Michael Cieply: “Hollywoodland” and the Jews, a museum exhibit we can use now

Is it too early to make a New Year’s wish? Well, I’ll do one anyway.

I wish the Academy Museum of Cinema fulfills its long promise Hollywoodland Exhibition.

Officially titled Hollywoodland: Jewish Founders and the Making of a Film CapitalUltimately, the exhibit seeks to acknowledge that Jews—especially the immigrants among them—made more than a small contribution to building the Los Angeles film industry, which began more than a century ago. The opening is scheduled for Sunday, May 19, 2024, and the museum’s website states that it is the Institute’s “first and only permanent exhibition.”

Many observers thought something like this would be part of the package when the Academy Museum first opened in September 2021. It seems impossible to tell the story of the movie business without paying special tribute to the thousands of Jewish executives, filmmakers and stars who helped build the studios here. That history lives on today, from the Thalberg Building in Culver City to the site of Salka Quarter’s Salon in Santa Monica Canyon to the remnants of Poverty Row on Gower and everywhere else.

But it took time and some pressure from museum donors for staff to get things sorted. “We never had any desire to exclude or not represent the Jewish founders,” said Bill Kramer, former museum president and now CEO of the film academy. The attacker, who became aware of the cultural surveillance early on. “We have long planned to highlight them in a temporary exhibition, but now we are making it a permanent exhibition.”

This is huge – or it would be if this exhibition only existed now, as Jews here, as elsewhere, have faced physical attacks, vandalism, SWAT operations at the synagogue and hostile demonstrations following the Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent attack be exposed on 7 October. Answer. It will be a welcome reminder that Jews – many of them poor and as oppressed in their homelands as any victim group today – have often made films that make you laugh, cry, wonder and be glad to be alive. Life.

But things move slowly in the museum world. Last Monday there was still no sign of it Hollywoodland at the Academy Museum – just a pile of junk, as Netflix has prepared for it master premiere, and some giggles and chats as a bus full of school children were turned away from the scatological, profane and sexually kaleidoscopic John Waters: Pope of Trash Installation. (It’s pretty rough; I went outside with the sizzling roller when it came off and was covered in dog poo.)

There was a small Hanukkah display downstairs in the gift shop. A book about Jewish comedians, some greeting cards from Adam Sandler. But not much.

That’s why I wish they would hurry up. Maybe you could run an ad for the March 10 Oscar show or put up an early billboard or two. We need something Hollywoodland– an afterthought for the Jews – at this time.