Why You Must See Harry Ransom Center’s Fantastic Collections

The University of Texas' Harry Ransom Center contains everything from Robert De Niro's annotated scripts to Spalding Gray's papers, in addition to 36 million literary manuscripts, 1 million rare books, 5 million photographs, and more than 100,000 works of art. A treasure trove of research that will boost your knowledge and feed your soul. Steve Wilson, the Center's Curator of Film, shares some of the standouts that may also help your career.

Well, they can probably learn something just from seeing how these actors work. For instance, we have Stella Adler's papers. She believed that she could teach actors things like strategies and script study, but ultimately each actor has to find his or her own way. So, with that in mind—we have Robert De Niro's scripts, and De Niro's scripts are a sight to behold. You can see how he intensely studies them and does background interviews for every role, as opposed to Gloria Swanson, who pretty much delivered the lines as written. Either way, it can be really useful for young actors as they decide what works best for them. And we have John Garfield's copy of "An Actor Prepares." He was one of the original Method actors in the '50s, along with Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift and James Dean and Shelley Winters. The book's binding is now gone, but the pages are covered in his notes.

He had been collecting his works for a long time, since the early '80s. He recognized that he was in some important films and felt that the documents should be preserved, including not only papers and scripts but costumes and film. And it's very very common for collectors to want to keep their collection together. So when he started looking for a home, it was difficult since not every institution collects papers and costumes and film—we're one of the few that could take all those different materials.

We had to be very careful with cataloging because there are a lot of personal materials within the research materials. For instance there are people's military records or hospital records. In "Flawless," DeNiro played a stroke victim, so there are medical reports about strokes and how they affect the patients. For "The Deer Hunter" there's a lot about what had been called "Returning Veterans Syndrome"—what we now know as PTSD. There's also a lot of research materials about gangsters, so we had to redact names and social security numbers.

You mentioned Gloria Swanson, I think you have her papers as well?
Yes we do, including her copy of the script for "Sunset Boulevard." It has that last speech on its own page—I think they rewrote it several times. It has her changes in her handwriting. It had originally said, "Alright, Mr. Demille, I'm ready for the closeup," before she changed it to "I'm ready for my closeup..." You can see with "Sunset Boulevard" that acting has changed over time. The silent days of Gloria Swanson came from stage and vaudeville and pantomime and gestures so you could reach the back row of the theater without amplification. Once talkies came the style changed, and Swanson only made three more films before she retired from it. She continued in theater though.

Her collection is so vast because she was mega-famous in the silent days and very gregarious, and wrote a lot of correspendence with famous people. Sometime in the early '50s, after "Sunset Boulevard," she decided it was time for her to do her memoirs, so we have recordings and transcripts from that, and she would tell stories about working with Cecil B. DeMille. There's also a great one she told about a scene in "Male and Female" where she's dressed like a Babylonian princess in a lion's den with a real lion. There were sharpshooters on set in case the lion got out of hand, and she could feel its breath on her neck. There are a lot of anecdotes about working in the silent era.