* 1929, Londen, Engeland - † 14.4.1996, Manhattan, NY

Longtime independent film curator, impresario of old movies and prolific historian of the silent film.

Growing up outside of London near the film studios, William K. Everson was addicted to cinema before he could read. At the age of 21 he emigrated to the US and, like most immigrants, was struck breathless by the new land. It wasn't the Statue of Liberty, the skyscrapers, or the waving fields of wheat, however, that impressed him: "As soon as I got off the boat, I was confronted by 42nd Street!" he explained years later. "Row upon row of marquees! And the first marquee I saw had Chaplin's CITY LIGHTS and von Sternberg's THE SCARLET EMPRESS, neither of which I'd seen in England, so I was off like a shot!"

Almost immediately, Everson began collecting films. He was in the right place at the right time. The studios were lax in preserving films from the 20s and 30s that they thought had no value, and TV had not yet discovered the treasure trove of the studio libraries. Working in the industry as a sometime publicist, he would often hear that some reels of an old film were about to be destroyed simply because a distributor's contract had run out. He'd offer to buy them; sometimes legal barriers required that he "liberate" them. Answering to a higher authority, he did so.

Gradually the hobby became an obsession. It wasn't enough to own a representative set of John Fords, for example; he had to have them all. Moreover, at the same time that he was passionately collecting, Hollywood was dispassionately destroying "useless" old movies.

What Everson and other private collectors were doing on their own in the US, governments were sponsoring in Europe. Compare Everson's experience in New York to that of Henri Langlois in Paris. A similarly obsessed collector, Langlois was able to found the Cinémathèque Française, an official, funded organization. In 1970, when the American Film Institute was founded, some of the pressure was taken off Everson.

By the mid-70s Everson's collection had grown to more than 4,000 titles, nearly all of which were stored in his West Side New York apartment. From the beginning he had been showing prints from his collection in his living room to a small circle of aficionados. In 1966 he began a long-running series of screenings at New York's New School for Social Research, where thousands of filmgoers and scores of filmmakers have been exposed to an important part of film history that would, without Everson, have been lost.