There it was in my email, right on the dot, at 10:00 a.m. on Wednesday morning– the digital equivalent of a dreaded question that follows every industry screening. As the old joke puts it: “How did you love my movie?”
I had (finally) visited the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on Tuesday afternoon. The follow-up survey, among other things, wanted to know, what were my “top 5 museum experiences.” But the handy pull-down didn’t have my favorites on the list of options. For me, the five best things, starting at the top, were the Salad Niçoise, the free parking on 6th St. (we slipped in just after sweeping hours), the friendly staff (they let us enter well in advance of our 1 p.m. reservation, no questions asked), the antique photos of mid-Wilshire when it really was The Miracle Mile, and that smoggy patio view of the Hollywood Hills, just across the museum’s top-level Barbra Streisand bridge.
In 21st Century Los Angeles, it doesn’t get any better than that.
As for the exhibits, not being a certified museum critic, I’m not qualified to say, except to share one purely personal thought. The movie museum, which I’d been side-stepping since it opened to the public in 2021, left me feeling vaguely uneasy, as if it had somehow been designed to dismiss or downplay most of what I’d experienced in 40 years of covering and working in the film business. Much of the big stuff (other than The Godfather display, a lovely tribute to John Singleton and his Boyz N The Hood, and a few other other mainstream touches) was unfamiliar. And the people and pictures that I’d known and loved and written about for decades were either missing, or reduced to the museum equivalent of footnotes, like that great photo of a young Peter Bart in the Godfather gallery.
“You’re irrelevant,” shrugged my fellow visitor, not one to mince words.
Irrelevant, and not, I think, accidentally so.
Being a digger by nature, on Wednesday afternoon I dug out a couple of Academy Museum Foundation tax filings that were slightly outdated, but had only recently surfaced on the Candid nonprofit monitoring service. No great surprises popped up, except one: There was an intriguing shift in a required description of the film museum’s “mission” between the successive filings for fiscal 2020 and 2021.
In the first, dated March 10, 2022, the museum was simply “dedicated to the arts and sciences of motion pictures.” In straightforward (if somewhat clunky) fashion, it would be “devoted to the history of the motion picture industry, educational exhibits and activities relating to how motion pictures are made, displays of memorabilia, and other functions that will permit visitors to experience” the making of movies.
Fair enough.
Yet two months later, on May 10, 2022—and this was before Bill Kramer and Jacqueline Stewart took their current posts as chiefs, respectively, of the Academy and of the Museum—the mission statement noticeably shifted.
In describing the museum for the fiscal 2021 filing, the foundation now said its job was to advance “the understanding, celebration and preservation of cinema through inclusive and accessible” initiatives. The museum would work, it said, “in active partnership with motion picture artists and specialists, scholars, staff, and diverse communities to contextualize and challenge dominant narratives around cinema, inspiring discourse, connection, joy and discovery.”
Contextualize and challenge dominant narratives.
No wonder any of us who spent a lifetime crafting pieces of those narratives—as a producer, or for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, the trades—should feel a bit disoriented in the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. That’s the idea. The story as we told it is being challenged.
And for those who program the museum, we’re not entirely relevant.
Michael Cieply: In The Filings, The Academy Museum Shifts Its Mission Statement
There it was in my email, right on the dot, at 10:00 a.m. on Wednesday morning– the digital equivalent of a dreaded question that follows every industry screening. As the old joke puts it: “How did you love my movie?”
I had (finally) visited the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on Tuesday afternoon. The follow-up survey, among other things, wanted to know, what were my “top 5 museum experiences.” But the handy pull-down didn’t have my favorites on the list of options. For me, the five best things, starting at the top, were the Salad Niçoise, the free parking on 6th St. (we slipped in just after sweeping hours), the friendly staff (they let us enter well in advance of our 1 p.m. reservation, no questions asked), the antique photos of mid-Wilshire when it really was The Miracle Mile, and that smoggy patio view of the Hollywood Hills, just across the museum’s top-level Barbra Streisand bridge.
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In 21st Century Los Angeles, it doesn’t get any better than that.
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As for the exhibits, not being a certified museum critic, I’m not qualified to say, except to share one purely personal thought. The movie museum, which I’d been side-stepping since it opened to the public in 2021, left me feeling vaguely uneasy, as if it had somehow been designed to dismiss or downplay most of what I’d experienced in 40 years of covering and working in the film business. Much of the big stuff (other than The Godfather display, a lovely tribute to John Singleton and his Boyz N The Hood, and a few other other mainstream touches) was unfamiliar. And the people and pictures that I’d known and loved and written about for decades were either missing, or reduced to the museum equivalent of footnotes, like that great photo of a young Peter Bart in the Godfather gallery.
“You’re irrelevant,” shrugged my fellow visitor, not one to mince words.
Irrelevant, and not, I think, accidentally so.
Being a digger by nature, on Wednesday afternoon I dug out a couple of Academy Museum Foundation tax filings that were slightly outdated, but had only recently surfaced on the Candid nonprofit monitoring service. No great surprises popped up, except one: There was an intriguing shift in a required description of the film museum’s “mission” between the successive filings for fiscal 2020 and 2021.
In the first, dated March 10, 2022, the museum was simply “dedicated to the arts and sciences of motion pictures.” In straightforward (if somewhat clunky) fashion, it would be “devoted to the history of the motion picture industry, educational exhibits and activities relating to how motion pictures are made, displays of memorabilia, and other functions that will permit visitors to experience” the making of movies.
Fair enough.
Yet two months later, on May 10, 2022—and this was before Bill Kramer and Jacqueline Stewart took their current posts as chiefs, respectively, of the Academy and of the Museum—the mission statement noticeably shifted.
In describing the museum for the fiscal 2021 filing, the foundation now said its job was to advance “the understanding, celebration and preservation of cinema through inclusive and accessible” initiatives. The museum would work, it said, “in active partnership with motion picture artists and specialists, scholars, staff, and diverse communities to contextualize and challenge dominant narratives around cinema, inspiring discourse, connection, joy and discovery.”
Contextualize and challenge dominant narratives.
No wonder any of us who spent a lifetime crafting pieces of those narratives—as a producer, or for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, the trades—should feel a bit disoriented in the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. That’s the idea. The story as we told it is being challenged.
And for those who program the museum, we’re not entirely relevant.
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