LOS ANGELES – Italian architect Renzo Piano had just one request before allowing a sneak peek of the long-awaited Academy Museum of Motion Pictures last week.
“I have one favor to ask you,” Piano, 84, pleaded with a smile from the state-of-the-art theater housed in the new movie museum’s colossal Sphere Building. “Please don’t call this the Death Star.”
The Pritzker Prize-winning architect appealed to think of the 26 million-pound concrete and glass structure as a “very well built” soap bubble that will never pop, or: “Even better, call it a flying vessel ready to land or take off.”
It’s unlikely that Piano will squash the nickname that has immediately stuck to the instant Los Angeles architectural icon. But there’s no denying his belief that theAcademy Museum will blast visitors to new worlds with its official opening Thursday, giving a long-overdue and spectacular movie home for the industry town – the film capital that put the Hollywood in Hollywood.
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Thursday’s ribbon-cutting ceremony will end the long-sought and oft-delayed quest for a movie museum in Los Angeles, an original goal for the 94-year-old Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the group that presents the annual Oscar awards. The academy’s charter originally called for a movie museum.
“This is an art form that we’ve wanted to celebrate and preserve from the beginning,” says Dawn Hudson, academy CEO. “We’re creating a space in which you’re completely immersing yourself in movies. It wasn’t a simple equation to solve. But we solved it. And it took some years.”
‘The Parthenon’ of film museums
After false starts, the academy announced plans in 2012 to renovate the 1939 May Co. Wilshire building, a stunning Streamline Moderne structure and classic former department store, as the museum’s permanent home. The brand new, modern Sphere Building (aka Death Star), which contains two state-of-the-art movie theaters and a viewing deck that provides stunning open-air views of the distant Hollywood sign, was built as a contrasting structure for the 300,000-square-foot, seven-story museum now part of Museum Row in Los Angeles’ Miracle Mile.
There have been building halts and budget overruns for the $484 million project. Even after Tom Hanks announced at the February 2020 Oscars that the museum would open later in the year, the COVID-19 pandemic forced additional delays. However, last week, board of trustees member Hanks, who spearheaded fundraising efforts with Annette Bening and Walt Disney Co. executive chairman Bob Iger, proudly heralded the lauded new building.
“We all know, films are made everywhere in the world, wonderful films,” Hanks explained to reporters. “And there are other cities with film museums, but with all due respect, created by the Motion Picture Academy in Los Angeles, this museum has really got to be the Parthenon of such places.”
Guarding the grounds is a fearsome introductory centerpiece – Bruce, the 1,208-pound, 25-foot-long shark from Steven Spielberg’s 1975 thriller “Jaws” hanging over the main escalators, the predator prop that first made moviegoers fear going into the water 46 years ago.
Spielberg, who donated $10 million toward the movie museum, also loaned one of his greatest movie mementos, an original surviving “Rosebud” sled, the emotional centerpiece from Orson Welles’ classic film “Citizen Kane.”
The glass-cased balsa wood sled is part of the museum’s three-level main exhibition, Stories of Cinema, that features a section highlighting original costumes – from Dorothy’s sequined ruby slippers in “The Wizard of Oz” and Evillene’s dress from “The Wiz” to The Dude’s robe from “The Big Lebowski” and the May Queen gown from “Midsommar.”
Danai Gurira’s “Black Panther” Okoye costume is cased in the other-worldly Inventing Worlds and Characters gallery.
“I was super proud. She greets you when you walk into that room,” says Oscar-winning costume designer Ruth E. Carter, who designed Gurira’s Dora Milaje warrior apparel. “Anybody who loved ‘Black Panther’ and felt empowered by the beautiful, strong women will give that costume a salute.”
Highlighting Hollywood’s complicated history
The film museum educates and celebrates diverse, often overlooked filmmakers (including an exhibition on pioneering Black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux) and delves into, rather than ignoring, the unsavory sides of Hollywood history. One display features Anna May Wong, the Chinese-American 1920s movie star who was denied leading roles, while the museum’s makeup and hairstyling exhibit displays methods of blackface and yellowface used in the 1930s and 40s.
