It has been said at times that Hollywood lacks a conscience, but what strikes me in my day-to-day dealings with the entertainment world is how sorely it lacks a memory.
Show business is a forgetting industry, a reflection of our forward-looking, amnesiac culture. It places a high premium on youth, who are notoriously ignorant of their past. When Hollywood does look back, it usually lays on the nostalgia so thick you could slice it with a negative cutter — not that anyone who works in a digital editing suite today remembers one of those.
In the last few years, however, Hollywood has worked to recover its memories in thoughtful new ways. It has created places of remembering here in Southern California, contemporary museums where the public can understand, for better or worse, how entertainment helped shape our outlook in this American century.
I drove by the Museum of Television & Radio in Beverly Hills three times before finally spotting it among the stylish, low-slung stores of the Rodeo Drive shopping district. Once inside, I was better able to appreciate the museum’s external and internal qualities.
The museum, which opened last year, is a functional duplicate of the original Museum of Television & Radio in New York built in 1975, two doors down from the West 52nd headquarters of CBS. But while that building crouches in the shadows of the skyscrapers and has a dark and unwelcoming feel, its sister museum is encased in glass on its northern and western walls, bathing its spacious, two-story lobby in the warm California sunshine.
William Paley, the founder and longtime chairman of CBS, was a man of unfathomable ego, like his rival at RCA, “General” David Sarnoff. Paley’s ruthlessness in building a broadcast empire was only occasionally tempered by real vision. But one of those great foresights was to preserve the TV programs of the past, rather than destroy them, as Sarnoff’s NBC did to save storage space.
Visitors can search the museum’s collection of more than 75,000 radio and TV programs via computer in the museum’s second-floor library and request programs for private viewing at a nearby console. The collection, which includes advertisements and fragments of early shows, is notable more for its breadth than its depth. The ultimate classic-TV experience would be to sit down and watch, end to end, a typical week’s worth of a 1950s soap opera, or “The Jack Paar Show,” but those shortcomings are the fault of previous generations, not the archive’s.
The museum also has a small, L-shaped listening room where visitors can hear various documentaries about old-time radio on headphones. Its design is notable: the seats are arranged so that everyone has a view of everyone else in the room, a reminder that in the days when radio was king, listening to radio was a communal experience.
The sedateness that permeates the museum’s video areas also conjures up an earlier time, back when TV still was, in Marshall McLuhan’s phrase, a “cool,” participatory medium. For instance, as you walk up the unenclosed ramp that leads from the main floor to the audio-video collection, you’re scarcely aware that right below you is a gallery where a documentary on the making of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” is playing at low volume on four TV sets.
In all, touring the Museum of Television & Radio is a pleasant experience — which is what makes it so entirely unrepresentative of today’s electronic age. In many homes TV has become a background sound, a pageant of images to be endlessly browsed by the channel surfer. To younger audiences, the museum’s archive of TV from the Paley era might as well have come from the Paleolithic era.
As if La-La Land were trying to send me a message, my next stop along memory lane proved to be just as hard to find as the first.
Tucked underneath a General Cinema multiplex on Hollywood Boulevard, two blocks west of Graumann’s Chinese Theater, is the Hollywood Entertainment Museum, one of Tinseltown’s newest places for remembering. An inauspicious entrance opens up to a tall, spacious lobby from which one takes two guided tours through the rest of the museum.
Here visitors will find props and costumes from TV shows and movies, old production equipment with names like Movieola and the “hot splicer,” and original sets from the TV shows “Cheers” and “Star Trek.” There’s an exhibit devoted to Max Factor, the progenitor of modern screen makeup; a display on the history of radio; and a 12-foot historic replica of old Hollywood, built in 1940, that can be viewed from above through a glass-bottom floor.
The exhibits are well-designed and up-to-date, but thematically they seem disparate, unrelated; one longs for a common thread that would make them into a coherent whole.
I did notice, however, how many displays paid tribute to Hollywood’s obsession with visual trickery. As our tour group gazed at an indistinct, 4-foot-high Styrofoam sculpture, our guide explained how Cecil B. DeMille had magically transformed it into the enormous Gates of Ramses in “The Ten Commandments.” The actors had simply pushed against a backdrop that was later replaced with the picture of the Styrofoam.
