Yahoo Lifestyle Michael Cieply: Where Movies Wither, Museums Suddenly Bloom
A happy surprise on Friday — gleaned from a soggy copy of the Santa Monica Mirror left in the curbside box — was news that we almost have a spanking new science fiction museum in these parts. Called SCI-FI WORLD: The Experience, it occupies the old Sears department store premises in downtown Santa Monica. The grand opening was set for Memorial Day but slipped a bit over staffing and city permit and code issues, according to the Mirror. But, hey, this is Santa Monica. I once waited a year for a gas line inspection. (Duly noted, a June 3 article in the Los Angeles Times reports that the problems and delays run deeper than a routine permit delay.)
The 30,000-square-foot Sears building is only about one-eighth the size of the former mid-Wilshire May Company, which now houses the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. Still, it was a handy place to buy appliances, socket wrenches, socks, underwear, whatever; and if you can’t have those, science fiction is the next best thing.
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Started by a nonprofit called the New Starship Foundation — and with support both from fans and from the likes of William Shatner and George Takei — the museum promises to display movie and TV sci-fi memorabilia of all kinds. An early task was to preserve an Enterprise bridge from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Now, the windows are lined with supergraphics of deep space voyagers, Yoda, a rampaging ape – better than cosplay on Day 2 at Comic-Con. And on Friday morning, the place looked just about ready to go.
Remarkable. Something new. A folk museum devoted to popular movies and television shows, just across the street from the erstwhile Arclight cinema, where you might have watched Star Trek Beyond or Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens before Covid and film industry malaise killed that almost new theater.
Even more remarkable is a transformation occurring in and around the former Arclight, which was located on the third floor of the Santa Monica Place mall. Right there, three sizeable entertainment “museums”—more properly, exploration and exhibition galleries — have opened or will open soon.
Banging away in the Arclight lobby, workers are currently turning the closed multiplex into a branch of the Arte Museum of Immersive Art. Somehow, you’re supposed to get lost in nature through cinema there.
Across the way, the Cayton Children’s Museum, where kids up to the age of 8 get lost in a pastel rainbow of play experiences, is already open. “Playing our way to a better world,” is the motto.
Just downstairs, the Dr. Seuss Experience, too, is in full swing. There, you get lost in the twisted world of the Dr. Seuss books.
What these all have in common, of course, is a sense of fun. They share the unstoppable exuberance of pop culture, which keeps blossoming even when its familiar forms — I think especially of the movies — seem to be getting tired of themselves.
By 2025, what appears to be a growing network of Los Angeles area museums, exhibits and experiences will have a new, colossal anchor tenant, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. As my colleague Peter Bart recently noted, it’s almost impossible at this point to know what the incurably private proprietor George Lucas intends for that one.
But you can bet it will be less didactic than the Academy Museum, with its declared intent “to contextualize and challenge dominant narratives around cinema.” And I suspect it will be almost as much fun as fiddling around on the Enterprise bridge in a cheerfully defunct seaside Sears.
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