While in Los Angeles last summer, we decided to spend half a day exploring the city before moving from our hotel at Universal Hollywood to our one in Anaheim. We spent half the day at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, which is amazing if you love movies.
Not only do they have a whole exhibit dedicated to The Godfather movies, but they also have one of the surviving prop sharks Bruce from Jaws. There's even a large portion of an exhibit that celebrates the movie Casablanca.
The best temporary exhibit, of the few they have in their 3 floors of art, was one called Regeneration, an exhibit of Black entertainers through history, much of which included a lot of racist tropes and images. If that is too much for you, this exhibit may not be for you, but I greatly appreciated the story of where Black entertainers started and how they defied the odds to become stars, against all odds.
There is a whole wall of entertainers that performed in something called "soundies", which were 3-minute musical films that were projected on a machine that looked like a jukebox, but was more like a TV. Between 1940 and 1947, businesses that owned a Panoram machine got 8 new soundies shipped to them to be played on their machines. Each week they would get new ones, and though soundies that featured Black stars were put at the end of the reels, it was still great exposure for them to be seen by a wider audience beyond clubs where they may only been seen otherwise.
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Balcony Seating Only, by Gary Simmons |
If you are like me and enjoy historical textiles and costumes, you'll find a lot of these at the Academy Museum. The Regeneration exhibit had a few, like these amazing costumes above.
Also in the main exhibits, you can still see props/costumes from some of Hollywood's biggest Black entertainers, including Halle Berry's Oscar dress from 2002. Though she's had so many iconic looks, this is the dress you immediately think of when you think of the Halle Berry look. Also on display is a baseball uniform worn by Richard Pryor and facial prosthetics worn by Zoe Saldana.
I found the permanent exhibits just as interesting as the rotating ones and I could have easily spent several more hours there, reading about each Academy Award and watching more acceptance speeches. Make sure to plan for at least 3 hours. If you spend less time there, you an eat at the restaurant on-site, which I thought was quite good, or hit up the Los Angeles County Museum of Art nearby. There are plenty of outdoor places to eat right outside as well, and you can park in the garage for a fee, so you aren't driving in circles looking for street parking.
While you may not be able to visit this particular exhibit on Black entertainment history, you never know what you may find at museums of all kinds on your travels. I'm almost always pleasantly surprised when I visit museums, so I definitely encourage you to give different ones a chance before deciding it's not going to be fun or interesting.
Tell me your favorite awards speech(es) from the shows you've watched over the years.
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