Joe Coffman
I’m always amused when film buff friends say they were addicted to movies throughout their childhoods and more. Same for professional critics and performers. “And did you drink water?” I’m tempted to reply.
Throughout a century, most audience members saw on average two or three films a week — the place for dates, amusement, family outings or venting over all others — whether the films were good or bad. lt was always so damned easy. And still is as we approach the latest Academy Awards ceremony.
The bigger question is why, other than at specialized archives, there wasn’t a fine museum of record for film art.
Now we have it.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) has at last opened the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, with a re-design by architect Renzo Piano in the greatly enhanced former May Company Department building along the Miracle Mile section in the mid-Wilshire Boulevard area of Los Angeles.
It’s a classic mid-century, post-war part of the city sometimes called “museum row” — once a dusted bunch of roads and paths surrounded by oil wells and tar pits that unfortunately the mastodons didn’t get out of fast enough.
The May Company store, now re-titled the Saban Building, wasn’t that impressive — despite its “Streamline Moderne” label bordering on cold. But it works as a sound stage facade for the film industry since what it houses is the production engines that make the movie dream factory sizzle. Inside now are floors of film paraphernalia and a “soap bubble” overlook complementing light and shadow lookouts and one in view of the iconic Hollywood sign.
There are loads of movie decorative arts and production memorabilia to please the Western hats and ruby slippers groupies. The film stars through the ages are also represented as are directors and the promise that displays will evolve periodically.
I hope that these displays address the central icon that makes movies — the camera, the most definitive change in lively arts since sunlight.
Nothing would be possible without the camera reflecting and refracting reality and illusion in ways we couldn’t imagine before 1900, from the clunky box wind-up devices used in two-reelers to the modern behemoths of color and mind-boggling special effects machines.
American cinema reflects America.
Think about it, nothing documents our creative and social history more than our movies — and beyond the glitz and glamour there have always been ugly sidebars of ego and cruelty. Endless pots of gold make bad people worse.
These realities are apparently included in the museum, at least in part, as shown in the factual histories about Hollywood and minorities as seen in some displays and pointedly the one showing pancake makeup used on white actors as they portrayed other races. Then there are those noxious egos that even the movies themselves portrayed candidly. (Take a look again at “The Bad and the Beautiful” (1952) and “Trumbo” (2015), over a half century apart but equally tough-minded about Tinsel Town.
One hopes that the truths mirrored by this most popular of our lively arts will remain in some displays and the moveable feasts of film history will continue to include some courses that will always be hard to swallow. “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty” as the poet Keats said so well.
We don’t need another Disneyland.
Joe M. Coffman has written features, reviews and commentary on the lively arts in newspapers, magazines and for broadcast.
