Barbara L. Hall (1961-2025), Archivist for the Art Director’s Guild, former Oral Historian and Research Archivist at the Margaret Herrick Library (AMPAS), and co-author of Letters from Hollywood: Inside the Private World of Classic American Moviemaking, passed away on May 24, 2025, surrounded by her loving family. Barbara’s untimely passing is a great loss to her beloved spouse of 39 years Val Almendarez, her sisters, nieces, nephews, grand nieces and nephews, and her wide circle of friends and colleagues.

To the SCMS community, Barbara was an indispensable expert, aide, and writer who shared her wide and deep knowledge of archival resources about the history of Hollywood filmmaking with generosity, enthusiasm, and discernment. Many members of this organization researched their books, articles, dissertations, and even undergraduate theses, with the benefit of Barbara’s interest and expertise, and due to her commitment to making many archival resources, such as the Production Code Administration files, more accessible to scholars. At the news of her passing, many film scholars described her as a rare archivist who acted as a bridge builder among scholars, journalists, and industry artists and as a scholarly collaborator in the researching and writing of film history.

Barbara grew up in Redondo Beach, California and graduated from the University of Southern California in 1983. She began her undergraduate pursuits as a French major but switched to Cinema-Television after taking a number of film history and theory courses in what was then called the USC School of Cinema-Television; she was particularly drawn to the American film courses taught by Prof. Richard Jewell, who became a life-long friend and mentor (one of Barbara’s last projects before her passing was conducting a SCMS Field Notes interview with Rick). During her senior year (1982-83) she interned at the American Film Institute library under the supervision of Howard Prouty, who would become another life-long friend and mentor as well as eventually a colleague at the Margaret Herrick Library, the library for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The AFI work led to a position in the Special Collections Department of the Herrick, where, between 1983 and 1985, Barbara worked on the library’s newly acquired collections of the Production Code Administration files and the Alfred Hitchcock papers under the direction of Sam Gill. It was at this time she met her husband Val, who was doing research for the National Film Information Service, and who later became a collections archivist at the Herrick.

Barbara left the Herrick in 1985 after her acceptance in the University of Iowa’s M.A. program in Film Studies. After she earned her M.A. at Iowa in 1987, she was accepted in the doctoral program at USC. She cultivated treasured relationships while in both graduate programs and many of these people would become library patrons where she worked as archivist, and remain long-time friends for whom Barbara and Val generously opened their home for social gatherings and sometimes for short-term stays when out-of-towners in the group visited L.A. to do research.

Barbara left the USC doctoral program in 1989 to take a position—which she had a hand in creating—as Oral Historian at the Herrick. This was a role in which Barbara’s personal charm, congenial sociality, and affective investments in the historical past were wedded to her professional expertise in Hollywood film history. And it allowed Barbara to develop her interest in showcasing the significance of multiple crafts and kinds of labor in the studio system while complicating and nuancing historical accounts of Hollywood by attending to the words of those who worked and lived there. The range of oral histories she conducted is dazzling: among them, interviews with Hitchcock’s assistant and script supervisor Peggy Robertson; production designer Alexander Golitzen; costume sketch artist and designer Adele Balkan; agent-producer Sam Jaffe; actress Laraine Day; screenwriter Daniel Taradash; Production Code staff member Albert Van Schmus; MGM foreign department director and Production Code liaison Robert Vogel.

Barbara was active in the Southwest Oral History Association throughout her career, serving as the organization’s president in 1996-97. At the Academy, she transitioned from Oral Historian to Herrick’s Special Collections Research Archivist in 1998, beginning a fifteen-year role for which is best known to many SCMS members, as well as to those who worked in other libraries and archives with significant collections of films and film-related documents, and to biographers, independent historians, and researchers employed in media industries. Barbara’s ability to match archival materials in the Herrick’s Special Collections with patrons’ research and writing projects was perhaps unparalleled (rivaling the talents of her late friend Ned Comstock at USC) and the many mentions of Barbara’s encouraging, knowledgeable, and unfailingly creative archival aid that appear in the acknowledgment pages of  hundreds of books and essays published in the last thirty years are testament to her lasting influence on American film history scholarship. More than one scholar found, through Barbara’s help, not only what they were hoping to find, but also intriguing artifacts that would inspire their next project.

Barbara was also a leader in the Herrick’s move to making some of their materials available in digital format, and her role in selecting case files from the Production Code collection for publication by Gale Publishers (first on microfilm, then in digital form and now accessible to many SCMS members through their institutions’ research libraries) will certainly be part of her professional legacy for many years to come. One of Barbara’s most joyful experiences at this time was her mentorship of, and collaboration with, Jenny Romero, who became Barbara’s successor when Barbara left the Herrick in 2013; Jenny held the position for several years before she left the Academy and later started her current position as the Robert De Niro Curator of Film at the Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin.

