Quiet on the Set!
Photo/Eric Mankin
At a stop, Van Wyck’s mother gave her a dollar to buy an armload of screen magazines - magazines that Van Wyck’s journalist mother had written for and that often featured stories about her actor father.
Van Wyck devoured the magazines. Then she carefully clipped and filed them as she has through the nearly 70 years since that train ride.
At the end of her visit to the fair, said Van Wyck, "I came home with 40 pounds of excess baggage, and I was hooked.”
Her efforts now fill two long rows of file cabinets in the stacks of USC’s Doheny Memorial Library.
The clipping continues to this day, as she makes bi-monthly trips from her Orange County home to the library, adding the latest news to the Constance McCormick Collection, which includes information on more than 1,000 screen personalities, many still household names, others much less familiar.
Van Wyck (who has since remarried) donated the already sizable collection to the university on her 40th birthday, Nov. 2, 1966. It has grown to many thousands of items offering film students and scholars a unique window into film and 20th-century American popular culture.
"Connie's scrapbooks feature almost every article done about individual actors and actresses from the 1930s to the present time," said cinema-television head librarian Stephen L. Hanson.
"We used her materials extensively for the Frank Sinatra exhibit. I think she had about 14 books of clippings on Sinatra," Hanson said.
Van Wyck’s clipping books also include thousands of film reviews arranged so that a user instantly can tell how a movie was received at the time.
For the most part, the old reviews are unavailable electronically and otherwise would have to be laboriously retrieved by tracking down collections of publications, many of which no longer exist.
Van Wyck's fascination with the material may be chromosomal. Her father was Lucien Littlefield, a character actor whose career began in 1913. Her mother Constance Palmer, a reporter for a Philadelphia newspaper, traveled to Los Angeles while she was still in her early 20s to interview Rudolf Valentino and met Littlefield on the set of “The Sheik.” The couple married soon after.
Van Wyck and her husband William are now extending their relationship with USC.
The Van Wycks recently pledged $10,000, part of which will be used for new display cases to house the still-expanding collection. The balance will fund a continuing lecture series on the material.
The world of popular film culture has changed with the advent of the World Wide Web, as Van Wyck knows. But she feels her role has not lost its value.
And librarian Hanson agrees.
The Web has electronic search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, he said, "but Connie's scrapbooks are actually easier for students to use because everything is right there in one place."
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USC in the News
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The Chronicle of Higher Education mentioned USC’s $6 billion fundraising campaign. The story noted that USC had already raised $1 billion in a “quiet phase,” including the $200 million naming gift from USC Trustee and alumnus David Dornsife and wife Dana Dornsife to the USC Dornsife College.
The Guardian (U.K.) highlighted two major gifts to USC in a list of the 10 biggest philanthropic benefactors in America. The list included the $200 million naming gift from USC Trustee and alumnus David Dornsife and wife Dana Dornsife to the USC Dornsife College, and the $110 million gift from USC Trustee and USC Viterbi School alumnus John Mork and wife Julie to create the USC Mork Family Scholars Program.
The New York Times featured the USC U.S.-China Institute documentary “Assignment: China — The Week that Changed the World.” The documentary, part of a series, examines media coverage of the 1972 Nixon trip that reshaped U.S.-China relations after a quarter century of isolation and hostility. “People look back now and take it for granted that the outcome was preordained,” said the institute’s Mike Chinoy, who produced the documentary. Voice of America also featured the story.
Los Angeles Times featured the Oscar Senti-meter, a tool developed by the USC Annenberg School, Los Angeles Times and IBM that analyzes thousands of tweets about the Academy Awards nominees. The story noted that Mexican actor Demian Bechir received an enormous boost on Twitter the day of the nominations, with a total of 6,893 tweets mentioning him, a 47-fold increase from the day before. The story noted the tool uses language-recognition technology developed in collaboration with USC Viterbi School’s Signal Analysis and Interpretation Lab.
The Times of India (India) featured a three-day medical emergency training workshop organized in association with USC. At the workshop, held at GCS Medical College in India, 50 doctors and more than 100 paramedics learned how to improve emergency support systems. William Mallon of the Keck School of USC said that discussion topics included the use of portable ultrasonic devices to scan patients. “The ultrasound applications help physicians make accurate and timely decisions,” he noted. Daily News & Analysis (India) also featured the workshop.
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