One recent night in Los Angeles, a group of powerful people filed into a building to watch the 1982 movie Tron . The film, which is about a coder who gets stuck inside a video game, has become a cult classic. But the audience this evening wasn’t composed of the usual fan boys. Rather, Hollywood’s power nerds were gathering at a place that has become their clubhouse: the Science and Technology Council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

The academy is known worldwide as the organization behind the annual Oscar awards. Every year, the non-profit group’s 6000-plus honorary members—directors, actors, producers, and the like—vote, and the results are aired on one of Hollywood’s biggest nights. Behind the scenes, however, part of the roughly US $50 million earned from Oscars licenses goes toward funding the Science and Technology Council, a division of the academy dedicated to both preserving the film industry’s technical past and advancing its scientific future. That ranges from an event like the recent night when technology leaders discussed the breakthrough animation of Tron to fighting for new ways to preserve invaluable digital media. As Andrew Maltz, the trained engineer who serves as the council’s director, says, ”We view ourselves as the guardian of quality of the motion picture. We’re a common meeting ground for all the interests here.”

The Science and Technology Council’s roots go back to the founding of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1927. From early on, there were committees dedicated to production matters such as sound and prints. But when the studios took control in the late 1930s, the focus shifted to the Academy Awards, leaving much of the geek work behind. It wasn’t until 2003, after Hollywood technologists began pushing for an umbrella organization, that the council came back bigger than ever. ”Doing this in the 21st century is different than doing it in the 1920s and ’30s,” Maltz says. ”In terms of technology, business, personalities, and laws, everything is different.”