Current Exhibitions
Mobsters, Molls, and Mayhem: A Year in the Life of Los Angeles
Doheny Memorial Library, ground-floor rotunda
February 15–May 15, 2008
The year 1958 was especially fruitful for anyone looking to capitalize on the latest salacious scandal in Los Angeles. The sensational trial of movie star Lana Turner’s daughter (accused of murdering Johnny Stompanato) grabbed the most headlines while violent gangster Mickey Cohen was regularly caught picking fights all over town. In addition, plenty of unexpected events provided rich fodder for the camera lens, from the Dodgers’ controversial cross-country move to everyday scenes of damage and destruction. These pictures illuminate a darker side of the City of Angels, one where L.A.’s popular facade as a halcyon land of swaying palm trees and burnished beaches gives way to real-life stories of crime, corruption, and chaos. The striking images were taken by photographers working for the now-defunct Los Angeles Examiner newspaper. Newly printed from negatives held by the USC Libraries regional history collection, they reflect how much (or perhaps how little) has changed here in the intervening fifty years. Thousands of additional images from the Examiner can be viewed online through USC’s Digital Archive at digarc.usc.edu.
The Art of Film Adaptation
Doheny Memorial Library, first-floor Treasure Room
February 2–May 16, 2008
Since the birth of cinema, filmmakers have taken on the challenges of adapting literature for the silver screen. The earliest effort was Trilby and Little Billee (1896), based on George du Maurier’s gothic novel. Transforming a two-hundred-page novel into a two-hour film requires screenwriters to make delicate artistic choices while trimming the source material and translating it into a new artistic medium. In 1924, Austrian director Erich von Stroheim famously attempted a literal, scene-by-scene adaptation of Frank Norris’s McTeague, resulting in a nearly ten-hour film. MGM made drastic cuts before releasing it widely in theaters. Since then, directors and audiences have come to accept that literary works require significant changes to make an effective transition to the screen. This exhibition examines sixteen classic adaptations, from the 1927 Jazz Singer to the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Each display illustrates how an image from the film was realized from the shooting script and the relevant scene in the original literary source. The Art of Film Adaptation complements the twentieth-annual USC Libraries Scripter Award, honoring the writers of the year’s most accomplished film adaptation and the novel or short story that inspired it.