What We Do

A Cultural Memory Archive

We, Melissa Dollman and Devin Orgeron, founded Deserted Films in Palm Springs in 2021 and incorporated as a nonprofit in July 2022. In 2023, it was federally recognized as a 501(c)(3). A bit about us: We collect, care for and make accessible films shot in the general Palm Springs region during that golden age of nontheatrical film from the 1920s-1980s when 16mm, 8mm, Super 8 celluloid film and VHS camcorders (instead of our phones!) were the tools we used to preserve our memories. The collection houses a fair bit of footage of Southern California, generally, and also our surrounding desert regions. If we love a filmmaker’s aesthetic and (be still our hearts) their film documents a historical event (or historically underrepresented peoples), we grab it too. There are a few surprises. Really though, we encourage visitors to view and think about our region in context, in relationship to other cities, states and countries.

Disconnected from their makers, removed from their contexts, home movies end up at estate sales, yard sales, auctions, thrift stores, and antique shops. Deserted? Perhaps. Like archives big and small around the world, our mission is to reunite these materials with the region they depict and to amass and make available a roster of films that present a fuller image of the area’s unique development, its particular beauty, and its perpetual appeal. The Deserted Films collection consists of over 2,000 8mm, Super 8mm, and 16mm films, as well as a handful of home movies transferred to, or originally shot, on VHS.* 500+ are digitized and on our website. We have presented educational — and entertaining we think! — programs to audiences in the Coachella Valley at such venues as: Palm Springs Cultural Center, Palm Springs Public Library, Modernism Week, Maleza, and Rotary of Indio.

You can read a bit about us in this Palm Springs Life (August 2024) and in Bold Journey (July 2024)! We are recipients of digitization and preservation grants from both California Revealed (2023 & 2024) and the National Film Preservation Foundation (2025)! California Revealed‘s digitization grants are administered in California by the State Library. The program is made possible by funding from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act. The National Film Preservation Foundation is the nonprofit organization created by the U.S. Congress to help save America’s film heritage. They support activities nationwide that preserve American films and improve film access for study, education, and exhibition.

A thank you note to our supporters…

While we are principally interested in amateur films of the region, our sense of local history is also enhanced by the many “official” tourist and/or “booster” films made in the area, particularly during the mid-century. See “Our Region” for films shot in our general area, and then go farther afield with “A Short Drive“, “A Longer Drive,” and “A Flight Away.” For other Palm Springs-related ephemera like promotional View-Master reels and film strips, slides and yearbooks (coming soon), see “Palm Springs Ephemera.”

We are accepting donations of small gauge home movies and educational films shot in the Palm Springs area and surrounding desert regions created through about 1990. We also link out to other archives’, libraries’, and collectors’ films on our “Palm Springs Area Films in Other Collections” pages.

If you love watching strangers celebrate holidays, weddings, and other special events in their home movies, or retirement and work parties (like Melissa does), or enjoy tricks filmmakers do with their cameras, see “Holidays, Special Events, Parties, & Weird Stuff” and “Melissa’s Obsession: Work and Social Club Parties.”

Please see our “Publications & Resources” page for helpful information on preserving, digitizing, and thinking about home movies and other ephemeral films.

Tax Exempt/EIN number 88-3383988.

*We donated most of our VHS collection to the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, however we will still pick one up now and then.

We accept film donations if they cover Coachella Valley and/or Southern California. Contact us (desertedfilmsps [at] gmail.com)

