Paramount

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The Paramount holdings at the UCLA Film and Television Archive include the entire studio output from the coming of sound in the late 1920s to l948. In many cases these studio prints are the best, or only, available materials for preservation. Paramount features and shorts have been at the forefront of the Archive's preservation program and the Archive staged a major retrospective of Paramount titles in 1987.Paramount Pictures, the most powerful motion picture corporation coming out of the l920s into the studio era, braved the adverse effects of the Depression and enjoyed financial success throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Over this three-decade span, the studio boasted an enormous diversity of talent and style including work by an impressive range of Hollywood masters. Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, Preston Sturges, Josef von Sternberg and Rouben Mamoulian among others, directed sophisticated comedies of manners and contemporary dramas, while Cecil B. DeMille crafted his famed monumental epics. The studio discovered and promoted stars as diverse as Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, Claudette Colbert, Maurice Chevalier, Mae West and George Raft. Currently, Paramount's in-house production is combined with the sponsorship of an increasing number of independently packaged films. In recent years Paramount has had a good share of Oscar winners and commercial hits: GREASE, SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER, THE GODFATHER films, the Indiana Jones series, and the films of Eddie Murphy.The Paramount collection housed at UCLA comprises more than 800 feature films, most of which are from the studio's "Golden Age." Cartoons and short subjects also constitute a sizable part of the collection. The Archive holds, for example, the acclaimed cartoons of Max and Dave Fleischer. There are also a good number of Paramount's own in-house productions, including the "Screen Songs" series and shorts featuring Little Lulu. A smaller number of newsreels and live action short subjects are part of the collection--of particular interest are the publicity shorts for Paramount features including "Hedda Hopper's Hollywood" (l94l-l942) and "Hollywood on Parade" (l932-l934).Some of the films from the Paramount collection which have been preserved and restored by the Archive include: THE WILD PARTY (l929, Dorothy Arzner); MOROCCO (l930, Josef von Sternberg); THE VIRGINIAN (l929, Victor Fleming); THE SCOUNDREL (l935, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur); REMEMBER THE NIGHT (l940, Mitchell Leisen); HIGH, WIDE AND HANDSOME (l937, Rouben Mamoulian); THE MOON'S OUR HOME (l936, William A.Seiter); ROAD TO UTOPIA (l945, Hal Walker); GLORIFYING THE AMERICAN GIRL (l929, Millard Webb).