Fate of Hollywood Memorabilia

[Reza]

NY Times

June 18, 2006

In Search of a Home for Scarlett and Kong

By BRYAN REESMAN

THOUGH rife with familiar landmarks ­ the Paramount gate, the Chinese Theater, that big self-advertisement on the hill ­ Hollywood is still waiting for its first large-scale temple: a museum devoted to the film industry and medium.

Two years ago the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said it intended to fill the void by investing a share of its Oscar-show nest egg (more than $160 million and still growing, as of the group's last annual report) in a movie museum. The academy appears to be closing in slowly on a plan to build an 80,000-square-foot, multibuilding complex somewhere in Hollywood.

"The museum will be a world-class facility," John Pavlik, director of communications for the academy, said in a prepared statement. "Something that illuminates the past as a stepping stone to the future and does it in such a way that it is interesting, exciting, user-friendly, interactive, high-tech and makes you want to come back again."

Meanwhile a handful of institutions around the world are already chasing that will-o'-the-wisp, film history. And they have learned that it isn't easily captured within four walls, not least because moviedom's ephemera have already become the stuff of a booming Internet-driven marketplace.

"Film productions like to sell, not to loan or donate, original items," said Rolf Giesen, curator for the German Cinematheque's Museum for Film and Television in Berlin, a six-year-old institution run by the German government. "We really had to work hard to get items from Hollywood movies," Dr. Giesen said of the museum's initial development in the 1980's. "If eBay had been around, we wouldn't have had a chance."

A popular attraction at the German museum is the "Artificial Worlds" exhibition, which Dr. Giesen has overseen for 15 years in various forms. He said that, when combined with his own personal holdings, it is the second-largest special effects collection in the world, after one owned by Lucasfilm. Stocked with sci-fi and fantasy artifacts, it houses, among other things, a Darth Vader costume, reproductions of figures from "Alien" and "Westworld" and original Ray Harryhausen models from films like "The Golden Voyage of Sinbad" and "Clash of the Titans."

Yet the museum's collection ­ which includes one million stills, tens of thousands of posters, 16,000 film titles, 24,000 film prints and thousands of original set designs ­ might never have reached critical mass were it not for the initial acquisition of personal collections from the German film collector Albert Fidelius and the German director and film historian Gerhard Lamprecht. That Hollywood must now compete with avid collectors for its own artifacts speaks to what author David Thomson, an adviser to the academy's planned museum, calls the film industry's "cheerful neglect" of cultural history.

Mr. Thomson recalled a trip to the old Pathé lot in Culver City in 1989, where he learned that pieces of sets and props from films as revered as "King Kong," "Citizen Kane" and "Gone With the Wind" were being surreptitiously stolen by studio insiders who knew their value. "Basically that's the way Hollywood has regarded its treasury," he said. "It's been pillaged over the years."

In addition to overheated collectors, any new film museum will have to deal with problems of approach and economics that are already challenging others.

One of the more ambitious attempts to set film in a museum environment, for instance, was the British Film Institute's Museum of the Moving Image, which was praised for its innovative spirit but closed amid economic troubles in 1999 after an 11-year run.

The museum chronicled the history and development of moving images from pre-photography through to the digital era. Brian Robinson, communications manager for culture and heritage at the British Film Institute, said the moving-image museum displayed more than 1,000 hours of film extracts and attracted some 450,000 visitors annually.

Among the museum's more striking exhibits was a replica Lenin-era "Kino train," a propagandistic cinema on wheels used to promote political ideals to the Russian populace. But overcrowding during peak hours, inconsistent attendance and competition with a growing number of free museums contributed to its downfall. (The museum's former space is now being redeveloped to focus on the collections of the British Film Institute's National Film and Television Archive, and will be called bfi southbank.)

Elsewhere a handful of museums have focused on film around the world. The National Cinema Museum in Turin, Italy, for instance, is housed in a former synagogue, with 10 "chapels" devoted to themes like "Love and Death," "Animated Cinema" and "Horror and Fantasy." The Cinémathèque Française in Paris is considered to be the largest archive of film and film-related documents in the world. The director Peter Jackson is considering building a museum in his native New Zealand.

In New York, the Museum of Modern Art's department of film and media has done its share to preserve cinematic history with a daily film program in two theaters and in a dedicated media gallery. It also offers exhibitions in other parts of the museum, including a recent, unorthodox Pixar exhibition that spread film, sculpture and digital installations across four floors.

Taking a different tack, the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, covers film, television and digital media like video games and computer art. Its central exhibition, "Behind the Screen," explores the various creative processes involved in creating and marketing moving images, using everything from commissioned artworks to interactive experiences. The museum, which presents more than 300 screenings per year and organizes discussions with top directors and actors, plans an expansion to 75,000 square feet, bringing it close in size to what the motion picture academy proposes.

While specific plans for the exhibits at the academy remain far in the future, Mr. Thomson suggested considerable interaction with visitors, like film sets where museumgoers could participate in a production.

But Mr. Robinson of the British Film Institute cautioned against pushing such gimmicks into theme-park territory. "You don't want to be in the business of just giving people a chance to stand on a set that looks like 'Titanic' or see the 'Jaws' shark again," he said. "It's not a thrill ride. What you really want is to explore, explain and entertain. The final aim is getting people to see and learn more."

And Dr. Giesen of the Berlin museum said that any true repository of Hollywood history should be international in scope, recognizing the contribution of immigrant filmmakers and actors and their respective cinematic traditions.

"Hollywood is not America," he said. "Hollywood is like Mecca. It's not only considered American, it's considered the cinema of the world."