Harry Ransom Center Film Collections

The Harry Ransom Center is the humanities research library and museum of the University of Texas at Austin. Its film collections document how movies are made from the point of view of producers, screenwriters, directors, actors and designers, through scripts, correspondence, legal papers, photographs, designs and film and video. The foundation is the archive of producer David O. Selznick, which came to the center in the 1980s and fills more than 5,000 boxes. It documents A Star Is Born, Gone With the Wind, Rebecca, Spellbound and Duel in the Sun in detail, and it includes costumes. In 2010 more than 600 donors from 44 states and 13 countries gave $30,000 to conserve five gowns Vivien Leigh wore as Scarlett O'Hara, including the green curtain dress. Three of Leigh's original gowns were shown together in The Making of 'Gone With The Wind,' a 2014 exhibition of more than 300 items marking the film's 75th anniversary. The center paired that show with free screenings of other 1939 releases, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Idiot's Delight and The Wizard of Oz, in its Charles Nelson Prothro Theater. Other studio-era holdings include the archives of Gloria Swanson, covering her work with Cecil B. DeMille, Erich von Stroheim and Billy Wilder, and screenwriter Ernest Lehman, whose credits include North by Northwest and The Sound of Music. The center supplied more than 100 stills from the Swanson archive to the restoration of the lost 1922 Swanson–Valentino feature Beyond the Rocks, which had its Texas premiere in Austin on December 1, 2005. The center also holds the records of Karl Hoblitzelle's Interstate Theatre Circuit, the circuit that operated Austin's Paramount. In January 2026 it added the papers of Olivia de Havilland. Robert De Niro gave his archive in 2006. When it opened in 2009 it held more than 1,300 boxes covering 69 films, from Greetings in 1968 to Hide and Seek in 2005, and about 8,500 costumes and props, among them the Raging Bull boxing robe. De Niro steered Paul Schrader to the center; Schrader donated his papers in 2010 after earlier giving it De Niro's Taxi Driver costume. Producer Irwin Winkler's archive followed in 2023, and Matthew Weiner gave the Mad Men archive. In 2022 the center announced an endowment for a De Niro Curator of Film and marked its 65th anniversary with a Celebration of Film gala featuring De Niro. The center also shows films. Besides screenings in the Prothro Theater, it has taken series off campus, such as a 2008 Beat Film Series at the Alamo Drafthouse Ritz, co-sponsored by the Austin Film Society.