Lillian Michelson and her one-of-a-kind film library get a digital Hollywood ending

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A real Hollywood ending doesn’t always come from Hollywood; sometimes it comes from, gasp, the internet.

Or in this case, the Internet Archive, which has stepped in at the 11th hour to save the Michelson Cinema Research Library.

Lillian Michelson is Hollywood’s most famous and beloved librarian. Her marriage to late, great storyboard artist and production designer Harold Michelson brought her to Los Angeles in the late 1940s and eventually to Samuel Goldwyn Studios, where she began a lifelong career providing inspiration and information for all manner of filmmakers. Over the next half-century, she would build a cinematic research library second to none.

Six months ago that library seemed doomed to the dumpster.

After nearly six decades serving filmmakers first at Samuel Goldwyn, then the American Film Institute, Zoetrope Studio, Paramount and DreamWorks, the library filled 1,594 boxes: tens of thousands of books, photographs, magazines and a panoply of other visual resources. All of this had been sitting for five years in a storage facility, paid for by friends who could not bear to see it all destroyed.

 

Source: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/