students and loan them to nonprofit groups.