David Shepard (1940–2017)

Author(s): Jan-Christopher Horak

Source: The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists ,
Vol. 17, No. 1 (Spring 2017), pp. 85-88
Published by: University of Minnesota Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/movingimage.17.1.0085

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DaviD ShePaRD
(1940–2017)
JAN-CHRISTOPHER HORAK

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 horak
86

In an interview from December 2000,

David Shepard noted that he was not re-
ally interested in preserving American
sound films because their copyrights
are owned by the major studios: “I
would rather work for my own account,
not so much for finances, but because I
don’t like people sticking their thumbs
in my stuff and telling me how to do it.”
Indeed, although David was one of this
country’s best known film preservation-
ists, he worked for the great majority
of his career outside the institutions of
film preservation, privately buying, sell-
ing, collecting, trading, transferring (to Figure 1. David Shepard, 2006.
Photograph by Carol Yoho
electronic media), and distributing the silent films he from the Kansas Silent Film
loved best. For his life work, he earned the gratitude and Festival.

admiration of generations of collectors and film buffs,

as numerous obituaries attest. Yet within the film archival community, he remained
a somewhat controversial figure, precisely because of his lone-wolf status as a film
collector.
Born in New York City in October 1940, David H. Shepard grew up in Tenafly,
New Jersey. At the age of five, he discovered silent films when his uncle brought a 9.5mm
projector and films back from World War II France. By the time he was twelve, Shepard
had bought himself a used 16mm projector and was purchasing reels of film from various
libraries. His father also took him to screenings at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
Thus began a lifelong obsession.
While earning a bachelor’s degree in religion and philosophy from Hamilton
College (1962) and a master’s degree in American studies from Penn State (1963), Shepard
continued to pursue his avocation. He broke off his doctoral studies at Penn State in 1968
when Richard Kahlenberg of the newly founded American Film Institute (AFI) hired David
as an associate archivist. His brief: to save American films, especially from the nitrate
era. In 2011, Shepard received an honorary doctorate from the University of Colorado.
At AFI, David was credited with securing hundreds of silent American films,
including the Paramount Collection, which, along with Kahlenberg’s acquisition of the
RKO catalog, formed the basis of the AFI Collection at the Library of Congress. As a

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 87 d a v i d s h e p a rd ( 1 9 4 0 – 2 0 1 7 )

longtime collector, David had excellent contacts in that community—unlike most institu-
tional archivists, who considered collectors film pirates. He was thus able to bring many
unique films into the archive, even if that sometimes meant making 16mm print-downs
for trading purposes. Unfortunately, the AFI’s funding structure soon changed. Grants
from the National Endowment for the Arts were now given directly to the film archives,
while the AFI merely coordinated the grant procedure. Its collections increasingly were
divided between the Library of Congress, the George Eastman Museum, MoMA, and the
University of California, Los Angles (UCLA).
In 1973, Shepard moved to Blackhawk Films in Davenport, Iowa, as head of
product development. There he felt he could make silent films accessible and not just
“preserve them for the shelf.” Shepard noted, “Blackhawk had customers who remem-
bered the films when they were new. . . . Blackhawk had a pretty good library, a couple
of thousand films, and they had, independent of anyone else—sitting out there in the
prairie—developed their own equipment and techniques for making extremely high
quality copies.”
Three years later, Shepard accepted a job at the Directors Guild of America
(DGA) to work on special projects, a position he retained until 1988. He organized the
DGA Oral History Program, interviewing silent film directors like Henry King and King
Vidor and coproduced the Academy Award–winning Precious Images (Chuck Workman,
1986) and several other films. He founded the DGA’s Workshop for Educators.
A few years after moving to Los Angeles, David Shepard joined the faculty of
the University of Southern California as a visiting professor, an appointment he kept for
thirty-four years. Several generations of film students benefited from his film history
courses, which were structured around gorgeous prints from his own collection. David
also taught briefly at UCLA, where Alexander Payne was one of his prize students.
Meanwhile, Blackhawk had closed its doors in 1987, its catalog of 16mm and
8mm prints unable to compete with the growing videotape market. A year later, Shepard
left the DGA after purchasing Blackhawk and moved the company into video and DVD
distribution through a newly founded company, Film Preservation Associates. After
the turn of the twenty-first century, Shepard formed partnerships for distribution with
Serge Bromberg of Lobster Films in France and Jeff Masino at Flicker Alley in Los Angeles.
Given Blackhawk’s focus on Chaplin and Griffith, it was natural that David would
begin restoring video versions of the Chaplin films. When his Chaplin at Mutual box set
appeared, it proved to be a sensation with film buffs who had previously only seen old,
beat-up, dupey Blackhawk prints. More importantly, David transferred the films at full
aperture, rather than cropping for a sound track, and at the correct projection speeds,

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 horak
88

rather than double printing every second frame to achieve sound speed, as Blackhawk
had done. David would go on to distribute in video virtually the whole Chaplin catalog
from Tillie’s Punctured Romance (1914) to His New Job (1915) and the other Essanays to A
King in New York (1957). Finally, in 2014, Shepard and Lobster Films released Chaplin
at Keystone.
David Shepard’s work on other restored DVD sets is too vast to enumerate. It
includes a Henry King box set with Tol’able David (1921), Abel Gance’s La Roue (1922),
Raoul Walsh’s  Regeneration  (1915), D.  W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915),
F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), and many others.
Shepard’s numerous honors included the Prix Jean Mitry of the Giornate del
Cinema Muto (1993), an Honorary Life Membership in the Society for Cinema and Media
Studies (2004), a special citation by the LA Film Critics Association (2005), the Anthol-
ogy Film Archives Preservation Award (2005), a special award by the National Society of
Film Critics (2006), the Silver Light Award of the Association of Moving Image Archivists
(2007), the Umhoefer Prize for Achievement in Humanities (2013), and awards from the
San Francisco International Film Festival (2000) and Silent Film Festival (2008).
David Shepard died of cancer on January 31, 2017, in Hat Creek, Oregon, where
he had spent the last years of his life.

Jan-Christopher Horak is director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive

and a member of the Moving Image Editorial Board.

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