Bill Douglas Cinema Museum facts for kids

The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum (formally the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture) is both a public museum and an academic research facility, housing one of Britain's largest public collections of books, prints, artefacts and ephemera relating to the history and prehistory of cinema. Located on the Streatham Campus of the University of Exeter, the Museum was founded in 1994 and opened to the public in 1997.

The museum has two galleries of exhibits which are open to the public free of charge everyday from 10am to 5pm (apart from between Christmas and New Year). There is a reading room for researchers to access and consult materials from the collection which is open from 10am to 5pm Monday to Friday by appointment.

The museum is named after the filmmaker Bill Douglas. The collection that Bill Douglas put together with his friend Peter Jewell founded the museum; many other donors have added to the holdings since. The museum now holds over 80,000 artefacts from the seventeenth century to the present day. There is a large collection of material on optical media prior to the invention of cinema including holdings on magic lanterns, shadow puppets, panoramas and dioramas and optical illusions. There are also significant holdings on cinema pioneers, early and silent cinema, film stars, such as Charlie Chaplin and Marilyn Monroe, and film publicity material and merchandising up to the present day.

There are also a number of filmmakers' production archives, including Bill Douglas's working papers and the archives of producer/director Don Boyd, and producers Gavrik Losey and James Mackay.