Wandering Among Treasures of a Celluloid Civilization’s 91 Years

The Smithsonian Institution’s massive traveling shrine to the Hollywood that used to be opens to the public today at the National History Museum in Exposition Park after a starry preview Thursday night.

It is the central jewel in a kind of tinsel tiara of tributes to the movies that are in place or will be opening in a few days.

As detailed in Thursday’s Calendar section, these include a look at how special effects are effected (at the Museum of Science and Industry, which is also in Exposition Park) and a display of the truly stunning movie posters that George Eastman commissioned from Batiste Madalena for his theater in Rochester, N.Y., at the Newman Galleries in Beverly Hills.

Starting Dec. 20, the County Museum of Art will offer “Masters of Starlight,” an exhibit assembled by Sid Avery of Hollywood photographs, glamorous and documentary, and another exhibit of Hollywood costumes, with related sketches and stills.

In addition to the big, big show--”Hollywood: Legend and Reality,” curated for the Smithsonian by Michael Webb with a principal grant from Time Inc.--the Natural History Museum is offering a selection of celebrity photographs from Time Inc.’s People Magazine and a collection of Brian Shapiro paintings of Hollywood behind the scenes.

It is all a postgraduate exercise in what we might call film fannery. But in December, 1987, it feels like nothing so simple as nostalgia, although there is a lot of that going around.

In this 91st year of the life of the movies (counting from their first commercial showing at Koster and Bial’s Emporium in Manhattan in 1896), the Smithsonian show--judging by its lavish and thoughtful catalogue--has much the archeological flavor of the King Tut exhibition or a display of Etruscan sculpture, as being fragments of a lost civilization.

For all their apparent links to a living entity, the motion picture, the several shows proclaim, rather cruelly in fact, how greatly Hollywood and American society and the world have changed.

The Smithsonian show can be seen as a mobile Williamsburg (it moves to Tokyo in late February after it closes here), providing a glimpse of an irretrievable past.

The movies have always been a refuge from reality; it was and remains their principal appeal, although, of course, they have several others. This new profusion of paradings from yesterday affirms just how much the film past has itself become a refuge from present reality--especially among those too young to have experienced Clark Gable or “The Wizard of Oz” in first release, let’s say.

It is easy to lament a loss of innocence the movies have experienced between then and now, but it’s hard not to notice the loss of innocence, the sunny presumptions that despite all the good folks will win and things will work out.

The movies were never not a tough and ruthless business. The dream factory was run by born survivors who had to recognize talent to survive and who did, although they did their best to keep the talent under a hard thumb.

Yet whatever the private cynicism and the sybaritic life styles of the industry in the first three or four decades of its explosive and untidy existence, the products proclaimed the ultimate triumph of goodness, decency and justice.

The dream factory was in fact a series of greater and lesser kingdoms, with greater and lesser kings, and their aspirations not just to wealth but to class and prestige and social acceptance led to the grandeurs whose traces are going on display. They were close to the audience from which they had emerged and understood its wants and needs; it was the moguls’ great and profitable strength.

(It is a bitter corollary truth that the shabby performance of the studio chieftains during the blacklist period stemmed in part from their horror at being perceived as anything but 110% true-blue Americans, and they were prepared to sacrifice friends and principles to maintain the posture.)

Hollywood 1987 bears amazingly little resemblance to Hollywood 1947, to cite the first real year of commercial television as the watershed. The studio kingdoms are no longer so royal and the thrones are musical chairs. The studios no longer groom the stars as once they did; they can rarely afford to be daring, experimental or controversial.

(It is interesting how many within that handful of present superstars--Eastwood, Newman, even Jane Fonda--can trace their beginnings to the waning days of the studio system as it was. Stars of a later day more nearly resemble comets, apt to trail off fast if not nourished by new roles.)

The industry is much more nakedly a business than ever, with an even thinner veneer of passion and creativity than existed when the founding moguls played their hunches and went by the seat of their pants.

The later moguls are corporate managers, bankers and distributors who--to a degree Jack Warner might have found appalling--vest their creative powers in market researchers and outside agencies.

It is not invariably so, and it may well be significant that the three most successful studios at the moment, Paramount, Warners and Disney/Touchstone, appear to be reasserting in-house creative control of their own destinies.

There are probably still-relevant lessons to be learned amid the “Casablanca” piano, Rosebud and King Kong in miniature. But the principal lesson is to enjoy that gaudy and innocent past; it isn’t coming back.