Huge scrapbooks of news clippings recording the early success of child star Jackie Coogan. A letter from silent star and film producer Mack Sennett politely asking card-playing chums to pay up their gambling debts. And a grocery list Sennett's mother sent her famous son. These are among the treasures that Rob King, graduate student in film and television critical studies, discovered in the archives of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Perhaps because of his field, it's tempting to see King as a film noir detective, seeking clues to Hollywood's past in dim and dust-filled rooms. "He's so good at following through on tips and leads," says his adviser, Associate Professor Janet Bergstrom, who hired King as a research assistant on a silent film project "because he knows the library so well and is such a good detective."

But what he does "feels less like an investigation work than exploratory work or discovery," King says. "The pleasure of having these things in my hands is what keeps me going." Like an explorer, King is careful to record the historical and social environment in which he finds his treasures buried. For example, his perusal of Coogan's scrapbooks inspired a paper on the commercial exploitation of the boy who was the kid in Charlie Chaplin's The Kid. Using Coogan's image to sell dolls, children's clothes, and school accessories might be expected, but the child is also seen promoting cigarettes and auto tires, Rob says.

"Jackie Coogan promoted new patterns of child spending," Rob says, although ironically, he usually played a penniless orphan in films. Coogan's association with a Victorian social concern for helping the urban poor made him an acceptable icon to bridge the gap between a vision of childhood as a time for discipline and restraint and new images "based on spending, spontaneity, playfulness, and cheekiness."

Rob's delight in his archival discoveries "makes you want to show everyone what you've found," he says. A paper about Coogan and child consumerism is the cover story in this fall's issue of the Velvet Light Trap, a journal published by University of Texas Press. He also submitted the paper in application for the Georgia Frontiere Scholarship and the Plitt Southern Theater Employees Trust Fellowship-and won both. Rob will use the second award to write about Mack Sennett's bathing beauties and early models of femininity and seaside resorts.

Sennett is a key figure in Rob's dissertation examining the Keystone Film Company, which Sennett headed, "in the context of early 20th-century American and urban working class culture." Keystone produced Charlie Chaplin's films in the mid-1910s, as well as a host of slapstick comedies, including those featuring the Keystone Cops. Rob acknowledges that these comedies may not be funny to 21st-century sensibilities: "You can only take so much kicking people up the backside and hitting people with bricks before it starts to wear thin." Instead of expecting to be entertained, Rob looks at the way the films and society relate to one another, making "the fact that they're not always so amusing into a cornerstone of curiosity."

The first silent films were often slapstick comedies, according to Rob, but about 1907 middle-class values took hold in Hollywood. Adaptations of literary and stage classics and biopics about famous figures became prime material for feature films. By 1912, when Sennett founded Keystone, his style of film was at odds with the Hollywood mainstream. "The enormous popularity of Keystone suggests that film wasn't all about genteel entertainment or exploring the ways that film could be art," Rob explains.

Although Rob is just beginning his dissertation work this fall, he's already reviewed the entire Mack Sennett collection at the Academy library. He hopes to finish his dissertation in two years, and unlike many graduate students, he faces a deadline of three years imposed by his visa.

Born and raised in England, Rob was an early fan of Hollywood movies. While studying Greek and Latin on scholarship at Oxford University's Balliol College, he wrote film reviews for campus publications. As a summer intern, Rob wrote brief film reviews for Time Out, London's version of LA Weekly. Finding reviewing unsatisfying, he took a master's degree in film and television studies at the University of Warwick, then headed for Japan to teach English at Nova English Language Schools in Nagoya and Osaka.

While he was in Japan, Rob submitted applications for doctoral studies in film to several British programs and one American school: UCLA. UCLA offered more than an attractive package of financial support. "At UCLA I've received the most positive support and encouragement I've ever had."

Much of that support has come from Professor Bergstrom, who says Rob combines a mastery of the literature with excellent writing skills: "It's rare to find someone who has the archival detective skills along with the ability to do advanced historiographic work." In turn, Rob says Bergstrom "has given me the encouragement to become the kind of film scholar I want to be." For Rob, that's equal parts historian and film critic, with employment in university teaching. Having discovered the wonders of Hollywood's film archives, Rob wouldn't mind if that university was in Southern California. Although Los Angeles is unlike any other city he's seen, he quickly felt at home here. "Once I get a car, I'll be fully adjusted."

Published in Fall 2001, Graduate Quarterly