LOS ANGELES — The long-delayed Academy Museum of Motion Pictures will open on Dec. 14, completing a nine-decade quest by the Hollywood establishment to celebrate itself year-round.
Tom Hanks announced the opening date during the 92nd Academy Awards on Sunday night. “It’s going to be a very big deal,” he said. “We’ll see you there.”
The museum was initially scheduled to open in 2017 and cost $250 million. Setbacks have included sparring architects, a ballooning budget (now at least $388 million), construction difficulties and the forced departure of the institution’s inaugural director, Kerry Brougher, last summer.
The academy recently announced that it had reached 95 percent of its fund-raising goal; Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, has overseen the campaign. The museum is also working on another bond offering of roughly $100 million, according to Deadline, an entertainment news site, that would push the project’s cost to around $450 million, unless some new money is used to retire debt.
The museum could attract in the vicinity of 1 million visitors annually. It is next to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and features a 1,000-seat theater inside a spherical building designed by Renzo Piano that has been likened to the Death Star. (Piano prefers to think of it as a “soap bubble.”)
Anchoring the six-floor Academy Museum will be a 30,000-square-foot exhibition tracing the artistic and scientific history of cinema from a filmmaker’s perspective, starting in the late 1800s in France, and including an array of movie installations. Galleries will focus on early female directors, international silent film, Soviet cinema, the Hollywood studio system and Indian independent film, among other topics. The museum will also feature temporary exhibitions, starting with a retrospective on Hayao Miyazaki, the Japanese animation titan behind films like ‘’Spirited Away’‘ (2001) and ‘’The Wind Rises’‘ (2013).
The motion picture academy will have local competition. The Los Angeles County Museum has its own film program and has hosted popular movie-related exhibitions like one on the filmmaker Tim Burton. Well-established local organizations like American Cinematheque already coordinate public screenings of significant art films. And construction has begun near downtown Los Angeles on the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which will house items collected by George Lucas, including 20th-century American illustrations, comic books, costumes, storyboards, stage sets and other archival material from ‘’Star Wars’‘ and other movies. The Lucas Museum, shaped (without question) like a ‘’Star Wars’‘ vessel, and its surrounding campus will cost an estimated $1 billion.
But the motion picture academy — with a collection that includes 190,000 film and video assets and 61,000 posters — has wanted its own museum for decades.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
