Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opens next year; Reveals Inaugural Exhibitions

Coming in late 2019, the Academy Museum will be the world's premier film institution.



LOS ANGELES — When the long-awaited Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opens next year, it will offer a mix of scholarship and sparkle as it tries to appeal to two discordant audiences: moviedom’s elite and the tourist masses.



Kerry Brougher, the museum’s director, announced his programming strategy on Tuesday. 

The $388 million institution — it's opening now pushed back to late 2019 — expects to attract about 860,000 visitors annually. It is next to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and features a theater inside a spherical building designed by Renzo Piano that has been likened to the Death Star. (Piano prefers to think of it as a “soap bubble.”)

Anchoring the six-floor Academy Museum will be a 30,000-square-foot exhibition tracing the artistic and scientific history of cinema from a filmmaker’s perspective, starting in the late 1800s in France, and including an array of movie installations. Galleries will focus on early female directors, international silent film, Soviet cinema, the Hollywood studio system and Indian independent film, among other topics.

The Nicholas Brothers in the 1943 musical “Stormy Weather.” In 2020, the museum will present the exhibition “Regeneration: Black Cinema 1900-1970,” which will focus on the contributions made by African-American filmmakers.CreditMargaret Herrick Library/20th Century Fox

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The Nicholas Brothers in the 1943 musical “Stormy Weather.” In 2020, the museum will present the exhibition “Regeneration: Black Cinema 1900-1970,” which will focus on the contributions made by African-American filmmakers.Credit Margaret Herrick Library/20th Century Fox

Brougher said he wanted the sprawling history exhibition to take an international and “revisionist” approach and pay particular attention to diversity — a topic that has roiled the predominantly white and male movie industry since 2015, when the #OscarsSoWhite social media outcry began. Rita Moreno, for instance, will stand beside Fred Astaire as an incomparable screen dancer, and Marilyn Monroe will share icon status with the pioneering Mexican actress Dolores del Río.

The museum, founded by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization behind the Oscars, will also feature substantial temporary exhibitions, starting with a retrospective on Hayao Miyazaki, the Japanese animation titan behind films like “Spirited Away” (2001) and “The Wind Rises” (2013).

“I wanted to open with something unexpected to establish this as a global museum,” Brougher said in a phone interview, referring to the Miyazaki showcase, which will be mounted in collaboration with Studio Ghibli, which Miyazaki co-founded in Tokyo.

Another exhibition focused on inclusion, “Regeneration: Black Cinema 1900-1970,” will replace the Miyazaki show in 2020. The scholarly project will “reveal the important and underrecognized contribution of African-American filmmakers in the development of the American cinema,” Brougher said.

The museum will feature a theater inside a spherical building, designed by Renzo Piano, that has been likened to the Death Star. (Piano prefers to think of it as a “soap bubble.”)CreditAcademy Museum Foundation

On Tuesday “Regeneration” received the Sotheby’s Prize, an award of $250,000 designed to encourage museums to explore overlooked or underrepresented areas of art history. In a statement, Allan Schwartzman, a Sotheby’s chairman and executive vice president, predicted that the black cinema exhibition would “rewrite our understanding of the history of film.”

I'm a Serious-minded offerings will undoubtedly please the academy, which did not want its museum to be a tourist-pandering collection of memorabilia. One of the academy’s stated goals for the institution is to “ensure film’s legacy as the great art form of our time.”

But getting tourists in the door — admission prices have not yet been set — will take some sugar, as any seasoned museum director will tell you. To that end, Brougher, who previously served as the interim director and chief curator at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, will sprinkle the Academy Museum with offerings more likely to appeal to casual sightseers.

One of the surviving pairs of ruby slippers from “The Wizard of Oz,” for instance, will be on display in the Spielberg Family Gallery, located in the lobby. On view elsewhere: the typewriter used to write “Psycho,” and the doors to Rick’s Café Américain from “Casablanca.” 

The doors from Rick’s Café Américain in “Casablanca” will be on display. Credit Joshua White/Academy Museum Foundation

The Academy Museum will also offer a high-tech attraction and photo stop called “the Oscars experience.” (Start preparing your acceptance speech.) One gallery will place visitors inside the mind-bending stargate corridor sequence from Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Public programs will include daily film screenings, including Saturday matinees for children, and splashy events in the orb building’s David Geffen Theater, which can accommodate a 60-piece orchestra on stage.

The motion picture academy will have local competition. The Los Angeles County Museum has its own film program and has hosted popular movie-related exhibitions like one on the filmmaker Tim Burton. Well-established local organizations like American Cinematheque already coordinate public screenings of significant art films. And construction has begun near downtown Los Angeles on the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which will house items collected by George Lucas, including 20th-century American illustrations, comic books, costumes, storyboards, stage sets and other archival material from “Star Wars” and other movies. The Lucas Museum, shaped (without question) like a “Star Wars” vessel, and its surrounding campus will cost an estimated $1 billion.

But the motion picture academy — with a collection that includes 190,000 film and video assets and 61,000 posters — has wanted its own museum for decades. The organization, steered by its determined chief executive, Dawn Hudson, has pushed through recent setbacks that have included sparring architects, a ballooning budget (the museum was originally expected to cost around $250 million) and an opening date delayed by two years because of construction difficulties.

For four years now, Brougher has been the director of a museum that does not exist. The museum announced in April that its doors would open in the middle of next year. But Brougher said that a few more months were needed to install exhibitions and test interactive features.

Unveiling his programming plans nonetheless represents a step forward. “It’s a thrill to finally be able to talk about all the various things this museum can be,” he said. “I’ve been holding it in for so long.”

For the new renderings, scroll down.

The lobby of the former May Company, now called the Saban Building.

The sphere and Saban building, seen from the north. From some angles, the sphere appears to float, but it will be anchored to the ground via four concrete columns. (The columns will be attached to base isolators “as big as cars” that will allow the structure to move two feet in each direction during earthquakes). The antenna is a weathervane that’s more sculptural than functional.

Joseph Stefano used this typewriter will writing the screenplay for Psycho.

 Joshua White

 

The ruby slippers used for close-up shots in The Wizard of Oz. Exhibition Curator Doris Berger says they’re the best-preserved pair of slippers worn by Judy Garland in the movie.

 Joshua White

The 1,000-seat theater at the lower level of the sphere will be used for premieres and special events.

The museum, seen from Fairfax, showing the profile of the sphere and adjoining May Company building.

 

Gold leafed tile from the original Italian manufacturer will be used to restore the old May Company’s iconic cylinder.

The Dolby Terrace at the top of the sphere—covered in 700,000 pounds of glass and steel—will offer sweeping views of the Hollywood Hills and Hollywood Sign.

A construction photo taken from the upper floor of the Saban Building, looking out at the future site of the sphere and over the hills.

 Joshua White

The Academy Museum campus will flow into LACMA and the La Brea Tar Pits, with the Petersen Automotive Museum across the street.

For more information visit: www.academymuseum.org