S.W. “Winkie” Childs, Jr., Yale College Class of 1927, was the producer of the first student film ever made at the university, and one of the first feature films made by undergraduates anywhere in the United States. The film, a feature-length adaptation of Henry Fielding’s 1749 novel The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, premiered at Yale's Sprague Hall on June 12, 1927. The only copy of Childs’s Tom Jones, as well as dozens of other amateur films and hundreds of reels of home movies from the 1910s to 1960s, were donated by Childs’s family to the Yale Film Archive in 2016.

In 2018, preservation of Childs’s award-winning short film I'd Be Delighted To! (1932) was completed, and the film was premiered at the Orphan Film Symposium in New York with a live score by Stephen Horne. In 2019, the film Seductio Ad Absurdum (1940), directed by Childs's wife Cynthia Childs, was preserved by the Film Archive, and premiered at the Northeast Historic Film Summer Symposium in Bucksport, Maine, also with a score by Stephen Horne.