Keith William Everson (8 April 1929 – 14 April 1996) was an English-American archivist, author, critic, educator, collector, and film historian. He also discovered several lost films. Everson's given first names were Keith William, but he reversed them so that "William K." would mimic the name of Hollywood director William K. Howard, whom he admired.
Early life and career
Everson was born in Yeovil, Somerset, the son of Catherine (née Ward) and Percival Wilfred Everson, an aircraft engineer. His earliest jobs were in the motion picture industry; as a teenager he was employed at Renown Pictures as publicity manager. He began to write film criticism and operated several film societies.
Later career
Following service in the British Army from 1946 to 1948, Everson worked as a cinema theatre manager for London's Monseigneur News Theatres. Emigrating to the United States in 1950 at age 21, he worked in the publicity department of Monogram Pictures (later Allied Artists) and subsequently became a freelance publicist.
Concurrently with his employment as writer, editor and researcher on the TV series Movie Museum and Silents Please, Everson became dedicated to preserving films from the silent era to the 1940s which otherwise would have been lost. Through his industry connections, he began to acquire feature films and short subjects that were slated to be destroyed or abandoned.
Many of his discoveries were projected at his Manhattan film group, the Theodore Huff Film Society, founded by Theodore Huff (filmmaker and the biographer of Charlie Chaplin), Everson, film critic Seymour Stern and Variety columnist Herman G. Weinberg as the Theodore Huff Film Society. After Huff's death, Everson added the word "Memorial". At each screening, Huff members were presented with extensive program notes written by Everson about each film. During the 1960s, these screenings were held in a hall at Union Square.
Occasionally, he would make special arrangements with a select invited group to see a 35mm print in a theater. For example, on a Sunday morning in the mid-1960s, he took over Daniel Talbot's New Yorker Theater to show the silent She (1925) to an audience of no more than 15 silent-film buffs. Later, the Huff Society screenings relocated from Union Square to The New School, by invitation of Everson's friend and fellow Huff Society member Joseph Goldberg, who was a professor at The New School. Everson was an influential figure to the generation of film historians who came of age from the 1960s to the 1980s, many of whom were regulars at his New School screenings. Other attendees at the Huff Society included such New York personalities as author Susan Sontag and publisher Calvin Beck.
Kevin Brownlow described an infamous incident at the Huff Society:It was a society that showed the rarest films — often in a double bill with a recognised classic. Everson's programme notes became world-famous (and let us hope that some enterprising publisher will bring them out).
In 1959, MGM's Ben-Hur received rave reviews and Everson felt they were not deserved — so he showed the 1925 version at the Huff. Rival collector Raymond Rohauer, experiencing a little trouble himself over a lawsuit from MGM, told the FBI what Everson was doing, and they confronted him after the performance. They seized the print, and Everson spent the next few days squirreling other hot titles around New York. Lillian Gish had to intervene on his behalf.
In the 1970s, the FBI instituted a "witch hunt" among film collectors, but by then Everson was too highly respected to be touched. Archives came to depend on him — he would not only loan rare prints for copying or showing, but he would travel the world presenting the films he loved. I was astounded to meet him at an airport weighed down by three times as many cans of films as any human could be expected to carry. He had the uncanny knack of finding lost films. It would be no exaggeration to say that single-handedly, he transformed the attitude of American film enthusiasts towards early cinema.
Many of Everson's film programs were assembled from his own personal collection, which comprised over 4,000 titles by the 1970s. These screenings usually showcased minor masterpieces and critically overlooked B pictures that he deemed worthy of reappraisal. He brought these rediscoveries to other venues, such as the Pacific Film Archive and the Telluride Film Festival.