10 Feb 2020
Hollywood's Academy Museum of Motion Pictures to open in December
BY Andy Knaggs
Hollywood icon Tom Hanks has announced the long-awaited opening of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, with the iconic Hollywood addition set to open on 14 December 2020.
The 300,000sq ft (91,440sq m), six-floor facility, which has views of the Hollywood Hills and iconic Hollywood sign, has been designed by architect Renzo Piano, and features a 1,000-seat theatre named after David Geffen in a distinctive spherical building.
It will be the first large-scale museum in the US to be entirely dedicated to the art, science, craft, business and history of film, with 50,000sq ft (15,240sq m) of galleries, theatres, project spaces, an outdoor plaza, rooftop terrace, education studio, event spaces, a restaurant and a store.
The Academy reportedly has a collection of over 12 million photographs, 190,000 moving image items, 80,000 screenplays, 61,000 posters and 104,000 pieces of production art to draw from in putting together its displays. Among the key objects that could be shown are Dorothy's ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz, a typewriter used to write the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, tablets from The Ten Commandments, and the only surviving shark mold from Jaws.
According to a report in The New York Times, the museum will have cost at least US$388m (€355m, £300m), which could rise to around US$450m (€412m, £348m) with the museum working on a new bond offering of US$100m (€91.5m, £77.4m). Disney's Bob Igerhas overseen the fund-raising campaign.
The newspaper also revealed details of some of the galleries the museum will open with, including early female directors, international silent film, Soviet cinema, the Hollywood studio system, and Indian independent film. Temporary exhibitions are also planned, starting with a retrospective on Japanese animator and filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki.
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