In the world of movies, reality and illusion have merged to create a legendary place known as Hollywood. This Hollywood is more than an economically decaying Los Angles suburb. Centered around the famed intersection of Hollywood and Vine, Hollywood is a place of dreams, a painted backdrop of glitter, glory, and riches. A traveler can find it only on a map of the imagination.
The Smithsonian's travelling exhibit of "Hollywood: Legend and Reality," which opened in Washington April 17, celebrates the legendary Hollywood with a collection over 400 costumes, models, production sketches, props, posters, photographs, and other memorabilia. But is also goes beyond the Hollywood on the screen, and takes a look beneath the brightly painted backdrop to examine the hard work that created and nurtured the illusion.
"In a nutshell, the show is about the way that an idea is turned into a collective image by the means of a lot of hard work, and how magical that final moving image can be and how it has touched us all at different times," says Michael Webb, the exhibit's curator.
Laid out to show the evolution of the American film industry, the exhibit is organized into a series of galleries that spotlight a bedazzling collection of Hollywood history spanning from the classic silent films of D.W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin through recent blockbusters like Star Wars and Ghostbusters. Items on display include cowboy hero Tom Mix's hat, the matador suit Rudolph Valentino wore in 1922's Blood and Sand, Ray Bolger's Scarecrow costume from The Wizard of Oz, Fred Astaire's dancing shoes, and a recreation of Rick's café from Casablanca, complete with the piano used by Dooley Wilson to play "As Time Goes By." A miniature King Kong used for the ape's classic film stands a mere ten inches tall, demonstrating the celluloid magic that created the simian monarch of Skull Island. The overalls and undershirt worn by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times (waist: 35 inches) testifies to the humanity of a man who has long since become an internationally known symbol.
And playing among the artifacts on a number of video screens are clips from the real reasons for all this: the movies that have become collective memories for people the world over.
The exhibit is equally concerned with the work that went on behind the camera. Costume designers, set designers, writers, carpenters, cameramen, editors, and the other craftspeople never gained the glory of the stars but they created the backdrop that made them sparkle. People like D.W. Griffith's cameraman Billy Bitzer, film editors like Watson Webb, composer Alfred Newman, and the scores of prop men, set painters, and extras gave substance to the visions of the David O. Selznicks and Alfred Hitchcocks.
Webb, an English-born writer and former film programmer for the American Film Institute, was asked to join the exhibit by Peggy Loar, the director of the Smithsonian Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES), some four years ago. At first he felt daunted by the scale of the subject. "On reflection I thought it would be an interesting challenge to make the connection between the different periods of Hollywood's history and between different age groups and tastes," he says. "On that basis, and on the agreed idea of 'Legend and Reality,' it was inherent from the first idea that it would be the contrast between
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