Barbara was Corporate Archivist at Warner Bros. during the studio’s tumultuous year in 2013-14. Between 2015-18 she volunteered as a docent at the Los Angeles Public Library, worked as a free-lance researcher and as a Library Fellow at the Writer’s Guild Foundation, organizing their archival library and helping to prep special events. In this position Barbara expanded her knowledge of screenwriting as craft and labor and wrote several essays for the Guild’s magazine Written By, one on the history of writers’ pensions and three essays on facets of the blacklist for the magazine’s special 2015 issue on that topic. During this period she connected with writer-producer Rocky Lang, son of studio-era agent and producer Jennings Lang, to collaborate on a book that would view the history of the Hollywood studio system and its films through correspondence between significant or representative Hollywood figures between the 1920s and 1970s.

In Letters from Hollywood: Inside the Private World of Classic American Filmmaking (Abrams, 2019) Barbara and co-author Lang juxtaposed letters—137 of them, from such figures as Bette Davis, Alfred Hitchcock, Gregg Toland, Dalton Trumbo, Irving Berlin, Hattie McDaniel, John Huston, Cary Grant, Jane Fonda, Tom Hanks—with contextual texts illuminating key films and filmmaking relationships in American film history. The book was a smash success, a best seller for its publisher, inspiring stories on NPR and in Vanity Fair. The co-authors were invited to be interviewed at Turner Classic Movies (TCM) fan film festival and the channel aired, as interstitial material between films, a number of video interviews Lang produced with the grown children of Hollywood figures in which they read letters from their famous parents. For Barbara, who by this time had already moved from outside the archival space to participate at scholarly conferences (such as SCMS and Women and the Silent Screen), serve on editorial boards (for many years on the board of Journal of Film and Video), and publish her work in a variety of venues, this book was a new way for her to expand telling history through the words of the people who lived it, and to explore the overlap between the personal and the professional as a key factor in how the Hollywood film industry has operated.

At the time of her passing, Barbara had been working as Archivist for the Art Directors Guild, where she organized their archival holdings to make them accessible for working guild members. She was especially proud of participating in a cooperative Herrick-Art Directors Guild “Visual History” interview with Jeannine Oppewall, production designer for such films as L.A. Confidential, Wonder Boys, Catch Me if You Can, Pleasantville, and Bridges of Madison County. Barbara felt art direction and production design has been understudied in our field, and she strived to make a difference by showcasing the creativity and labor of the craft artists in this profession. Her essay, “Art Direction: The Drive to Unite Hollywood’s Designers and Artists,” which documents the complicated history of unionization for this craft labor, was recently published in Hollywood Unions, edited by Kate Fortmueller and Luci Marzola. It provides an indispensable start for scholars to turn their attention to art direction and production design.

As impressive as Barbara’s contribution to historical scholarship on Hollywood filmmaking is, she is also remembered by her family and close friends as an enthusiast of: her family and friends; her pets; travel; new restaurants in L.A.; pie from The Apple Pan; a good cocktail; the work of Stephen Sondheim; The Mary Tyler Moore Show; the movies The Best Years of Our Lives, The Little Shop Around the Corner, and All About Eve; Fred Astaire singing “Just the Way You Look Tonight.” She also loved exploring the history of southern California, especially the history of Los Angeles, and she lovingly curated and displayed relevant California objects (postcards, photos, craftsman-design tiles and ceramics) in the visual design of her home with Val. She was delighted to learn that silent film star Renee Adoree was an earlier resident of her house.

Barbara will be greatly missed by her family, friends, and co-workers. Her influence on Hollywood film scholarship is a lasting legacy for the SCMS and film archiving community.

For those interested in Barbara’s writing on Hollywood history, please enjoy the following:

Rocky Lang and Barbara Hall, Letters from Hollywood: Inside the Private World of Classic American Moviemaking (NY: Abrams, 2019), with an introduction by Peter Bogdanovich.

Barbara Hall, “ ‘Oh, Pioneers!’ The Academy’s Embrace of Early Film History, 1945-1951,” The Moving Image 13:1 (Spring 2013).

Barbara Hall, “A Diamond Formation: How Things Went Down at the Screen Writers Guild,” “You’ve Been Served: Decoding the HUAC Subpoena,” and “Jarrico v. Hughes,” Written By (Special issue on the Blacklist) 19:5 (September/October, 2015). Written By : September | October 2015

Barbara Hall, “Got Pension? Writers Made it Possible” Written By, 22:3 (April/May 2018). Written By : April May 2018

Barbara Hall, “Gladys Hall” [fan magazine writer, no relation!], Women Film Pioneer Project, eds. Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta (NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2016) Gladys Hall – Women Film Pioneers Project

Barbara Hall, “Art Direction: The Drive to Unite Hollywood’s Designers and Artists,” Hollywood Unions, eds. Kate Fortmueller and Luci Marzola (Rutgers University Press, 2025).

The transcripts of Barbara’s oral histories for the Academy are cataloged and available at the Margaret Herrick Library in Beverly Hills.

To listen to a 2019 podcast with Barbara talking about her professional background, researching Letters from Hollywood, and the skills and experiences necessary for a career in film research archiving, go to: Barbara Hall, Hollywood Historian-Episode #96 | Storybeat with Steve Cuden

--Mary Desjardins, with Val Almendarez