yeovil people
william KEITH Everson
Film Archivist and Historian
William
Keith "Bill"
Everson was born
in Yeovil on 8
April 1929, the
son of aircraft
Engineer
Percival Wilfred
Everson and
Catherine née
Ward.
Bill Everson became a renowned film archivist, author, critic, educator, collector and film historian. He often discovered lost films. 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.
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.
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 destined to be destroyed or abandoned. Many of his discoveries were projected at his Manhattan film group, the Theodore Huff Memorial Film Society. 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.
Bill Everson
died of prostate
cancer on 14
April 1996 at
the age of 67 in
Manhattan, New
York. He
was survived by
his wife, Karen
Latham Everson
and two
children.
gallery
William Everson with Marilyn Monroe.
William Keith
"Bill" Everson
1929-1996
