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Reviewed by:
  • Stardust Monuments: The Saving and Selling of Hollywood
  • Peter Decherney (bio)
Stardust Monuments: The Saving and Selling of Hollywood; by Alison Trope; Dartmouth College Press, 2012

Filmmakers in Hollywood annually reward themselves with multiple prize ceremonies; they join talent guilds that engage in collective bargain on their behalf; and they retire to the Motion Picture and Television Fund Foundation’s Wasserman Campus. Hollywood may be littered with broken dreams, but it is also a town that looks after its own.

Despite many efforts, however, Hollywood has never successfully managed to start a museum to preserve its treasures, artifacts, and history. As Alison Trope shows in her fascinating and wide-ranging new book Stardust Monuments, it was not for lack of trying. Movie stars, producers, and fans from Carl Laemmle to Debbie Reynolds have worked hard to give American film the shrine that it deserves, only to see their plans disintegrate for one reason or another.

In the 1930s, museums began to embrace the art of film, and both the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and the Cinémathèque Française, which eventually settled in Paris, started film collections. At MoMA, Iris Barry culled a selective canon, while Henri Langlois at the Cinémathèque Française grabbed everything he could get his hands on. Both embraced Hollywood films in their collections, but with a few exceptions, neither was terribly successful in getting the industry to part with either films or financial donations. Barry found producers reluctant to show their films for free, and when Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford opened their house for a lavish (though helpless) fund-raising gala, Hollywood’s top stars stuck the museum with the bill.

In the 1950s and 1960s, a project closer to home germinated and eventually died. Producers and politicians teamed up to start what was to be known as the Hollywood Museum right in the heart of Hollywood itself. Film historian and curator Arthur Knight left his post at MoMA to move west and assemble the collection. Producer Sol Lesser was particularly enthusiastic, and a string of local Los Angeles politicians seized the opportunity to cement the connection between the industry and the city. The project, as Trope shows, took on visions [End Page 170] of a Marshall McLuhenesque global village and demonstrated how the industry could give back to the community even as the museum celebrated the supremacy of American capitalism. In a telegram, John F. Kennedy endorsed the project, linking it to Cold War–era support for the arts. But the project’s lofty rhetoric was compromised when it came to implementation. The county invoked eminent domain to evict some residents on the plot of land they designated for the museum, but in a successful stunt, one man attached himself to a fence in an extended standoff. Like so many subsequent Hollywood museums, this one fizzled.

Among the Hollywood Museum’s failed successors is the Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) in London, which opened in the 1990s, only to close within a few years. Personally, I remember MoMI as a three-dimensional version of the Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell Film History textbook—a great accomplishment in my estimation—and it is a shame that financial problems and institutional changes prevented it from reopening after closing for a redesign. The Hollywood Entertainment Museum is another addition to the Hollywood museum graveyard. Located close to the Hollywood Walk of Fame, it had the right location and a few noteworthy objects, including the set from the TV show Cheers. But after a moment of potential success while curator and scholar Jan-Christopher Horak directed the museum, it could not sustain itself.

Why have so many Hollywood museums failed to live up to their potential? Trope is careful to put each project in its own historical and cultural context, but she does offer some overarching suggestions. All the museums were caught in the agony between art and commerce. Hollywood is ruled by the bottom line, and even when long-term fiscal goals might be served by preservation and appreciation, industry leaders find it hard to give anything away.

The second half of Stardust Monuments seems to...

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