Roughly a quarter of the employees of the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Science’s Academy Film Archive were laid off this week, according to a report from IndieWire. Employees of the Archive—one of the largest film archives in the world—reported that 7 of their 30-plus co-workers were summarily let go, some after serving many years at the Archive. (Anne Coco, the curator of the Archive’s poster collection, was one of a few specifically named.) News of the layoffs comes just as the Archive’s sister institution, the far-flashier Academy Museum Of Motion Pictures, announced a number of high-profile new acquisitions, including one of Quentin Tarantino’s original Pulp Fiction scripts, and original drawings from Hayao Miyazaki.
The Archive, which came into formal life in 1991 after years of the Academy collecting archived film footage, has frequently been presented as being de-prioritized in favor of the Museum in recent years. (The latter, unsurprisingly, is open to the tourist public, while the Archive is largely a draw for scholars and film researchers, who can request access to the more than 140,000 film assets stored in its vaults.) In addition to its efforts at preservation and curation (including housing the largest collection of film trailers in the world) the Archive is also notable for its efforts in film restoration; the Archive and its employees have been responsible for saving and restoring several classic films that otherwise might have been lost to time.
According to Deadline, the terminations at the Archive are part of a wider plan by Academy CEO Bill Kramer, who ultimately let 16 Academy employees go this week. In a memo obtained by Deadline, Kramer wrote that, “As part of our efforts to bring all of our collecting and preservation departments together — the archive, the library, and the collecting unit of the museum — we have spent the last several months assessing the structure of these teams. As part of this work in building the new Academy Collection and Preservation Department, some team members will be leaving the Academy this week.” So far, neither Kramer, nor the Academy itself have issued a formal statement about the layoffs.
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