“They had to go see the movie to see what they’d done,” joked our guide, a cheerful older woman from Brooklyn.
“Let’s face it,” she said, “Hollywood is all illusion.”
By contrast, at the vaster, more richly endowed and — hallelujah — much easier to find Autry Museum of Western Heritage, the theme of illusion was explicit.
The Autry, next to the L.A. Zoo in Griffith Park, was launched with a $54 million gift from Gene Autry’s private foundation and opened in 1988. It is a first-rate museum that tells its story extremely well, from the early exploration of the West to its conquest, the scattering of native peoples and the introduction of European settlers — their customs, cultures and firearms — across the frontier.
Although there are plenty of reasons to make this museum a must-see, the wing dedicated to the evolution of the mythical West in paintings, movies, radio and finally television is worth the price of admission alone.
Almost as soon as the “real West” was gone, the “imaginative” and often imaginary West rose up to take its place, beginning with the first romantic 19th Century paintings (some of them by artists who had never even seen the West).
The development of this myth into mass entertainment is told through an intelligently designed sequence of stations, each with a short documentary on a TV screen and a display case of mementos.
There are exhibits on the very first westerns, dating to the cinema’s earliest days; the epic “A” westerns of Ford, Peckinpah and DeMille; the muted roles of women and minorities; and movie poster art, including a stunning watercolor for Cimarron painted by Frederic C. Madan.
Interestingly, Hopalong Cassidy — or “Hoppy,” as he was known to two generations of young boys — and Tom Mix get bigger spreads than the museum’s benefactor, although Autry does get credit for inventing the singing cowboy form and launching a raft of imitators like Tex Ritter, Monty Hale and, in one laughable instance, a young John Wayne.
But Autry gets his revenge at the gift shop, an impressive trove of paraphernalia that includes a $900 pair of Blue Bird cowboy boots, singing cowboy tapes and plenty of buckskin souvenirs with Autry’s name branded on the side. Say what you will about guns — merchandising was how the West was won.
DETAILS ON L.A. ENTERTAINMENT MUSEUMS
The Museum of TV and Radio is at Beverly Drive and South (or “Little”) Santa Monica Drive. Take Interstate 405 to Santa Monica Boulevard and head east. There’s free two-hour parking underneath the museum and extended meter parking one block north.
The museum holds seminars regularly in the main auditorium. This fall will feature top sitcom producers of “The Young and the Restless” (Dec. 11). Tickets cost $10; the museum’s hot line is 310-786-1025. Previous seminars can be ordered and viewed in the library.
This fall the museum is host for a series of screenings devoted to the early live TV productions by director John Frankenheimer. As with seminars, these works can be viewed individually as well.
If you’re serious about TV, there are several excellent archives around L.A. The UCLA Film and Television Archive (405 Hilgard Ave., 310-206-5388) is considered the best public repository of old TV programs; the entire “Hallmark Hall of Fame” collection is there. But you must order the works you wish to view and then wait until the following day for the materials to be delivered to the school’s Media Lab. (The archive can be searched over the Internet at its Web site; www.cinema.ucla.edu) If you’re more interested in research information about the shows and the actors in them, try the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (5220 Lankershim Blvd., 818-754-2800) or the USC Cinema-Television Library located in the Doheny Memorial Library (213-740-3994).
The Hollywood Entertainment Museum is at 7021 Hollywood Blvd., underneath the multiplex, and is open 11 a.m.-6 p.m. daily except Mondays. Admission is $7.50 adults, $4.50 seniors/students and $4 ages 5-12. There’s $2 parking in the garage north of the museum.
Adjacent to the L.A. Zoo, the Autry Museum of Western Heritage is at I-5 and the Ventura Freeway and is open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. daily except Mondays. Admission is $7.50 adults, $5 seniors/students and $3 ages 2-12. Call ahead tyo inquire about upcoming talks, films and musical performances (213-667-2000; www.questorsys.com/autry-museum/).
