By Desa Philadelphia

Barnet Kellman’s office in the School of Cinematic Arts looks like a television set. Which is not surprising considering that Kellman, who teaches in the Film & Television Production division, has had a celebrated directing career in the medium, and is renowned as a pilot specialist. He has directed dozens of first episodes, launching more than a dozen television shows that include Murphy Brown, Mad About You, Suddenly Susan, The George Lopez Show and Something Wilder. Kellman started his career in theatre in New York, and also directed films. In short, he is a directing triple threat.

Kellman also apparently has an eye for preservation. The desk in his office, easily recognizable as a special piece of furniture, looks like something news anchor Murphy Brown might have sat behind. It however belonged to Kellman’s father, a lawyer, who worked for the American Jewish Committee combating hate groups. 

The rest of the collectibles in the office though, tell the story of Kellman’s career, and of television history of the last three decades. “My father kept records and files and so I grew up being taught how to file, so it was very automatic for me,” says Kellman. “I kept all the stuff.” 

Kellman previously donated his father’s papers which includes research on the KKK and the American Nazi Party, to the USC libraries. And now he is donating the collections from his own career to the School of Cinematic Arts archives. Among the many items are on-set photography from the shows; publicity and artifacts from Murphy Brown’s 10-year run including when Vice President Dan Quayle criticized Murphy’s single motherhood and set off a media storm; scripts; and lots of swag from the last thirty years. “I had stuff that I don’t know where else on earth it would be available,” says Kellman.

Kellman, who holds the Robin Williams Chair in Comedy at SCA has promised all these items to the School’s archives. “I wanted to add on to what’s already an amazing collection at the School of Cinematic Arts library, that houses so many important papers from artists in our industry,” says Kellman. “Obviously it also felt completely fitting since I’ve now spent what’s turned out to be a significant amount of time here at this institution.”

Kellman came to SCA during the 2007-2008 Writers Guild (WGA) strike. “I had been through strikes before and I knew how protracted they could be,” says Kellman. “I didn’t want to sit around for a year. I (went) to both USC and AFI and I pitched my comedy idea.” Both schools within a week called him back and offered him teaching jobs. He wound up working in both places, and kept teaching after the strikes were over even though he went back to working on set. "It was a little crazy and that went on for a couple years. But I finally said ‘when I’m on set I’m worried about my students.’" He eventually made the transition to teaching full time at SCA, and with professors David Isaacs and Jack Epps launched USC Comedy, the first comprehensive program in teaching comedy for the screen.

Kellman, who created and has honed the School’s popular class in Directing Comedy, is now working on a textbook-type manual for the class. It’s the kind of book that doesn’t exist and which Kellman says is badly needed. “I wasn’t following anyone else’s text, and I’ve devoted all my time to refining the class, there’s not a single semester that goes by that the class isn’t revamped. My class has become a testing ground and laboratory in communicating about comedy,” he says. “To this day you still can’t walk in a Barnes and Noble and pull a book off the shelf, it just isn’t there.”

He has relied on all his collections to pass on information to his students over the years. But he has now realized just how many people could benefit from the “sophisticated hoarding” he has been doing for decades. “I found out from librarians and people here that some of the stuff that I thought of as being of least interest and of least value, was actually, from a scholarship point of view, some of the rarest and most valuable.” This includes items like all the development and call logs and meetings and network correspondence, and even attorney’s files, from the beginning of Kellman’s career in television in the 1980s, through the big shows he worked on, culminating in 2015. Together it makes up what Kellman refers to as an “industrial record” of how major entertainment firms, law firms, and other companies did business with each other in shaping the evolution of the television landscape. 

Considering that in the digital age so much correspondence is deleted, the USC librarians were thrilled to find out how comprehensive his collecting has been. “Far more actual artifacts and materials from the feature film industry exists,” explains Kellman. “But the television industry, they don’t have access to that stuff and the studios and networks don’t give it out. So the fact that I had retained it gives them a look at stuff that it’s not easy for them to see.” Television is also such a fast-moving medium that oftentimes creators don’t really stop to think about the importance of their work. “You’ve got to do another show next week, who has got time to memorialize this one,” says Kellman. 

Kellman also kept various cuts of the same episode of a show, so that if someone is interested in how a show moves from the first edit to its various broadcast versions, including recuts for syndication, it’s all there.

Kellman got his first directing paycheck for directing a show at a theatre summer camp, when he was 17 years old. He directed all through college at Colgate University, and a master’s at Yale Drama School. 

His devotion to the craft fueled his devotion to keeping the souvenirs that will now fuel scholarship around creating great Comedy. “I was definitely on a path. By the time I was seventeen I knew what I wanted to do,” says Kellman. Now he is sharing all the knowledge, and the accompanying artifacts, he picked up along the way in a way that will benefit generations of cinema scholars.