Spending a little time this evening looking into some of the collections USC's Cinematic Arts Library has listed for future research trips I'd like to do. I keep running into collections USC says aren't available to researchers because they haven't yet been processed. The crazy thing is, some of these are batches the university received back in the 60s and 70s! Somehow, they've never gotten to it in the last 50-60 years.
They've got nearly a thousand boxes of production files from Universal Pictures spanning the 40s through the 60s, but nothing is available. A veritable goldmine of knowledge for researchers, and nobody knows what's there because nobody's gotten to it over the decades. I've been doing research off-and-on about the Kirk Douglas version of Spartacus for the last six years and this collection might hold some of the smoking guns I can't find in Douglas' and Dalton Trumbo's papers in Wisconsin, or even Stanley Kubrick's archive in London.
I swear USC is the most disorganized with their archives compared to all the other places I've visited in SoCal, like UCLA, the Herrick, or the WGA Library.
