Universities will say to a studio, 'Give us your old records - production records, scripts, sets, still photographs, anything. The studio will answer, 'No. You can't have them. There are packing case after packing case of production records showing cost accounting, scheduling, receipts, logistics and planning. Financial records, also included in the collections, are the most secret of papers and the most difficult to obtain.
Studios jealously guard actual cost, gross profit and net profit figures.
There are extensive censorship records, particularly in the Cohen collection. Censorship of this strict a nature did of course cease. In the late 1940s and early 1950s the Supreme Court began reversing earlier decisions, liberalizing censorship laws. The Cohen collection covers the period of these changes. These were also the years when television, and its far reaching aftermath, hit the film industry.