Who We Are

We have dedicated the better parts of their lives to film and to the preservation of our collective visual history…especially as that history plays out in “lesser known” or “ephemeral” film. Devin is a widely published emeritus professor of Film Studies at North Carolina State University and has spent the couple of decades years researching, writing about, and sharing films made to advertise goods and services, films made to educate and instruct children and adults, and films made by amateurs to commemorate important as well as everyday events. He is editor-in-chief of The Moving Image (the journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists), an academic journal that celebrates these interests. Melissa created and curates the website, and edits the nonprofit’s public screenings. She is a trained audiovisual archivist (M.A. in Moving Image Archive Studies from UCLA) and earned a Ph.D. in American Studies, a former board director and producer of oral histories for the Association of Moving Image Archivists, and an Advisory Board member for Al Larvick Conservation Fund. Her research often focuses on the role ephemeral films play in our understanding of our shared cultural heritage and as documentary evidence. As such she, like Devin, has also focused on “nontheatrical” films…. films made to screen in alternative venues (churches, prisons, schools, fairs, lodges, conventions, etc.) and home movies. Her former position as archivist and digital projects manager for Tribesourcing Southwest Film, for example, taught her (she is of Yankton Sioux descent) much about bringing historical nontheatrical films and home movies depicting Native American communities back to those communities for reinterpretation and re-narration by members of those communities.

Picture of us taken during our Modernism Week 2024 presentation: “Palm Springs Plays Itself: A Vintage Home Movie Cocktail Hour with Deserted Films.” Photo by Andrea Heck Addington.

Board of Directors+ and By-laws

First Events in the Area

Prior to 2022 when we officially incorporated, we collaborated with Modernism Week and the Palm Springs Public Library for Home Movie Day, a grassroots, worldwide effort to educate the public about home movies that invites the public to bring their films where we inspect, repair, and screen them. The broad appeal of Modernism Week and Palm Springs’ reputation as a community of transplants means that not all of the films we see are made in or around the area. We screen films from our own collection or invite local archivists to present films depicting Palm Springs, Palm Desert, Cathedral City, Indio, and the greater Coachella Valley region.

See our Events and News page for forthcoming and recent happenings.

Our Personal Home Movies

MD#1. [Melissa Dollman’s Home Movie Shot by Her Cousin’s Family, ca. late 1950s.] 8mm Transferred to VHS and then digitized at 720p. Color. Silent. Footage features her mother when she was about eight, cousins, aunts and uncles, grandmother, and even her great-grandmother. Shot in Platte, South Dakota.

DO#1. [Devin Orgeron’s Family Home Movie Compilation, 1960.] 8mm. Color. Silent. Digitized in-house, so not the best quality! This fragment is from a reel in Devin’s own family collection. The Orgeron family didn’t shoot home movies and this is one of a small handful of films depicting my older brother (in this case) and sometimes my older sister. All of the films are dated 1964 and were shot by family friends. This appears to be a joint birthday party, during which my brother splashes in an inflatable pool filled with urine, receives some outfits in primary colors, is briefly imprisoned for wearing a USC shirt, and then gets R&R at the beach on Balboa Island, California.

Copyright Statement

Note: We do not sell or license footage to filmmakers, but we are happy to collaborate on educational or civic-minded projects with other nonprofit entities*. Our aim here is educational, to showcase these ephemeral nontraditional visual records of our past. We do our very best to research and offer as much historical and regional context for the heirlooms on this site as much as we can (and because we like it!), as well as in our public presentations.

Copyright status unknown. Works on this site may be protected by the U.S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S.C.). In addition, it’s reproduction may be restricted by terms of gift or purchase agreements, donor restrictions, privacy and publicity rights, licensing and trademarks. Works on this site are accessible for purposes of education and research. Transmission or reproduction of works protected by copyright beyond that allowed by fair use requires the written permission of the copyright owners (if discoverable). Works not in the public domain cannot be commercially exploited without permission of the copyright owner. Responsibility for any use rests exclusively with the user. Deserted Films has attempted to find rights owners without success in most cases, but is eager to hear from them so that we may obtain permission, if needed. Upon request to Deserted Films, digitized works can be removed from public view if there are rights issues that need to be resolved. Should a person see themselves or family members as subjects of a home movie on our site, please be in touch. We’d love to chat! If said parties object to our display of a work or their likenesses, we have a take-down policy.

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Land Acknowledgement

Deserted Films is located on the ancestral and current homelands of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians. They, and other bands in the surrounding areas, have been the caretakers of this land for many generations. We honor and thank them.