According to Hollywood lore, a world-class motion picture museum situated in Los Angeles has been in the works for nine decades. By the 1960s, a group of industry legends — including Walt Disney, Louis B. Mayer, Mary Pickford and Gloria Swanson — had moved forward with the concept. Yet they threw in the towel after legal challenges ultimately resulted in a showdown, during which a shotgun-toting owner of a property situated on an intended site defended his turf, backing down only after an intervention from an “army” of L.A. County sheriff’s deputies. The idea for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to build a film museum — intended to be to the medium what the Louvre is to fine art — first took shape at a 2002 Academy board meeting.
Discussion of Debbie Reynolds’ suggestion of subsidizing the display of her vast collection of Old Hollywood memorabilia (which she acquired at the 1970 auction of seven MGM soundstages), planted the seed and prompted the hiring of Academy Museum staff in 2004 for a building that would have risen in Hollywood.
Locations, architects and curators came and went. The hirings, firings and an ultimate relocation to the Miracle Mile area were complete with plot twists redolent of a Robert Towne screenplay.
Constructed over six years, beginning in 2015, by the Pritzker Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano, together with his Renzo Piano Building Workshop and Gensler, as executive architect — as well as innumerable world-class specialists of all manner to get the look and the mind-boggling technical craft involved in running the place exactly right — the new Academy Museum has outpriced any blockbuster ever made in Hollywood. But the museum, opened on Sept. 30 at the corner of Fairfax Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard, was worth waiting for.
The monolithic Sphere Building — around which the museum’s campus revolves — acquired the nickname the “Death Star” (that’s the superweapon from Star Wars) amid construction. However, the exterior of this awe-inspiring structure brings to mind the otherworldly brutalist elegance that legendary production designer Ken Adam conjured for the all-time great 007 films like 1967’s You Only Live Twice.
Inside the sphere, the 1,000-seat David Geffen Theater brings new meaning to the term “movie palace,” with its state-of-the-art projection facilities and glamorous lipstick-red color scheme. Atop the sphere, the Dolby Family Terrace offers a panoramic view stretching from Westwood to the Hollywood Sign by way of Beverly Hills.
The observatory deck was made for photo ops. But enjoying the dramatic vista, within a film museum’s context, delivers a powerful charge. It feels as though the sphere’s dome roof, which was constructed from steel and glass (like the “skyway” pedestrian bridges connecting it to the Saban Building gallery complex), functions like a gigantic, open-air exhibition vitrine, allowing visitors to frame the movie scenes which, captured amid this storied locality, inevitably come to mind while drinking it in.
The museum’s exhibition Backdrop: An Invisible Art — on view within the Saban Building’s double-height Hurd Gallery through October 2022 — showcases another piece of monumental historic film scenery. The iconic Mount Rushmore backdrop that Robert F. Boyle conjured for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 thriller North by Northwest (that is, after he rappelled down the outdoor sculpture), inaugurates the space as one of four “ongoing” exhibits.
Staged in galleries located on multiple levels, the ongoing shows collectively amount to journeys through the history of international film and the Academy Awards. Amid all this, there are temporary shows, including the first North American retrospective of the Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki (its glowy “Mother Tree” is a highlight) as well as smaller ones produced in collaboration with filmmakers upon which they focus.
Director’s Inspiration: Spike Lee, for instance, explores the cultural sources fueling his imagination. Pedro Almodóvar displays sequences illuminating his cinematic influences and longtime muses across multiple screens in another gallery, which gets the David Geffen Theater’s monochromatic floor-to-ceiling color treatment. The space is awash in a zingy neon blue that brings to mind the bold tones characterizing Almodóvar’s movies and, more specifically, the azure-hued Balenciaga pantsuit which Tilda Swinton flaunted in the director’s 2020 short, The Human Voice.
Defining all aspects of the museum’s curation is an egalitarian perspective recognizing people of color and women (which is now standard at all major cultural institutions). Such grassroots social movements as #OscarsSoWhite, #MeToo and Black Lives Matter also intensified the museum’s inclusive focus.
The viewpoint clearly comes into focus in the Spielberg Family Gallery’s show, Stories of Cinema 1. This hypnotic work of video art traces the diverse paths of film history by sampling sequences and stills from an impressive international selection of 700 films, which are directed by men and women. The 13-minute piece — put together by the museum’s exhibitions curator, Jenny He — is thoughtfully bookended by historic black-and-white documentaries, namely Louis Lumière’s 1895 Exiting the Factory (known to be the original motion picture) and Garrett Bradley’s Time. After Bradley became the first African American woman to win the 2020 Sundance Film Festival’s U.S. Documentary Competition Directing Award, she earned an Oscar nomination.
Lending power to this installation is its illusory quality. Sound, mostly dialogue, lends motion to the cinematic sequences. Veiled in a tone of moody darkness — let’s call it twilight — the six double-sided screens illuminating the “multichannel” exhibition seem to float amid the glass-walled gallery.
Why the stunning “prelude” to Stories of Cinema — which, as a three-part show, is the museum’s major attraction — is crammed into a gallery located next to the museum’s gift shop, and why it’s found floors below the exhibit’s further two sections, are some of the questions a visit to the Academy Museum prompts.
