William K. Everson

William K. Everson
Born	William Keith Everson 8 April 1929 Yeovil, Somerset, England, UK
Died	14 April 1996 (aged 67) New York City, New York, U.S.
Occupation	Archivist, author, critic, educator, collector and film historian

William Keith "Bill" Everson (8 April 1929 – 14 April 1996) was an English-American archivist, author, critic, educator, collector and film historian. He also discovered some lost films.

Everson was born in Yeovil, Somerset, the son of Catherine (née Ward) and Percival Wilfred Everson, an aircraft engineer. 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 1946-48, 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.

Concurrently with his employment as writer, editor and researcher on the TV series Movie Museum and Silents Please, 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 slated to be destroyed or abandoned.

Many of his discoveries were projected at his Manhattan film group, the Theodore Huff Memorial Film Society, originally founded by Huff (the biographer of Charlie Chaplin), Everson, film critic Seymour Stern and Variety columnist Herman G. Weinberg as the Theodore Huff Film Society. After Huff's death, Everson added the word "Memorial". At each screening, Huff members were presented with extensive program notes written by Everson about each film. During the 1960s, these screenings were held in a hall at Union Square.

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