We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Melissa Dollman and Devin Orgeron of Deserted Films in Palm Springs, California. Deserted Films is a nonprofit home movie archive focused on collecting amateur films (8mm, Super 8, and 16mm) shot in and around the Coachella Valley from the 1920s-1980s and making them available to the public. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Melissa Dollman and Devin Orgeron below.
Melissa Dollman and Devin Orgeron, thank you so much for joining us and offering your lessons and wisdom for our readers. One of the things we most admire about you is your generosity and so we’d love if you could talk to us about where you think your generosity comes from.
Generosity (material and spiritual), we think, is the archivist’s primary motivation. A desire to share…to give the public a glimpse of what this place looked like through the decades, informs everything Deserted Films does. While we are both unrepentant collectors and find personal pleasure in the materials we’ve accumulated, we are also firmly committed to making our collections accessible to a broader public at no charge. We know that the stuff we collect is expensive to store and digitize… it’s why it can be a low priority for cultural institutions and regional historical societies, museums, etc. But it is ALL we do. And we are here to help (and share with) those over-burdened institutions as well.
Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
Melissa Dollman and Devin Orgeron founded Deserted Films in Palm Springs in 2021 and incorporated as a nonprofit in July 2022. In 2023, Deserted Films was federally recognized as a 501(c)(3).
Deserted Films got started in the middle of the pandemic. We had just moved to Palm Springs, CA and had taken note of how this town, that loves and celebrates all things midcentury, was, maybe inadvertently, overlooking one of that period’s most embraced pastimes: amateur filmmaking, or home movies. These were just conversations early on. But because we both had come from the film and archives world (Melissa, a trained AV archivist and media and culture historian and Devin, an emeritus professor of film history and the editor of The Moving Image, the journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists), we MIGHT have been making plans without knowing it!
We picked up a few films from an estate sale. And then a few more. And we told our neighbors. And they found films for us. We thought of a name for our venture that seemed to encapsulate what appeared to be our mission (“Deserted Films”)…and we were off!
A thousand-plus films later, we are still actively collecting (from auctions, estate sales, neighbors), digitizing films, researching what they depict, and making everything free and accessible on our website.
We work with our local movie theatre, The Camelot, to put together retro film series… And the films we screen are preceded by films from our collections. It’s what we do instead of ads or trailers. We host Home Movie Day, a worldwide celebration of amateur filmmaking where experts gather and invite the public to bring their old home movies which are inspected, cleaned, and screened for the public…sometimes for the first time in decades! We have a very popular annual Holiday show called Holiday Oddities where we show a variety of holiday shorts interspersed with Christmas footage from our vaults. And we work with Modernism Week. Though principally a celebration of modernist architecture, this yearly event is also a week-long immersion in the culture of the midcentury (music, art, architecture, fashion, and film). Home movies have the potential to touch upon ALL of these categories (their own “heyday” occurred during the very years Palm Springs was coming into its own as a glamorous vacation getaway for Hollywood and the rest of the world). Our 2024 event, Palm Springs Plays Itself: A Vintage Home Movie Cocktail Hour with Deserted Films, was standing-room-only (one woman in the audience even recognized herself in a parade film from the 1960s!).
We really love what we do. And we love sharing it!
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
Three important things for a small, nonprofit regional archive to keep in mind (by which we do mean to imply that all regions should have a small, nonprofit regional archive, home movies or otherwise!):
1 – Keep trying. Not everyone will “get” or care about the thing/things you collect and spend your life thinking about. Get your materials out there in front of them and keep a sense of humor while taking these things seriously. Cultivate your audience.
2- Keep it fun and relevant. Your enthusiasm is contagious and it can change the way people see things.
3 – Do what you can. We can’t “rescue” all the films. We can’t afford all of the bids. We can only fine-tune storage conditions so much. We will ALWAYS be cataloguing. These are the realities of a small archive. But what we do is still important. Take pride in the small victories! And repeat #1.
How can folks who want to work with you connect?
Deserted Films is founded on a belief in collaboration and a collaborative spirit infuses everything we do. We work with the Palm Springs Public Library, Modernism Week, our local movie theatres, and The Palm Springs Cultural Center. We do this in part because it keeps us and our work visible. We are also keen, however, to establish relationships with local institutions of higher education (we are both former academics), the Chamber of Commerce, the Palm Springs bureau of tourism, the airport, etc., because we think the films we collect are a beautiful way to share what is unique about Palm Springs, its history, its present, and its future. Imagine coming into Palm Springs International Airport (PSP) and seeing vintage home movies from the 30s-80s on monitors throughout the terminals! It would be a perfect way to help the city signal the fact that, stepping off that plane, you also stepped into a world where the past mingles harmoniously with the current. It’s a uniquely Palm Springs vibe. We’ve done the acquiring. We’ve done the digitizing. We’ve done the research. We’d love nothing more than for our moving images to be part of what welcomes folks to Palm Springs (whether it’s home, home away from home, or a fantasy vacation).
Contact Info:
- Website: https://desertedfilms.org
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/desertedfilmsps/
Image Credits
1.jpg.webp – Andrea Heck Addington
melissa – Arlyn Bruccoli
so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.
