Top of page
Posted by: Mike Mashon
There’s lots of reminiscing in the Moving Image Section today about Robin Williams. My younger colleagues first remember him from Aladdin (1992) and Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), for others it was his Eighties films Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) and Dead Poets Society (1989), and for folks of my generation, he’ll always be a little bit Mork. …
Posted in: Copyright, Motion Pictures, Television
Posted by: Mike Mashon
Last week my colleague Daniel Blazek told the interesting story of how the Library came to acquire audio transcription discs of 1960s-era Tonight Show broadcasts via the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service. Of course, the very existence of these discs is, to say the least, unexpected—record discs of TV show audio?—and given the preservation …
Posted in: Copyright, Film/Video, Television
Posted by: Mike Mashon
Like a lot of boomers, The Brady Bunch (ABC, 1969-1974) was a beloved television show of my early youth. It was easy to envy the Bradys. They lived in a large, airy house with a big kitchen, a magnificent open staircase, and, especially, a yard made out of artificial turf. Occasionally a celebrity like Joe …
Posted in: Copyright, Television
Posted by: Mike Mashon
The Library’s moving image collections began with a bureaucratic decision. In August 1893, an unnamed employee (but most likely W.K.L. Dickson) of the Thomas Edison Laboratories in West Orange, NJ, where work had been going on for several years to develop motion picture photography, sent sequential frames from various camera tests to the Copyright Office. …
Posted in: Copyright, Motion Pictures, Paper Prints
Posted by: Mike Mashon
While it’s very easy to identify the oldest surviving motion picture registered for copyright—Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze, which I talked about in this post—it’s much trickier pinpointing the oldest copyrighted television program. [I’ll wait here while you do an internet search on “first copyrighted film” and then “first copyrighted tv show.” See what …
Posted in: Copyright, Television
Posted by: Mike Mashon
Although the collections of the NAVCC are rightfully associated with audiovisual content (after all, it’s in our name), we have a tremendous amount of paper records—well in excess of two million items. And for moving images, this documentation really runs the gamut: posters, lobby cards, photographs, festival catalogs, scripts, trade periodicals, press kits, and on …
Posted in: Copyright, Motion Pictures