The Oscar-winning director has donated over 50 storage boxes of tapes that show a devoted interest in recording films and shows from the ’80s to the 2000s
In the basement of the University of Colorado Boulder’s main library, an 85-year-old stone fortress built in the Italian rural style, the archives of the school’s Rare and Distinctive Collections occupy rows of shelves as far as the eye can see. Here, amid yellowed books, historical maps and medieval manuscripts, Martin Scorsese has quietly made public a very private preoccupation. More than 50 storage boxes hold thousands of VHS tapes that contain films and television programs Scorsese recorded directly from broadcast television. The renowned director and film preservationist, it turns out, was also, for decades, a prolific guerrilla archivist.
Long before YouTube and Netflix gave the world instant access to a deep repository of media, Scorsese began the project of amassing his own private on-demand video library. In each week’s TV Guide, he would note the movies and shows that caught his interest. A full-time video archivist in Scorsese’s New York office would then record the telecasts from a kind of audiovisual hub made up of multiple VCRs and monitors, which could often be active at all hours. The tapes were meticulously labeled, cataloged initially using a library-like card system and later a computer, and filed away for Scorsese’s personal viewing and research.
