The warmth of your hands pressed against those of your date, the squeak of your shoes peeling off of the sticky floor, the smell of faux-butter popcorn, the power of laughing or crying with a room full of strangers—the magic of motion pictures is as much about the venue as the film itself. These are the reasons why television and movie rentals have not been the death of movie theaters.

Still, appreciation for the art of filmmaking seems increasingly lost among present-day audiences. Going to the movies, says film aficionado and archivist Ray Regis, used to be an event, an experience that, before the advent of television, was more like going to see a Broadway musical than merely something to pass time after a meal at T.G.I. Friday’s.

Over the past 50 years, Regis has built an impressive film collection, 3,000 original prints of some of history’s most coveted celluloid. Estimated to be worth more than $6 million, the real value in this collection, he says, is for people to see movies the way they “were meant to be seen.” So this summer, several trucks in North Carolina stacked with metal canisters are en route to the University of Miami School of Communication, now the home of the Raymond J. Regis Motion Picture Archives.

All of the titles in Regis’s collection are original 35mm and 70mm prints, some of which are the only copies known in existence. Sam L Grogg, dean of the School of Communication, notes that the collection is a coup in terms of attracting future film students and instructing current ones.

“What it will say about our motion picture program is that it truly is a serious program,” Grogg says. “Not many universities have collections of original prints. To be able to say, ‘I can see the original movie the way it was meant to be seen,’ that’s a special resource for students. You can’t teach broadcasting without a studio, you can’t teach journalism without an active publication, and you can’t teach movies without actually seeing them.”

The collection also will help Grogg and Regis offer members of the UM and Miami community an unparalleled moviegoing experience at the University’s Bill Cosford Cinema. Regis, a former projectionist, stresses that the film itself is only part of the show. Before the overture, he says, he’ll play specific music that relates to the picture being shown (he also used to own a radio station, and is bringing nearly 30,000 albums).

“The lights are dimming, the curtain’s going up, and they’re just waiting for thatmoment when it’s totally dark. Then the image appears on the screen,” Regis explains. “It’s exciting when it’s done properly.”

Regis’s collection also includes trailers—about 7,000 of them—which he plans on pairing with films from the same time period. “After a while,” he says, “the students get into it and appreciate it.”

Grogg was the founding dean of the School of Filmmaking at the North Carolina School of the Arts when he first met Regis. Grogg received a letter from arepresentative of Regis that read: “I have a client who has a considerable collection of motion pictures and is interested in placing it in a situation where it could be seen and used by students to study the history of motion pictures.” Grogg traveled to Boston to see what this mystery donor had to offer.

“We went up to a house out in Framingham, and there were cases and cases of motion pictures everywhere,” Grogg recalls, his eyes widening. “Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Stagecoach, everything was around me.”

Grogg and Regis moved the collection to the school, where it grew and became a core component of the curriculum. A decade later, after Grogg had left North Carolina for the American Film Institute and then accepted the position at the University of Miami, the men’s paths crossed again. Regis was looking to move his collection and himself to a warmer climate.

Regis’s collection includes the classics (Gone with the Wind, Some Like It Hot), the campy (Moon Over Miami, Bladerunner), and the contemporary (Capote, Good Night, and Good Luck), but perhaps the most important collection within his collection is that of the films shot in Technicolor, a color process developed in the 1930s and used through the early 1970s. Three separate strips of negative film raced through the Technicolor camera, each one taking the same image in red, green, and blue. Once the negatives were married to a master, an unparalleled color release print could be reproduced.

In the mid-1970s, says Grogg, “it was discovered that most every motion picture prior to 1930, about 90 percent, and about 50 percent of every picture prior to 1950 had been lost because they were filmed on what was called nitro-cellulose stock, which is easily destructible.”

Technicolor prints, however, will never fade. “I have films from the ’30s and ’40s that are just as vibrant as the day they were made,” Regis says.

In the beginning, Regis’s fascination with film was not so much what was on the screen but how it got there. “I’ll tell you a secret that will probably ruin going to the movies for you,” he says from the Cosford Cinema’s projection room. “Next time you’re at the movies, look in the upper right corner. Every 20 minutes or so you’ll see a dot—that’s to let the projectionist know to switch over to the other projector.”

He explains the job of the projectionist, how it used to be an art form but now moviegoers are lucky if the film even fits the screen.

“There used to be several moving picture libraries,” Regis recalls, “and for special occasions, like birthdays, parents would rent a movie on film and a 16mm projector, lug it home, get a screen, and show the movie. My parents would rent movies for the weekend, and I would spend the entire weekend with it.” That’s when he got the bug.

It was fitting, then, that Regis’s first job was as a projectionist for theaters around town as well as for the archdiocese of Boston. He would edit the films that were going to be viewed in the church and travel to area convents to teach nuns how to work the projector. “I remember one sister telling me, ‘Oh, this is adorable, it’s just like a sewing machine!’” he says, shaking his head as if the thought were blasphemous. “They would keep them clean, though.”

Regis started collecting the films from his various projectionist gigs, and before he knew it, he had filled his parents’ house with them. He will continue to curate the collection at the University of Miami, where he also is teaching a course on film genres in the fall and wants to train interested students in how to project and preserve film. He’d also like to host late-night screenings as study breaks, ongoing screenings and, of course, film festivals. Grogg would like to collaborate with other departments on campus—a screening of The Music Man in conjunction with the musical theatre program’s production of it, for example.

Overall, however, perhaps what Grogg and Regis both hope to accomplish most with this collection is simply generate more interest in and more excitement about seeing movies. “There’s a love of motion pictures that I think is in everybody,” Grogg adds. “And the idea of this is to feed it. It’s pretty easy to throw in a DVD on a Friday night, but if you create a place where you know you’re going to get a quality experience, you can build a loyal audience, and after a while we hope the Cosford will become what it was always intended to be—a real cultural treasure for the campus and the whole community.”

Jessica Sick, B.S.C. ’00, is a freelance writer in Miami, Florida.