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Two-time Academy Award winnerTom Hanksand Oscar nomineeAnna Kendrickwere among some of the A-list stars who unveiled the brand-new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles.
The museum opened its doors to press and Hollywood stars on Monday for a preview advance of its grand opening to the public on Sept. 30.
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Introducing the early morning program, Kendrick expressed the long-simmering anticipation that’s been coursing through both the L.A. community and the entertainment industry in the walk-up to the museum’s launch.
“I’ve been waiting with a lot of people in the film industry – and people everywhere, all the people everywhere – to get my first look at the Academy Museum and, here it is, so shiny and new and enormous,” said Kendrick. “It’s crammed with about 125 years' worth of ideas and dreams and life-changing cinematic experiences.”
There is also an assortment of behind-the-scenes artifacts – costumes, hair and makeup, cameras, animation concept art and more – and educational displays delving deep into many techniques and evolution behind the filmmaking process, and up-close peeks into the storied history of the Academy Awards includingthe OscarsExperience, which simulates walking onstage to receive an Oscar, a gallery of the historic statuettes and uber-memorable Oscar nightgowns, like Cher’s infamous ensemble from her 1986 appearance.
Appearing in a short film during the press program in clips along withLucy Liu,Eiza GonzálezandJurnee Smollett,Oprah Winfreyhelped underline the museum’s intent to be a place of diversity and inclusion.
Underlining the inclusive efforts, the museum’s opening exhibits include elaborate displays dedicated to filmmakers Spike Lee, Pedro Almodovar, and, in the first significant and extensive retrospective outside of his native Japan, animation legend Hayao Miyazaki. Among the many culturally wide-ranging screening series is a look at the career of Anna Mae Wong, one of the few high-profile Asian actresses of Hollywood’s Golden Age.
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“Do we need a movie museum?” asked Hanks. “Yeah, because we need to celebrate everything that this town has brought to the world and everything the art form as brought to the world order to bring people together, whether you’re watching [a] film on the last of the surviving Cinerama screens, or you’re streaming them at home on hopefully a good television monitor with a right lumen count and a good sound system, movies continue to bethemagical art that speaks to everybody, everywhere.”
Piano – who over a five-decade career has garnered acclaim for visionary, high-profile buildings such as New York’s Whitney Museum of Art, London’s The Shard and Paris' Centre Georges Pompidou – said he tried to express the essence of cinema in his work on the museum.
“I became an architect and I became jealous of filmmakers, very jealous, because movies are probably the most important way to create emotion,” said Piano. “Everything is in the movie, everything: it’s story, action, light and shadow, music, photography – everything’s there. Light and shadow – essential. Tell me about another art I can move people to tears…It’s important. Light and shadow is actually the essence of this project, of this building.”
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There are a dynamic plethora of cinematic mementos within the museum’s walls, including a life-sized extraterrestrial from Steven Spielberg’sE.T., Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell’s red showgirl costumes fromGentlemen Prefer Blondes, makeup test life masks of Grace Kelly and Clark Gable, Jeff Bridges' cozy robe and sandals fromThe Big Lebowski, a costume test Polaroid ofBlues Brothersstars John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd; a space module model from2001: A Space Odyssey, storyboards from Hitchcock’sPsychoand concept art from Disney and Pixar classics likeSnow White,Sleeping Beauty,Toy StoryandUp.
“There is one particular gallery I saw yesterday that spoke to me of everything this museum stands for, everything that we were hoping to happen,” he said. “It’s the room that is filled with old magic lanterns, the little slide projectors that hundreds of years ago, hundreds of years ago, before even there was electricity, through the power of focused candlelight projected a lifelike image onto a blank wall.”
Recounting how he could remember not just the films that moved him but the specific movie theaters he saw them in, Hanks said those theaters “provided the same sort of magic as they provided people in the 1700s, when they walked into a dark room to take in the magic of the magic lantern.”
source: people.com
