The Harry Ransom Center has awarded over a dozen fellowships for 2021-2022 to The University of Texas at Austin faculty and graduate students through the Center’s new UT-Austin Fellowship program. The new fellows reflect the interdisciplinary nature of the Center’s collections and represent a wide range of departments, programs, and schools across the university. [Read more…] about Fellowships awarded to UT-Austin faculty and graduate students
Film
The women who made Selznick’s screenplays
by ERIN MCGUIRL
This essay is part of a slow research series, What is Research? Learn about the series and click here to add your voice to the conversation.
Research is part of the history of Hollywood’s Golden age. Eighty years ago, in the heyday of the studio system, little libraries on studio lots employed a handful of people who collaborated with writers, directors, producers, and designers to dig up the details that made the movies look and sound authentic. Studio researchers made sure that audiences were focused on the story, not the modern look of a movie set in the nineteenth century. [Read more…] about The women who made Selznick’s screenplays
All hail The Queen! An interview with drag historian Joe E. Jeffreys
Inside the spring 2020 Stories to Tell exhibition, Ransom Center film curator Steve Wilson explores the archive related to the recently restored film, The Queen, which documents the 1967 “Miss All American Camp Beauty Pageant” held in Manhattan. The New York contest was a parody of the Miss America pageant and featured drag queens when laws against cross-dressing and widespread anti-gay attitudes put the participants at great personal risk. The Center worked in partnership with Kino-Lorber to restore the film, and in 2019, The Queen was re-released. Learn more through this Q&A with multi-platform drag historian and videographer Joe E. Jeffreys (read more). [Read more…] about All hail The Queen! An interview with drag historian Joe E. Jeffreys
THE QUEEN
Lewis Allen was a respected theater and film producer. His biggest hits on stage were Annie (1983), I’m Not Rappaport (1985), A Few Good Men (1989), and Master Class (1995). His films include The Connection (1961), The Lord of the Flies (1963), and Fahrenheit 451 (1966). But, when Allen’s daughter Brooke donated her father’s archive to the Ransom Center in 2006, she told me that of all her father’s films, the one which he was most proud of was a 1968 documentary called The Queen. [Read more…] about THE QUEEN
Early special effects
Leslie DeLassus is a film historian and instructor with a Ph.D. in Film Studies from the University of Iowa. While working on her Ph.D, DeLassus came to the Ransom Center to research early film special effects innovator, Norman O. Dawn, and his groundbreaking work.
Preserving a Texas villain: Leatherface
I have yet to encounter someone who doesn’t know of the 1974 horror classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. While you may not have seen it, you’ve almost assuredly heard of it. The film follows five teenagers on their way to visit a desecrated grave when they pick up a hitchhiker. They find themselves at the hitchhiker’s family home where they are thrust into a world of terror. The hitchhiker is the brother of a chainsaw wielding, cannibalistic serial killer called Leatherface, a name born from his grisly habit of creating and wearing flesh masks from his victims. [Read more…] about Preserving a Texas villain: Leatherface