SUPPORT BROADENS FOR N.Y. FILM MUSEUM

This city, an early film center, has recalled its past history by giving rise to the new American Museum of the Moving Image.

“We believe that the next wave of film preservation will focus on the material artifacts of the cinema,” said Rachel Slovin, the director of the new museum, which will feature film, television and other “moving image media.”

The museum has been operating out of temporary quarters at the recently restored Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens since 1981, with a skeleton program of screenings, lectures and exhibits. But with the scheduled January, 1988, opening of a $10-million facility at the studios, the museum plans a year-round program that would make it a unique American film institution.

Daily screenings of films planned for a new, 200-seat theater, together with lectures, seminars, demonstrations and 25,000 square feet of projected exhibit space devoted to the tangible history of cinema--from costume sketches to cameras to special effects equipment--would make the museum unlike anything that now exists in this country and similar in scope to the prestigious Cinemateque Francaise in Paris.

Construction of the new museum began Oct. 1 with a Hollywood-style ground-breaking ceremony presided over by New York’s Mayor Edward I. Koch and attended by a cross-section of the New York film and television industry.

“We have a community of cultural and political people here who understand that you can be serious and intelligent, and not just sentimental, when you are talking about film and television,” said Slovin, pointing out that New York City has provided $7.5 million for the museum and that a campaign to find additional funding from the private sector is now under way.

“We have broad community support here because people realize that (Kaufman Astoria Studios) is a place to make a statement about the history of films and television,” said Arthur Barron, president of the entertainment division of Gulf and Western, and a museum board member, noting that the Kaufman Astoria Studios were a center of film making in the 1920s and ‘30s and that the recently restored studios symbolize the recent resurgence of production in New York.

Film and television production in New York currently produces $2 billion in local revenues, according to the city’s office of economic development. The new Astoria Studios alone have led to the creation of 600 new jobs to date.

“There is a built-in synergism between history, as represented in the museum, and what’s going on now, and we believe that the one will benefit the other,” said New York’s Deputy Mayor for Economic Development Alair Townsend.