Over 800,000 photographs of film stars, movie stills and publicity shots were on their way to the trash. The year was 1970 and Columbia Pictures was moving from its original lot in Hollywood to Warner Bros. in Burbank to create a new studio entity called the Burbank Studios. They were cleaning house.   Marc Wanamaker said he’d take everything.   “That’s how I became a film historian,” he told The Signal during a recent interview at the old Saugus Train Station at the Santa Clarita History Center in Newhall.   Wanamaker, a Beverly Hills resident and founder of the Bison Archives, which has been preserving the history of the American motion picture and television industries and Southern California for over five decades, said he has a particular interest for the Santa Clarita Valley. It was that first haul of those Columbia images that allowed him to grow his collection and offer a look at what Southern California and, in particular, this valley once was.  “We’re talking about a serious archive that was just going to be dumped,” Wanamaker said in a follow-up telephone interview. “So, we took it, I cataloged it, and with these photographs, I started to research my book on the studios.”  He’d go on to write many books about Hollywood history, including “Star Profiles” (1984), “Hollywood Handbook” (1996), “Hollywood Past and Present” (2002), “Hollywood Trains and Trolleys” (2020) and his latest book, which just came out in May, “Hollywood Behind the Lens: Treasures from the Bison Archives.”  Wanamaker, 76, was born in Hollywood. His parents came from Chicago after World War II. Wanamaker’s father was a doctor and his mother a stage performer.   In the late 1940s, the family moved to a home right next to CBS Television City, the television studio center in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles. But young Wanamaker would spend much time up here in the SCV.  By around age 7, he, like so many other kids of his generation, had become a fan of the fictional cowboy Hopalong Cassidy. Wanamaker came out to a camp in the Newhall area to learn how to ride a horse. He recalled riding a white steed along Newhall Avenue.  Marc Wanamaker at age 5 shows off his “Hollywood Cowboy” look. Photo courtesy of Marc Wanamaker/Bison Archives “This is where I got my first taste of the Santa Clarita area,” Wanamaker said. “And then, when I was 10 years old, I went to another camp just north of the Disney Ranch (the Golden Oak Ranch in Placerita Canyon). I spent two summers up there.”  He added that the time he spent in the SCV very much shaped who he’s become as a person. In his teens, he’d work as an extra on TV shows. He got that work in part because he could ride a horse. And much of that work came back to the SCV and Placerita Canyon, mostly shot on local movie ranches.  As Wanamaker got older, he’d occasionally come up to the SCV to ride horses for recreation. He recalled times when he’d journey along the Santa Clara River near where Six Flags Magic Mountain currently sits. Still, he and this place he enjoyed so much would become even closer.  Marc Wanamaker in 1954 hangs onto the horse he learned to ride in Newhall. Photo courtesy of Marc Wanamaker/Bison Archives In 1971, after he’d picked up all those Columbia materials, he established the Bison Archives, which he named after the Bison Film Co., a movie studio established in 1909 that employed Native American writers, producers and stars. According to the company website, the Bison Archives began preserving the history of the motion picture industry. It gradually expanded its preservation work to the history of Southern California.   Wanamaker would assist the Los Angeles County Museum in its cataloguing of motion picture history, which he believed they’d been building since the 1920s. He’s still working with the museum to this day.  “One of my jobs,” he said, “was to go out to the William S. Hart house (in Newhall), because William S. Hart had donated his home in Santa Clarita to L.A. County, and I went out there in the early days to see what archives they had there, which wasn’t much. But I’d collected archives on the history of William S. Hart over my years, looking for stuff everywhere. It was a very important collection.”  Much of what Wanamaker found over the years has become a major part of the record of places like William S. Hart Park.  Marc Wanamaker, Hollywood historian and author, inspects silent movie lobby cards as he visits the Saugus Train Station in Newhall in July 2024. Photo courtesy of Dan Watson According to E.J. Stephens, who co-wrote the book “Images of America: William S. Hart Park,” Wanamaker was more than forthcoming with images of Hart Park for that very publication.  “Marc gave us a lot of great stuff,” Stephens said. “Bison Archives is probably the biggest repository of photographs and things — mostly photographs — of the early, early days of Hollywood, mostly the silent era. And since William S. Hart was a silent star, he has a lot of Hart stuff.”  Stephens added that the SCV area, and really all of Southern California, is lucky to have Wanamaker, who’s been preserving so much history that would otherwise have been lost. Stephens said it’s not uncommon for studios to throw away that kind of thing, as he worked as an archivist for Warner Bros. and was very aware of such practices.  “Studio heads,” he said, “don’t really care about history.”  Wanamaker’s been lucky to catch a lot of that stuff before it’s thrown away.  “In the early ’80s, I worked at the research libraries and at the different studios, and they were throwing away a lot of their location files,” Wanamaker said. “I found tons of stuff on Santa Clarita, Newhall, Saugus, including the William S. Hart house.”  Hollywood film historian Marc Wanamaker displays images of local silent filming locations, the Saugus Cafe, Beal’s Cut and the Harry Carry Ranch House during a visit to the Saugus Train Station in Newhall in July 2024. Photo courtesy of Dan Watson For over 40 years, Wanamaker has been seeking out and collecting material on the SCV. Along the way, he became what he called a “Tom Mix expert.” Tom Mix, a star of western films during the early 1900s, shot many of his pictures in the Newhall area. Some area historians even called Mix a “part-time Newhall resident.” Over the years, Wanamaker found all kinds of material on Mix. He contributed much to Robert S. Birchard’s book “King Cowboy: Tom Mix and the Movies.”  