The Saban Building features 50,000 square feet of exhibition space. Given the Academy Museum’s mission of offering visitors an immersive viewing experience that’s comparable to watching a movie, it might be better to situate Stories of Cinema — as well as a trio of Academy Awards exhibits situated on multiple levels — continuously across consolidated gallery networks. The hike up escalators and across long hallways necessitated by its current layout may evoke the “sense of expansion and compression” that is said to characterize Piano’s concept for the museum. But why make the visitor work so hard to get through it all?
The curation of Stories of Cinema 2, which investigates “Significant Movies and Moviemakers” — including Citizen Kane, Thelma Schoonmaker and Bruce Lee — lacks dynamism. Among the first objects upon which the eye falls, as this section begins, is a signed poster of Citizen Kane. It’s one of several movie posters hanging throughout the museum, all of which seem better suited for its restaurant, Fanny’s. (Posters are also available at the gift shop.) In a museum context, key art is effective if it is on view in an exhibition dedicated to its making. Here, the posters seem like filler rather than genuine artifacts.
An installation celebrating Schoonmaker’s virtuosic career revolves around an unplugged Flatbed KEM editing machine, which looks as though it has been wheeled out of storage and propped on a platform. The gem around which Bruce Lee’s installation should flow — the two-piece suit topped by a tangzhuang jacket that he sported in 1973’s Enter the Dragon — is upstaged by a screen. Located across from the costume, the monitor projects dynamic fight sequences depicting the Dragon harnessing the power of Jeet Kune Do (the hybrid form of martial arts he pioneered) to diminish his adversaries. Meanwhile, the costume’s explanatory panel (found, like many in the museum, at the bottom of the display case, rather than on a riser to facilitate reading), fails to mention Enter the Dragon’s costume designer, Sheng-Hsi Chu. Even if he bought the suit off a rack, Mr. Chu should merit a credit.
In recent years, Hollywood has produced film and television costume epics featuring the legendary pageantry evoking Golden Era classics. Nevertheless, this craft, which actually deserves its own museum — if not a wing at the Academy Museum — shares space in the averagely sized Identity Gallery along with the handiwork of hair designers and makeup artists. Sartorial showstoppers, which are curiously a similar shade of bright shimmering green — namely, Travis Banton’s regal satin finery produced for Claudette Colbert’s portrayal of the title character in 1934’s Cleopatra and a sequined mermaid getup Mary Zophres conceived for Scarlett Johansson’s portrayal of DeeAnna Moran in 2016’s Hail, Caesar! — stand in cases too small to do justice to their workmanship or to permit the visitor to admire it from every angle.
The assemblage of several costumes inviting the visitor to do so — thanks to an “in the round” concept — is crowded with ornate voluminous garments that compete for attention. Think: the May Queen costume that Andrea Flesch constructed for 2019’s Midsommar from 10,000 silk flowers and the “devil costume” that Julian Day embellished with 140,000 Swarovski crystals for 2019’s Rocketman.
A linear narrative conveying the history of Hollywood costume design — which was defined from its inception by LGBTQ communities and by a generation of women who shattered the glass ceiling long before the term originated — could lend a meaningful framework to Identity, which uses drawings, costumes and monitors to convey how screen wardrobes shape film characters.
Amid a gallery portraying Oscar acceptance speeches on technically impressive wraparound screens, there are a few ensembles that have appeared on the big night, including the gown in which Rita Moreno claimed the best supporting actress Oscar at the 34th Academy Awards for 1961’s West Side Story and which she flaunted again at 2018’s ceremony. The gallery’s low ceiling and uneven lighting conditions lessen the impact of the 12-piece Oscar ensemble Bob Mackie made for Cher to wear when presenting the best supporting actor Oscar (to Don Ameche) in 1986, and which he topped with a two-foot headdress involving 800 inky black rooster feathers. It’s as magical, and could look as shimmery, as Dorothy’s ruby slippers from 1939’s The Wizard of Oz, which are on show in a gallery dedicated to the Art of Moviemaking.
Given that a group of three is always more memorable than a duo, a companion for the Oscar attire — like the velvet Christian Siriano tuxedo dress that Billy Porter flaunted at the 91st Academy Awards — might add balance to the display. Cher’s Bob Mackie and Moreno’s gown seem a bit lonely, as do Bruce the Shark and a Rolex watch once owned by Paul Newman. The former, the last remaining shark created from the original mold for the Jaws predator, is suspended solo in the Saban Building’s towering atrium. The latter, the acting legend’s 1968 Rolex Cosmograph Daytona, is in a case nearby Cher’s mannequin.
Exhibiting the timepiece — which became the single most expensive Rolex ever sold after it was auctioned for $17.8 million by Phillips New York in 2017 — is seemingly a courtesy to the Swiss watch brand, after which the gallery showcasing Stories of Cinema 3 is named. It merits an installation, possibly one devoted to the mementos that actors often utilize to process their character or keep with them in challenging situations, like Oscar night.
Ingenuity and curatorial risk-taking could elevate this message to the sponsor and some of the museum’s other areas that feel not quite ready for their closeup. Nevertheless, the dramatic adventurism which Renzo Piano has lent to the Academy Museum — and which defines the craft it elevates — will, one hopes, filter through to its exhibitions in time.
Bronwyn Cosgrave is the author of Made For Each Other: Fashion & the Academy Awards (Bloomsbury) and the curator of Designing 007: Fifty Years of Bond Style.
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Critic’s Notebook: A Dazzling and Sometimes Frustrating Showcase for Hollywood History at the Academy Museum - Hollywood Reporter
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