Famous Hollywood Hills in California, USA. Hollywood Sign. California Photo Collection.

By Kallie Stahl 

This summer Falvey Library is going to the movies! Well, we’re using our beloved Library’s resources to research the coolest film scenes set in libraries. So grab a seat and a box of popcorn because the we’re going to look at when libraries go to Hollywood.

The Mummy (Universal Pictures). Image courtesy of IMDB.

Yes, the 1999 cinematic masterpiece starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz.

The Mummy has a bit of everything…adventure, horror, comedy, and romance. The film is one of the last “action-adventure” films produced before the rise of the superhero blockbuster. Not overly dramatic or serious, the show never gets too dark, offering audiences plenty of opportunities to laugh despite the ongoing conflict with the awakened mummy, Imhotep.

While The Mummy doesn’t feature an iconic library (like the University of Pennsylvania’s Fisher Fine Arts Library in the film Philadelphia), books play a crucial role throughout the movie. One of the main characters, Evelyn “Evy” Carnahan (Rachel Weisz), is a librarian and aspiring Egyptologist working in the Cairo Museum of Antiquities. The introduction to the character is a fun scene, as she accidently knocks over every bookshelf in the museum’s library.

Books drive the storyline, as Evy, her brother Jonathan (John Hannah), and Richard “Rick” O’Connell (Brendan Fraser) travel to the lost city of Hamunaptra to find the book of Amun-Ra. On their trip, Evy reads a page from the Book of the Dead, which resurrects the mummy. Not to spoil too much of the plot, but Evy’s ability to read hieroglyphs proves helpful in solving the mummy’s mystery (“Take that, Bembridge scholars!”) You can watch the movie using Falvey’s Interlibrary Loan service.

Looking for more libraries featured on film? Explore the resources below.

Libraries on film in Falvey’s collection:

• The Name of the Rose
• The Time Machine
• The Day After Tomorrow
• A.I. Artificial Intelligence
• All the President’s Men
• Harry Potter

More movies featuring libraries via Interlibrary Loan:

• The Music Man
• The Breakfast Club
• The Shawshank Redemption
• Se7en
• Clue
• National Treasure

Want to win a cool “Falvey Says Read” tee shirt? Email your favorite movie library to libraryevents@villanova.edu, and we’ll pick a winner at random!

Kallie Stahl ’17 MA is Communication and Marketing Specialist at Falvey Library.

Famous Hollywood Hills in California, USA. Hollywood Sign. California Photo Collection.

Courtesy of Wikicommons: George Eastman House, Set 72157608512488080, ID 2987740376, Original title [NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY]

By Shawn Proctor

This summer Falvey Library is going to the movies! Well, we’re using our beloved Library’s resources to research the coolest film scenes set in libraries. So grab a seat and a box of popcorn because the we’re going to look at when libraries go to Hollywood.

Want to win a cool “Falvey Says Read” tee shirt? Email your favorite movie library to libraryevents@villanova.edu, and we’ll pick a winner at random!

We’re not afraid of no ghosts! But the opening scenes of Ghostbusters, the 1984 classic horror-comedy, are actually pretty scary as we follow Alice, an older librarian, down the shadowy bookshelves.

“Deep in the basement of the New York Public Library (NYPL), strange things are happening: Books float from shelf to shelf in midair, cards spew from catalog drawers, and a librarian confronts a terrifying . . . something. Enter Drs. Venkman (Bill Murray), Spengler (Harold Ramis), and Stantz (Dan Aykroyd): “paranormal studies” researchers working in, but barely tolerated by, the psychology department of Columbia University,” explains The Laughing Dead: The Horror-comedy Film from Bride of Frankenstein to Zombieland. (Access available via ProQuest.)

While the film made use of many notable New York City landmarks, the ominous exterior of the NYPL, complete with massive marble lions, sets the tone for all of supernatural scares ahead. The pair of big cats look as if they might pounce off their pedestals right then!

Courtesy of NYPL

Did you know? The two lions are named Patience and Fortitude! And they are 112 years old, according to the NYPL!

If you want to see more images of the lions through the years, visit this NYPL Google Drive.

“(T)he screenwriters imagined that the urban setting was appropriate not only to the comic riffs of their characters (and the unflappable locals), but also to the mythology they were creating for their demons and ghouls. The buildings in New York are old and rich with history, full of ghosts and their legends,” says the book Fun City Cinema : New York City and the Movies That Made It. (Access available via ProQuest.)

“Of course, it adds to the comedy when the Ghostbusters themselves are only fractionally braver than Alice the librarian,” adds Karen Kettnich and Paul T. Jaeger in their Library Quarterly article “Libraries and Librarians Onscreen and in Library Quarterly, Part 2, Or, The Greatest Hits of the ’80s, ’90s, and Today!”

Do you still use physical media like DVDs? You can borrow a DVD set of Ghostbusters 1 & 2 via Falvey’s Interlibrary Loan service!

Throughout the movie, the exteriors were consistently New York, but you might not realize that very few of the interior sets resided on the east coast. Filming shifted to Los Angeles due to save on filming costs. The library scene is no exception.

“…the stacks of the library are the stacks of the library. Even though they’re quite particular at the great New York Public Library on 42nd Street, we didn’t think it would be a problem to move that scene [to L.A.],” Ivan Reitman told LA Weekly in 2016. “Where we made use of the great reading room [of the New York Public Library] — and we were always going to film there as soon as I walked through it and was given permission to shoot there — I said, “Well, this is incomparable, so we have to shoot here.”

As Falvey is home to the impressive Dugan Polk Family Reading Room, we can completely understand that sentiment.

Got a favorite movie that features a library? Comment below!

Falvey Library Resources Cited:

Columbia Pictures,, et al. Ghostbusters 1 & 2. Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Inc., 2017.

Jason Bailey. Fun City Cinema : New York City and the Movies That Made It. Abrams, 2021.

Kettnich, Karen, and Paul T. Jaeger. “Libraries and Librarians Onscreen and in Library Quarterly, Part 2, Or, The Greatest Hits of the ’80s, ’90s, and Today!” Library Quarterly, vol. 90, no. 4, 2020, pp. 389-411, https://doi.org/10.1086/710268.

ProQuest Ebook Subscriptions, et al. The Laughing Dead: The Horror-comedy Film from Bride of Frankenstein to Zombieland. Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.

Shawn Proctor is a Communication and Marketing Manager at Falvey Memorial Library.