Another locally connected cowboy star who interested Wanamaker was Gene Autry, nicknamed the “Singing Cowboy” for his singing cowboy pictures and his music career during the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s.   In 1952, Autry bought what is now known as Melody Ranch in Newhall. According to Wanamaker, Autry kept “all of his records and posters and publicity materials” on that ranch.  On Aug. 28, 1962, a fire burned up the main western street that included numerous structures. Wanamaker said Autry lost nearly everything.  “Eventually I met Gene Autry,” he said. “So, we’re talking, and he brought up the ranch. Why? Because I had tons of great pictures of the ranch early on. He was practically crying.”  Wanamaker added that upon Autry learning about the Bison Archives photos of Melody Ranch, the signing cowboy really made a big push to create his museum in Griffith Park to protect all the stuff that preserved so much of Autry’s history. What’s more, Wanamaker’s photos of the original Melody Ranch helped builders restore the town to one that very closely resembled the original.  In his quest to collect and catalogue pictorial materials of the area, Wanamaker has become quite an expert on Hollywood and Hollywood’s work in the SCV. He’s given lectures for the SCV Historical Society and, earlier this year, even spoke at the Newhallywood Silent Film Festival, which annually celebrates the role the SCV played in the era of silent film.  Wanamaker also helped preserve the history of film star Harry Carey Jr., who’d appeared in almost 100 films and TV shows from the 1940s into the ’90s, and whose family had resided on a ranch in the SCV in the early 1900s, what is now known as Tesoro Adobe Historic Park off Avenida Rancho Tesoro in Valencia.  “When I was researching my book on the studios,” Wanamaker said, “I found original 8-by-10 nitrate negatives taken in 1920 of the Harry Carey Ranch showing Dobie Carey (Harry Carey Jr.) as an infant. I finally showed these to him (Carey Jr.) years later and he almost slipped. He says, ‘I never saw these. Nobody ever saw these.’ And I found them in a giant pile of stills in New York, just by chance.”   Actor Harry Carey stands over his wife, Olive Carey, holding their son, Harry “Dobie” Carey Jr., in 1921 at their home in the San Francisquito Canyon. Photo courtesy of Marc Wanamaker/Bison Archives Wanamaker said that in that moment he’d solidified his friendship with Carey Jr., and when it came time to restore the ranch, Carey Jr. called Wanamaker and asked for any pictures he had in his possession to use as reference. That’s what Wanamaker does.  Actor Harry Carey’s ranch is nestled in the San Francisquito Canyon during the 1950s. Photo courtesy of Marc Wanamaker/Bison Archives Just three months ago, Wanamaker uncovered research materials that Columbia had almost thrown away over 50 years ago. While he was saving photos and movie stills that Columbia was about to toss, an art director had been saving research materials that, unbeknownst to him, were on their way to the trash.  “This stuff was locked up all these years,” Wanamaker said. “Nobody ever saw it. I made arrangements with Fox (Studios) to merge it with the Fox research library, and before I did that, I, of course, cleaned out all the locations, all the stuff I need. And in there, tons more on ranches around Santa Clarita, all kinds of places around Santa Clarita, which I’ve now included in my collection.”  Wanamaker is continuously in search of more items for his collection. He has an itch to find movie production photos from Newhall.  “It’s very hard to find pictures of them actually filming in Newhall during the silent era,” he said. “But I’m getting there. I’m finding stuff.”  Over the years, Wanamaker became a historical research consultant and technical advisor on feature films and documentaries taking place in the area or about the area. He’s an associate historian with the Los Angeles County Museum, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, California State Library in Sacramento, the Getty Research Institute and the Los Angeles City Library and Los Angeles County Library systems.  About 10 years ago, he gave around 80,000 images to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which had previously made up about a quarter of his collection. He said his entire collection will ultimately go there one day.  As he gets older, Wanamaker said he’s feeling more and more pressured to make sure the legacy of all he’s finding is preserved for future study and preservation.   “Most people don’t know where they live — I mean, they don’t know what was there before,” he said. “They have no idea how rich it is. Most people, if they’re exposed to this, are interested in it.”   From left, Hollywood historian Marc Wanamaker, historian Angus Gritz and SCV Historical Society Supervising Archivist Eva Gritz discuss images of local filming locations at the Saugus Train Station in Newhall in July 2024. Photo courtesy of Dan Watson And when people ask Wanamaker why he’s so interested in it, he tells them he grew up among it all, in this area, in and around these movies. Like someone learning their family history, people, he has found, are interested in where they come from, in where they live, especially when there’s so much history. And rich history at that.   So many individuals, he concluded, are connected to the film history of a place because they know the movies and TV shows that were made there. Those places sort of become a part of their own history as they perhaps grew up seeing the locations on the big and small screens of their childhood.  But whether people care about that history or not, Wanamaker said he’ll continue doing what he does for as long as he can.  “At least we’ll document it,” he said. “It’ll be an archive. And then maybe there’ll be a resurgence 30 or 40 years from now, and people will go research it, and there it all will be. I saved it for them.”  Hollywood film historian and author Marc Wanamaker visits the Saugus Train Station in Newhall in July 2024. Photo courtesy of Dan Watson The post Archivist continues to preserve SCV, his home away from home  appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.