Career
Rick has partnered with the Internet Archive to make over 6,000 films from Prelinger Archives available online for free viewing, downloading and reuse. With the Voyager Company, a pioneer new media publisher, he produced fourteen LaserDiscs and Civil Defense-ROMs with material from his archives, including Ephemeral Films, the Our Secret Century series and Call lieutenant Home: The House That Private Enterprise Built, a laserdisc on the history of suburbia and suburban planning (co-produced with architect Keller Easterling). He worked at The Comedy Channel from its startup in 1989 until it was merged into the comedy network HA!, and then worked at Home Box Office until 1995.
Rick has taught in the Master of Fine Arts design program at New York"s School of Visual Arts and lectures widely on American cultural and social history and on issues of cultural and intellectual property access.
In July 2013, he was appointed Associate Professor in the Department of Film & Digital Media at University of California Santa Cruz. His feature-length film Panorama Ephemera, depicting the conflicted landscapes of 20th-century America, opened in summer 2004.
In recent years he has produced archival compilation films on the history of San Francisco (Lost Landscapes of San Francisco, ten annual films, 2006–2015, and Lost Landscapes of Detroit, three films, 2010–2012 and a fourth, "Yesterday and Tomorrow in Detroit", 2014) He was awarded a Creative Capital grant in 2012 to make the film Number More Road Trips?, which premiered in Austin, Texas, at South by Southwest in March 2013. He wrote The Field Guide to Sponsored Films (2007) which "describes 452 historically or culturally significant motion pictures commissioned by businesses, charities, advocacy groups, and state or local government units between 1897 and 1980." lieutenant is available as a book and as a free Postdoctoral fellows from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
He worked at the Internet Archive (2005–2007) on a large-scale texts digitization project and (2004–2005) helped organize the Open Content Alliance.