Michael Cieply: ‘Hollywoodland’ And The Jews, A Museum Exhibit We Could Use Right Now
17.12.2023 - 17:51
/ deadline.com
Is it too early for a New Year’s wish? Well, I’m going to make one anyway.
I wish the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures would hurry up its long-promised Hollywoodland exhibition.
Officially titled Hollywoodland: Jewish Founders and the Making of a Movie Capital, the exhibit is intended, finally, to recognize that Jews—especially immigrants among them—did more than a little to establish the movie business in Los Angeles, beginning more than a century ago. It is scheduled to open on Sunday, May 19, 2024, and is said on the museum’s website to be the institution’s “first and only permanent exhibition.”
Many observers thought something like this would be part of the package when the Academy Museum first opened, back in September of 2021. It would seem impossible to tell the story of the film business without paying special tribute to the thousands of Jewish executives, filmmakers, and stars who helped to build the studios here. That history still lingers, from the Thalberg Building in Culver City, to the site of Salka Viertel’s salon in Santa Monica Canyon, to the remnants of Poverty Row on Gower and wherever.
But it took time, and a certain amount of pressure from museum donors before the staff got things into focus. “We never had any desire to exclude or not represent the Jewish founders,” Bill Kramer, formerly the museum president and now chief executive of the film Academy, explained to The Forward, which had noted the cultural oversight early on. “We long planned on having a temporary exhibit highlighting them but are now going to make it permanent.”
Which is grand—or would be, if only that exhibit were in place now, as Jews here, as elsewhere, are facing physical assault, vandalism, synagogue SWAT-ings and hostile