“They didn’t avoid it. And actually embracing the conversation of these Hollywood practices opens up the conversation for everyone to voice their views and opinions,” says Carter. “This is a welcome place for people to come and have those conversations and actually see the work that was done.”
Carter was heartened that the museum’s opening film presentation Sunday featured director Spike Lee (whose groundbreaking career is exploredin a personalized exhibit, including handwritten notes from his 2019 Oscars speech) and Denzel Washington discussing their film “Malcolm X,” a film on which Carter collaborated.
During a prescreening discussion, Lee recalled declaring around the 1992 “Malcolm X” release that school children should be excused from class to see the film. After all, Lee said, “I had a class trip to see ‘Gone with the (expletive) Wind!”
Marking the museum’s launch week with “Malcolm X” was not lost on Carteras “a way of telling the community that the Academy Museum is poised and ready to embrace the cultural films that have shaped communities like mine. It sets the tone for everything that this museum will represent for the filmmaking community.”
The nuanced look at Hollywood continues in the museum’s Academy Awards History section, where 20 real Oscars are displayed in a gold chamber, including the historic best actor win for Sidney Poitier for 1963’s “Lilies of the Field” (the first Black actor to take the prize) and best actor for Clark Gable 1934’s “It Happened One Night.”
Hattie McDaniel’s best supporting actress award for 1939’s “Gone With the Wind,” the historic first for a Black actor, is honored with an empty case, as the award has gone missing. The plaque notes that McDaniel’s role as Mammy “reflected the racial stereotyping that many Black actors had to navigate in Hollywood during that era.”
Rita Moreno’s 1962 best supporting actress speech for “West Side Story,” marking the first Hispanic woman to win an Oscar, is remembered on wraparound screens playing memorable Oscar speeches. A nearby display shows the real black-and-gold dress the actress wore to the 1962 ceremony, and again to present at the 2018 Oscars.
“It’s going to teach people and enlighten them,” says Moreno, who was thrilled to learn that her $400 dress (“which was a lot for me at the time”) will stand near Cher’s iconic 1982 Bob Mackie Oscars gown in the exhibit. “That’s just fantastic, I can’t wait to see it.”
You can hold your own Oscar
The museum allows visitors to hold an actual gold statue in The Oscar Experience (a $15 charge on the museum’s $25 admission,tickets should be booked in advance). The immersive simulation puts guests through the experience of walking onto the Dolby Theatre stage in front of cheering crowds while holding the Oscar trophy; each will walk away with a video ready for social media feeds.
A further draw for movie superfans are the major props and characters from some of the most beloved movies – from the original R2-D2 to C-3P0 from “Star Wars,” an original “E.T.” alien and an animatronic Arnold Schwarzenegger T-1000 Terminator head from “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.”
A six-foot-tall Gourmand Skeksis puppet from “The Dark Crystal” required a museum restoration overhaul before it could take its fearsome place on the display.
“If you go to the museum you will see the beautiful work you couldn’t necessarily see watching the movie,” says Frank Oz, who co-directed Jim Henson’s film and worked the elaborate “Dark Crystal” puppets. “You also don’t see at the flip side, which is all the sweat and strain of making that character come alive, either.”
Some of that goes to movie magic, from a magical animation-themed Hayao Miyazaki exhibit to 19th-century French magic lanterns on display. After Hanksglimpsed at moviemaking artifacts from the 1800s in the museum’s “Paths to the Cinema” section, he, too, pushed back against the Death Star nickname.
“Yes, it’s a soap bubble, a star,” said Hanks. “But what this building looks like to me as I drive by and take in the view – it looks to me like the world’s largest magic lantern that will transport us to amazing places.”
Contributing: Andrea Mandell
