Film studies students to have access to donated screenplays

Students who enroll in classes within the new film studies major now have access to more than 300 screenplays donated to the University of Richmond.

The new major, which starts next fall, will be composed of nine courses offered in a variety of departments, including English, modern literature and cultures and maybe business, said Paul Porterfield, the head of the Media Resource Center and adjunct instructor of film studies.

The founder and head of the Virginia Screenwriters Forum, Helene Wagner, approached the school after the Virginia Screenwriters Forum's librarian, Bill Sydnor, stepped down.

"He had a room with boxes and boxes of scripts and it seemed natural to suggest them to U of R," Wagner said in a phone interview.

The university gladly received the donation, which came free of charge.

"We would have had to spend thousands and thousands of dollars at a time when it's really tight at the university to even begin to put together a collection like this," Special Collections Librarian Jim Gwin said.

"Not many college campuses have that kind of resource available," Abigail Cheever, an associate professor of English, said. "It gives students a way of looking at the film production process from the beginning to the end."

Cheever is also a major force behind the creation of the film studies major.

The acquisition includes screenplays from movies such as "The Exorcist", "Mystic River" and "Blade Runner." International movie scripts are also included in the donation. Students will be able to use the screenplays as primary documents while completing research, and the manuscripts will also be a valuable resource to students are writing their own screenplays and scenes, Porterfield said.

Several contain notes from the directors or writers in the margins, another resource for students.

"One of the things that can be difficult for a student studying the medium is that it's hard to know who's responsible for what in the finished product," Cheever said.

All of the materials are copies.

"An original manuscript is like a rare book or artifact, but the notes would have been copied when they were reproduced," Gwin said.

The next step is to bind and catalogue the screenplays, Gwin said. The screenplays can be used in conjunction with a collection of more than 10,000 film titles, many of which are in Blu-ray or DVD format, available in the MRC, Porterfield said.

Students will be able to search online for the screenplays and find them on the library shelves, although it has not been determined yet what section of the library will house the donation. Current copyright laws prevent the material from being scanned and put online, but portions of screenplays may be put on eReserve for film classes for certain periods of time.

Contact staff writer Leigh Donahue at leigh.donahue@richmond.edu