I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History

20. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

20 The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences I was first elected to the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1964, an election that marked the beginning of a lifelong association with the Academy . In 1966, I was elected assistant treasurer, and two years later I became treasurer. When I first joined the board, the president was Arthur Freed, the legendary producer of MGM musicals. The executive secretary was Margaret Herrick, who had been with the Academy since a few years after its inception in 1927 as one of its first librarians. Regular meetings were held at the Academy headquarters, which were then located in an old theater building at the corner of Melrose Avenue and Doheny Drive, formerly called the Melrose. The auditorium was used for Academy screenings, and a small library and boardroom had been improvised upstairs. It was crowded and certainly didn’t provide much shelf space for what was publicized as the Academy’s library. The board considered all matters of business coming before it, such as rules, dues, publicity, public relations, and the planning of the Academy Awards ceremonies, as well as the vigilant protection of the Academy’s name and world-famous Oscar figure. 172 Having outgrown its quarters by the late 1960s, many of the Academy ’s activities had to be conducted in rented facilities, away from its headquarters. Most of its library collections were kept in storage. The Academy Players Directory had its own quarters, and the theater was very old by then, requiring a great deal of maintenance. We wanted to increase our staff so we could expand our services, but we had no room whatsoever in which to grow. The need for a new facility had become increasingly apparent to the board. The theater, which produced a certain amount of income when it was rented out for film company press screenings, could no longer compete with the new venues that were being built in the city. For example, the Directors Guild had constructed a new building on Sunset Boulevard, which had a state-of-the-art theater . The Academy Theatre also suffered from the worst of all possible af- flictions in Los Angeles: it provided no parking. There was only a small empty lot alongside that accommodated about a dozen cars. It is certainly difficult, if not impossible, to operate a theater that provides no parking facilities. When screenings were held for the membership, or when it was rented out, people had to scour the neighborhood to find parking places. When Steve Broidy was chairman of the Building Committee in the late 1960s, he had been approached with a proposal for the Academy to enter the Century City development, located on the former Twentieth Century-Fox back lot, which had been sold to William Zeckendorf Sr., a partner in the Webb and Knapp Company. Zeckendorf later went bankrupt and disposed of the property to Alcoa, which continued to develop it. The idea was that the Academy would become part of what was called the ABC Entertainment Complex. They proposed an area kitty-corner from the twin towers, fronting on the mall, where they would construct a headquarters building and a small theater, while also giving it some entrée to the Shubert Theater in the Center for the Academy Awards shows. It would also have the use of the Century City underground garage. Over the years, the Academy Awards presentations had moved from the Biltmore ballroom to the Chinese Theater to the Shrine Auditorium to the Pantages Theater and later to the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. In 1970, I was appointed chairman of the Building Committee by President Dan Taradash, at which time the Academy was presented The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences 173 / with a proposal from Universal Studios, which was interested in developing its studio tours. It was seeking new attractions to help bring people to visit its back lot, its rides, and its studio. Universal offered the Academy its choice of any available site on the studio back lot, comprising some four hundred acres. We began to talk about a site that would be furthest removed from the studio proper, probably out near a point that, as you see it from the freeway, is the tip of the Universal property as you turn to go to Burbank. The studio agreed to pay all the...