The Academy Museum will focus its first permanent exhibition on the mostly Jewish founders of Hollywood after coming under fire for overlooking their contribution when the venue opened last autumn.
‘Hollywoodland’ will open in late spring 2023 and comes after critics called out the omission, which includes the lack of any detailed attention to Hollywood founding fathers such as Louis B. Mayer, Harry and Jack Warner and Samuel Goldwyn.
The Los Angeles-based museum, which has allocated considerable space to the role played by people of colour, women and other underrepresented groups in the story of cinema, recently noted in the press how the Jewish experience exists throughout the museum’s activities and cited a symposium on Austrian exiles like lauded filmmaker Billy Wilder.
Anti-Defamation League head Jonathan Greenblatt told The New York Times he recalled being “shocked by the absence of an inclusion of Jews in the Hollywood story” on the museum’s opening day. However he sounded encouraged following the response to the feedback by Academy Museum leaders, who have reached out to rabbis and scholars as they curate the new exhibit.
‘Hollywoodland’ is part of a schedule of Academy Museum exhibitions announced on Monday (21) and will recount the history of filmmaking in Los Angeles and how the personal stories of the predominantly Jewish founders of the studio system influenced the types of films each studio made.
“The history of film is endlessly rich and varied, which is why we envisioned the exhibitions of the Academy Museum as a continually evolving set of installations and virtual content,” said Academy Museum director and president Bill Kramer.
This summer the temporary exhibition Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898–1971 will open and look at the history of Black cinema from inception through the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Other rotating exhibits include Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather and the influences of French New Wave filmmaker Agnes Varda highlighting her work from 1955’s La Pointe Courte to Varda by Agnès in 2019, the year she died.
Early 2023 will see space dedicated to Boys N The Hood, Casablanca, documentarian Lourdes Portillo and the collaborations of production designer Sarah Greenwood and set decorator Katie Spencer, who worked on Darkest Hour and Anna Karenina.
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