Stardust Monuments: The Saving and Selling of Hollywood

2 | The Great Whatzit?: Self-Service Meets Public Service in the Hollywood Museum

On October 21, 1963, as many as seven thousand Los Angeles residents, fans, reporters, and celebrities gathered on a four-and-one-half-acre land parcel on Highland Boulevard across the street from the Hollywood Bowl. The festivities announced the official groundbreaking of the Hollywood Museum, a project that had been germinating since the mid-1950s. Rosalind Russell, presiding over the ceremony, opened by reading a congratulatory telegram sent by President Kennedy: Through the motion picture, television, radio and other recording media, modern technology has added a totally new and exciting dimension to the creative arts. The unique characteristics of these new art forms require special institutions. The new Hollywood Museum can make a major contribution to the educational and cultural resources of this country, and I should like to congratulate its sponsors on undertaking this challenging task.1 The telegram reflected the Kennedy administration’s interest in promoting the arts on a national scale as well as a more general optimism surrounding the promises of global communication in the 1960s. Aligning the Hollywood Museum ’s mission alongside the nation’s legitimated the institution based on its potential service to a broad-based public, while also ensconcing Hollywood within a larger imaginary community. By interweaving Hollywood culture with American culture, and corporate interests with national interests, the • 45 • 2 The Great Whatzit? Self-Service Meets Public Service in the Hollywood Museum S T A R D U S T M O N U M E N T S • 46 • groundbreaking worked to reconstitute Hollywood, its products, and the idea of film culture as symbols of civic import. The laden significance of this presidential dedication, in turn, signaled an important rhetorical moment. Like the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) Film Library and other American institutions devoted to motion picture history, the Hollywood Museum steeped itself in a rhetoric of public service. Unlike MoMA, however, the Hollywood Museum planners, largely comprised of film industry leaders, did not exclusively view their agenda in terms of disseminating art and cultivating art appreciation—nor did they single out film’s scientific and technological history. Rather, the Hollywood Museum planners sought to prove Front-page news coverage of thousands gathered for the groundbreaking of the never realized Los Angeles County Hollywood Museum, October, 21, 1963. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. T H E G R E A T W H A T Z I T ? • 47 • that their museum could do more, be more, and symbolize more than its predecessors . In fact, the museum’s very legitimacy depended on proving not only that it had a responsibility to serve the public and nation at large but also that it could be epic in its proportions. The museum was envisioned as more than an art museum, more than a breeding ground for cinephilia, more than a collection of memorabilia, and most importantly, perhaps, more than a monument to the industry, films, stars, and myths that symbolized Hollywood. Furthermore, the museum had to serve a broad spectrum of interests that reflected a grand, multifaceted, and not always unified vision of Hollywood. Fundamentally, the museum had to serve both the public and the Hollywood industry. In addition to embodying national unity, the museum had to mark itself as an industry shrine upholding the history of Hollywood films, stars, and practitioners; an archive to house film and material culture; a science and technology showcase to promote experimentation and innovation; a tourist venue to serve the scores of annual visitors to Los Angeles; a cultural attraction to offer insight into the inner workings and mystique of Hollywood artifacts; and a storyteller to perpetuate the mythology of Hollywood glamour. In the eyes of the museum’s planners and rhetoricians, Hollywood had to embody a tangible, site-specific identity; a commercial business entity; an imaginary, universal symbol; and, particularly as the 1960s approached, a utopian celebration of burgeoning communications technology. The Hollywood Museum was therefore designed to serve multiple functions, negotiate multifarious identities, and reconstitute traditional views of both the film object as well as film culture traditionally associated with celluloid, cinephilia, and a canon steeped in discourses of high art. The task of encapsulating all of the meanings connoted by Hollywood and its history constituted a significant challenge, as evidenced by this museum venture as well as those that preceded and followed it. Since Hollywood’s symbolic...