Maria Arena Bell grew up in Newport Beach, California, and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Art History from Northwestern University. After initially pursuing a career in fashion design, Bell first served as the scriptwriter and fashion consultant for The Young and the Restless, eventually becoming the head writer and executive producer of the well-known daytime soap opera. Following her departure from the show, Bell founded Vitameatavegamin Productions, where she currently develops projects for film, television and new media.
Over the past several years, Bell has made notable contributions toward awareness and fundraising for arts education through non-profit/philanthropic roles, along with her efforts in writing both novels and freelance works. She currently teaches a course at the Harvard Extension School titled “Advanced TV Writing: The One-Hour Drama Pilot and Serialized Storytelling,” where she has the opportunity to share her Emmy Award-winning television writing skills with students.
The Maria Bell collection includes fifty-eight 35mm prints of feature films, released from 1939 to 2005, with the bulk released in the 1970s through the early 2000s. The majority of the earlier films are reissue print copies, not original prints. The films are spread across a multitude of genres, from Hollywood classics such as Gone with the Wind (1939), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), The African Queen (1951) and The Sound of Music (1965), to more recent family favorites like Beetlejuice (1988), Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) and Shrek (2001). The collection also features a number of Walt Disney films including Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951), Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971), Aladdin (1992) and The Lion King (1994).
Highlights of this collection are the eleven IB Technicolor prints. Technicolor IB was a film dye-transfer process, utilized approximately between 1928 and 2002, which employed the use of dyes that are more stable and permanent than ordinary color processing. Some of the collection’s IB Technicolor prints include It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1950), My Fair Lady (1964) and Funny Girl (1968). – Alexandra Vasile
This collection was donated to the Harvard Film Archive by Maria Bell in 2018.
A finding aid for this collection can be found here.
