The setting is vaguely reminiscent of the final warehouse scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. In the chilly recesses beneath Norris Theater rest row upon row of canisters, books and boxes stretching from one end of the basement to the other. The place is quite literally brimming with the stuff that made Hollywood great.
Standing watch over it is Herbert Farmer, cinema-television professor emeritus. After 60-plus years working with and teaching about film technology, the avuncular 79-year-old seems an appropriate curator for this museum of filmmaking paraphernalia.
“There are some 5,000 major items and probably untold quantities of historically interesting things here,” says Farmer as he enters the vaults kept at a constant 63 degrees Fahrenheit and 50 percent humidity.
Deactivating the security system, he reveals a room filled with old cameras, projectors, microphones and lights. The collection ranges from pre-Civil War daguerreotype apparatus to sophisticated 16mm units still in use today. There are sumptuous ones with gleaming brass fittings and lacquered wooden boxes, martial ones camouflaged in Army green for war-time service, and workaday ones in basic black, bearing nicks and scratches from much hard use. Sporting names like Edison or Bell and Howell, Lumière or Pathé Frère, they click and they clack when their hand-cranked mechanisms whir. Some of Farmer’s personal cameras are also here, including the one he used as a USC film student in the late 1930s and early ’40s.The collection also includes landmark items from the era of sound, such as the audio mixer used on The Jazz Singer (1927), the “talkie” that revolutionized the industry, and several one-of-a-kind specimens, such as plaster face castings of Fred Astaire and Clark Gable, used to design make-up effects for MGM luminaries.
In an adjacent section of the basement, thousands of film canisters rest on shelves like stacks of larger-than-life poker chips. In one nook is producer Gary Kurtz’ personal Technicolor print of Star Wars (1977). Another section of the vault holds thousands of USC student films, including The Face of Lincoln (1955) and The Resurrection of Broncho Billy (1970), both of which won Oscars for USC.
Having built up and watched over the collection for so long, Farmer harbors strong opinions about its future and the role USC plays as its steward.
“I choose to think of it not as ours, nor as a property to be sold or bargained with,” says the archivist. “It’s to be preserved until there is a proper place where it can be displayed – until there’s a museum ready to make it available to the public, to whom it really belongs.”

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