Hollywood job is a treasure

You might say Howard Prouty is the ultimate salvage man.

Prouty, 56, a Nebraskan for his first 20 years, talks moviemakers into donating their papers and movie artifacts to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for preservation.

He's going to the Academy Awards tonight, as he does every year. It's a choice job perk. Most years — he swears — he goes through the entire evening without running into anybody famous.

“It's not that I'm trying to avoid them,” he explained from his Los Angeles office. “I have a knack for it. I shook Peter O'Toole's hand a couple years ago, but it's not why I live, to rub elbows with movie stars. I'm very keen on the history, less on the idolatry.”

If that's true, Prouty lucked into the right job.

The academy's Margaret Herrick Library contains 35,000 movie posters, 10 million photos, uncounted original screenplays used as the films were being shot, scrapbooks, costume and scenic-design drawings, music scores and sound recordings, plus books and periodicals. All of them document more than a century of moviemaking.

The library has some of these things because of Prouty.

His job — acquisitions archivist — is to negotiate with actors, directors, editors, screenwriters and others in the movie business, or their heirs, to donate their collections to the academy. Some donors are obscure. Some are world famous.

Prouty worked for years with Oscar winner Gregory Peck (“To Kill a Mockingbird”) on the donation of his papers. Peck carefully edited what the library got, limiting it to his public life. Papers about his wife, his children (a son committed suicide) and his salaries were kept private.

In contrast, the children of director Sam Peckinpah (“The Wild Bunch,” “Straw Dogs”) donated everything without looking at it.

“We got his life in paper, in all its fullness,” Prouty said. “Wives, children, relationships, liquor and pharmaceutical receipts. It reflects his somewhat messy life. For biographers, this stuff is pure gold.”

Prouty's longest job was acquiring the papers of W.C. Fields, which involved working with the actor's grandchildren.

“It took about 12 years, waiting them out and wearing them down and letting them be ready,” he said. “A donation begins with a relationship.”

Once a donation has been made, Prouty often retrieves it.

“I don't have a crew for the lifting and toting,” he said. “I do that myself, excavating things that are often not in nice neat boxes or file cabinets. They are left behind not in terrific order or states of cleanliness, not valued by those who have possession.”

Prouty spends lots of time in dead people's homes, attics, garages, backyard sheds, barns, wine cellars and storage units.

“There's a lot of dirt and bugs involved. I don't wear a suit and tie. Stuff just needs to be plunged into, to find what's worth preserving, extract it and try to make sense of it.”

Right now he's working in a basement storage unit, excavating the papers of a prominent producer still active in the business. Among maybe a thousand boxes, Prouty will determine the 200 or so that help tell the story of how movies get made.

It's not a job his beginnings in a small Nebraska town would suggest.

Prouty is the only child of Henry and Viola Prouty, both now deceased. Henry was a heavy-equipment operator. Viola wrote social news for the local paper, the Shelton Clipper.

At age 13, Prouty discovered Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine.

“That's what got me hooked on the idea that a really old film, even a silent film, was something people would still be interested in 40 or 50 years later,” he said. “I began to seek out old movies on television.”

As a student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln studying English and film, he started his own silent film society as a way to get access to prints of old movies. He soon concluded that, at least in the early 1970s, he couldn't study film history seriously in Nebraska.

“I flipped a coin at the kitchen table, to go either to NYU or UCLA,” he said. California won. He established residency while working for a bookstore in Westwood, Calif., then enrolled at UCLA in the fall of 1976.

After a brief flirtation with being a moviemaker, born of a student film that won an award, Prouty graduated and settled into a reference job at the American Film Institute's library in Beverly Hills. It was a bare-bones operation. In 1986, he learned of an opening at the academy's library.

“They had just gotten the Hitchcock papers and the John Huston papers, plus a lot of old production code files from the Hays Office,” Prouty said.

The Hays Office preceded today's movie rating system and exercised great power in censoring movie content. Prouty felt lucky to be one of about 30 library staffers wading through such materials.

Today, 65 academy library staffers toil to catalog donations in a timely fashion, making bits of movie history available to researchers, biographers, documentary makers and a recently hot industry: those who make DVD extras.

Prouty admitted he's not immune to being star-struck.

“My favorite photo in the library is of Maurice Chevalier, inscribed personally to Charles Boyer. They're the two ultimate French guys on the screen.”

Another prized object is the original screenplay of “From Here to Eternity,” used by director Fred Zinnemann while shooting the movie. It's covered with his notes.

“It's an invaluable artifact,” Prouty said. “And it's preserved and made useful to people, which is the whole idea.”

For Prouty, tonight's Academy Awards are simply history in the making.

Contact the writer:

444-1269, bob.fischbach@owh.com

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