With Rare Footage, SMU’s Film Archive Is Preserving Dallas' History

The G. William Jones Film & Video Collection began as a passion project for one man, but has evolved to become a cultural catalog of Dallas history.

Nestled on the SMU campus, the archive houses tens of thousands of pieces of media, including B-roll footage from midcentury Dallas newscasts, projects from local filmmakers and historical works from the broader tapestry of cinema.

G. William Jones, for whom the archive is named, was a professor at SMU with a passion for cinema, a Methodist minister and a member of LBJ’s President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. Jones amassed his collection over the years, and in 1970, it was branded the Southwest Film/Video Archives.

Scott Martin, one of the collection’s curators, says the films were originally “squirreled away” on campus wherever room could be found for them: in closets, gymnasiums and a small house near SMU.

In the 1980s, the Tyler, Texas, Black Film Collection joined the curation, making an important addition to the archive. The addition comprises shorts, features and newsreels from between 1935 and 1956, showcasing art created outside of the Hollywood system for Black audiences.

Over the years, additional material has been donated in efforts to preserve pieces of local history. More recently, one of the archive’s most significant projects has involved cataloging and digitizing a collection of Dallas-area news footage from WFAA (from the 1960s and 1970s) and KERA (from the 1970s until the 2010s).

The archive, which was renamed after Jones in 1995, is now housed in the Hamon Arts Library. Films are no longer stored in the gymnasium; instead, the archive utilizes a temperature and humidity-controlled “cool storage” vault to help preserve the integrity of the footage well beyond its natural shelf life.

In recent years, in addition to their work on the news collections that have been donated to the archive, Martin and Jeremy Spracklen have been working to preserve films made by local filmmakers.

“Nationally produced stuff is neat to have, but it’s the local materials that … were more interesting to us because they’re scarce and they’re rare and they tell a story about the city and the people who lived in the city and the texture of the time,” says Martin. “And those were the things that we were just like, ‘You know, no one else is focusing on this stuff and there’s no real place for this stuff to live.’”

Local filmmaker Mark Birnbaum has donated his work to the archive, as has Bart Weiss, the founder of the now-defunct Dallas VideoFest. Weiss’ initial donation comprised roughly 30 years of VideoFest material and is now referred to as the Video Association of Dallas Collection. Martin says that when the team reviewed the material, they were amazed by the quality of work that had been produced by local filmmakers over the years, especially ones they were unfamiliar with. Susan Teegardin (Weiss’ wife) and Susan Magilow were local artists who previously collaborated as “The Susans” and donated their work to the archive, as well.

Spracklen says the material they receive isn't relegated to proper, finished films.

“We’re getting all kinds of edits,” he explains. “We’re getting shooting footage that was never incorporated into the production.”

Jolene de Verges, the director of the Hamon Arts Library, says another collection of local art that has been added to the archive is recordings from the Dallas Theater Center. The archive has held these recordings for years, but only recently began directly managing them as well. De Verges says this includes “local historical material” that can encompass interviews with actors and directors, the theater's productions, promotional materials and awards received.

The archive is reaching out to local filmmakers to ask if they would be interested in donating additional materials to the archive. The goal is to preserve the projects both physically and digitally, and to get to them before “tapes start to rot, films start to fade [or] hard drives go bad.”

Digitization is critical to the archive's short-term and long-term goals — a YouTube page offers a platform to publish the materials that have been cataloged so far.

Ultimately, Spracklen and Martin would like to see everything in the collection digitized and made available for public use or on-demand access. This takes a lot of work, though, as their process involves identifying the media and events depicted, sometimes without any identifying features or sound on the tapes themselves. So far, the team has been able to fill in some gaps by posting the videos and having the community help decipher what they are looking at.

Going through historical pieces occasionally presents surprising finds. Martin says that he enjoys seeing “slice of life” moments in old B-roll footage of people doing something simple, like walking through a grocery store in the early ‘70s.

“It’s sort of more valuable to me than, say, when President Nixon came to town, because that is covered [nationally],” he explains.

That being said, there are sometimes significant historical figures who appear in the footage he reviews. One example he cites is happening upon a visit Martin Luther King Jr. made to Dallas in 1963 for a poll-tax rally. Prior to their uncovering of that footage, it had not been seen since the day it aired.

Spracklen is fond of the “oddities” they have uncovered, particularly surrounding events in the ‘70s, like music festivals that no longer exist. De Verges says she enjoys footage found of Dallasites being interviewed after seeing The Exorcist in 1973. Sports footage, of course, abounds, with material documenting the Texas Rangers and the Dallas Cowboys' legacies.

Long-term, the archive wants to host more work from more local filmmakers to help keep history — and the story of Dallas, specifically — alive.

Filmmakers interested in donating their work to the collection can reach out to Spracklen and Martin at [email protected] for more information. The team also stressed that the G. William Jones Film & Video Collection is the only special collection at SMU without its own endowment. While the college has funded and supported the collection over the years, the team accepts donations to help them continue their work in not only preserving existing media but also educating and supporting future generations of filmmakers attending SMU.