San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
BLOCKBUSTER INVENTORY FILLS MOTION PICTURE MUSEUM
Art of filmmaking is focus at academy’s 7-floor showplace
Not to brag, but I recently received an Academy Award.
As I took the stage, that wonderfully schmaltzy Oscars music began to play and a giant chyron with the words “And the Oscar goes to ...” appeared on a movie screen in front of me. My name flashed onto the screen, the music swelled and an audience in eveningwear gave me a standing ovation. I took the heavy statuette in my hand and, wouldn’t you know it, flubbed my acceptance speech, even though my win was a sure thing.
Full disclosure: This happened at the newly opened Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. A well-done, if slightly gimmicky, feature of the long-anticipated new museum is called “The Oscars Experience.” For an extra $15, visitors get the virtual experience of winning their own Academy
Award, which they can send you on video.
An enthusiastic museum attendant explained that the statue I would be holding was made by the same factory that makes the real Oscars. Although I had to keep my mask on, she politely warned, I could put my purse down while I made my acceptance speech. As I took the stage, she congratulated me on my nomination, a strange and effective detail that made it — almost — feel real.
The museum, which opened to the public in late September after protracted pandemic-related delays, is housed in a former May Co. department store at Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles.
The main building’s seven floors of multiple galleries are neatly laid out and easy to navigate. Devoted to nearly every aspect of filmmaking — such as writing, equipment and makeup — the galleries offer a staggeringly comprehensive view of the mechanics, history and sheer magic of the art. Although just a small fraction of the academy’s collection is displayed here, it owns more than 13 million photographs, 71,000 screenplays and 67,000 film posters, among many, many other objects. All of which is to say: If you’re looking for the actual Rosebud sled from “Citizen Kane,” you’ve come to the right place.
I overheard a fellow visitor remark that it would take at least a week to really see everything on view, but I think that estimate is optimistic. I spent hours at the museum and still didn’t see everything I had hoped to view. Back home, for example, a frustrating inspection of my photos revealed that I somehow walked right by a copy of the “To Kill a Mockingbird” script scrawled with Gregory Peck’s handwritten notes.
Just north of the main building is an ostentatious spherical behemoth that houses the 1,000-seat David Geffen Theater and a second, smaller theater. Designed, like the main museum’s interior, by Italian architect Renzo Piano, its exterior stairwell and connecting skyways instantly put me in mind of a launchpad at Cape Canaveral, Fla. That said, the view from the Insta-perfect Dolby Family
Terrace, a semi-open platform on the roof, connected to the museum via the Barbra Streisand Bridge, is exceptional.
Of all the core exhibits, I found “The Path to Cinema: Highlights from the Richard Balzer Collection” the most affecting. The compendium of objects that explore the prehistory of cinema left me marveling at the fact that anyone ever thought moving pictures were a possibility. Included in the collection are shadow puppets, optical toys and phenakistiscopes — discs that, when spun, create the illusion that a drawing is moving. Particularly exciting was a group of nine vues d’optique, detailed engravings perforated with small holes that come to life when lit from behind. During my visit, there was an audible gasp when the main lights on the display were dimmed and small beams of light pierced the holes in the pictures.
In the same gallery, a compilation of short film clips by French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière also elicited rapt attention. According to the exhibition materials, the films, dating from 1895, were a vehicle for showing off the brothers’ Cinématographe Lumière, a projector thought to be the best of its time. Although the short clips of everyday life are almost disarmingly poignant, it was a quote projected onto the wall that made chills go up my spine. From a French newspaper of the era, the prescient, if somewhat hyperbolic, declaration
from 1895 reads: “When these devices will be available to the public, when people will be able to capture their loved ones, not still anymore but in motion, in action, in their ordinary movements, with their own words, death will cease to be absolute.”
Also of special interest are core exhibits that showcase the unsung aspects of moviemaking. One of them, “Backdrop: An Invisible Art,” features the backdrop of Mount Rushmore used in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 classic, “North by Northwest,” one of my favorite films.
The museum’s inaugural temporary exhibit, on view through summer 2022, is a tribute to Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, whose films include “My Neighbor Totoro” and “Spirited Away.” The comprehensive retrospective includes Miyazaki’s desk, his breathtaking watercolor renderings and poems he wrote for the animation teams on various films to express the atmosphere he was trying to convey. It left me with a strong appreciation of not only his skill, but also his filmmaking philosophy. A temporary show, “Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898-1971,” is set to follow the Miyazaki exhibit next year.
Of course, an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences museum without a tribute to the Academy Awards would be like a Van Gogh museum without sunflowers, and indeed, there is a substantial section that pays tribute to the Oscars. In addition to memorabilia, such as ceremony programs, congratulatory telegrams to and from a who’s who of moviedom’s heavy hitters, and the feathered and sequined Bob Mackie dress Cher wore to the 1986 Oscars ceremony, looped acceptance speeches play on screens that surround the room.
Did my visit have a Hollywood ending? It came pretty close. Though predictably reverential, the exhibits were also thoughtful and provocative. More important, the museum was less about the Oscars and ego than about the art of moviemaking.