Steve Bingen: Hollywood Behind the Lens

We interview Steve Bingen: 
About his new book with Marc Wanamaker  “Hollywood Behind the Lens: Treasures from the Bison Archive

Steven Bingen is an author, archivist, historian, and contributor to dozens of books, articles, and documentaries regarding film history. 

For nearly two decades, Steven worked as an archivist/staff historian at Warner Bros. Studio. While there, he was responsible for evaluating, maintaining, and preserving that legendary company’s physical assets and its intangible legacy. He also spent a lot of time crawling around storied studio backlots, underground catacombs, and cavernous soundstages. 


Marc Wanamaker:
“Los Angeles is a city that runs from its own past” explains historian and Bison Archives owner Marc Wanamaker. Many of Hollywood’s legendary sets and props, mansions, theaters, restaurants, nightclubs, hotels, and even the studios and the films they produced are now either gone or have been redeveloped, repurposed, or remade beyond recognition. Even more disarmingly, the physical ephemera associated with such items is often MIA as well. Photographs, files, maps, documents, menus, production paperwork, records, manuscripts, everything from matchbooks to movie magazines and entire movie backlots have now been lost in the backwash of dubious progress, short-sighted corporate mindsets, and civic indifference. Fortunately, for the last fifty years, in the very epicenter of Hollywood, thanks to Wanamaker, there has existed a haven where over 70,000 of these items, physically or photographically, have been collected and protected. These artifacts tell the story of Hollywood’s glorious past, as well as its uncertain future as the hub of filmmaking in America.

Movie Reviews and Serious Nonsense is a King Dyro Production ©2024

Podcast music:
Intro music Kamihamiha! – Alien Warfare Stems by Kamihamiha (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial  (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kamihamiha/60882

Available on Amazon (click the image of the book to purchase a copy)
Steve Bingen speaking at the TCM Classic Film Festival
Gloria Swanson, promoting her comeback vehicle "Sunset Boulevard," installs a namesake street sign in Beverly Hills (1950).
Normandie Avenue winding north into the Hollywood hills afforded 1939 motorists a breathtaking view of Grifith Observatory.
Marc Wanamaker as a "stunt kid" in 1955 at the erstwhile Simi Valley movie ranch and tourist attraction Corriganville.
The famous shot from the Exorcist
A variation the classic shot (from the proof sheet of the Exorcist)
Robert Preston in the "Music Man" posing with 76 Trombones
Greg Dyro
Tom Burka

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