Screen and TV Legends Live Again at Museum of the Moving Image

For shame, Hollywood, you’ve been royally upstaged by the Big Apple.

The American Museum of the Moving Image is not in Tinseltown, where you’d expect it, but 3,000 miles east in Queens . . . where Archie Bunker used to live.

The $15-million, seven-years-in-the-making museum is the first in the United States devoted to the art, history and technology of film, television and video.

AMMI opened in 1988 in the renovated Astoria Studios (now Kaufman-Astoria Studios), where Paramount Pictures produced silent films and early talkies starring such screen legends as Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson, W.C. Fields, George Burns and Gracie Allen in the 1920s and ‘30s.

More recently, “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” “Radio Days,” “Ishtar” and “The Cotton Club” were filmed there. In addition, the studio currently plays host to TV’s “The Cosby Show.”

More than 60,000 artifacts are displayed in 50,000 square feet of space on AMMI’s first two floors--anything even remotely related to the production of moving images, from Thomas Edison’s first moving-picture camera to Sonny and Cher dolls. It’s a film buff’s dream come true.

A 6,200-square-foot third-floor exhibition gallery opened last June, and a fourth-floor penthouse is scheduled for completion by 1995.

The ground floor includes an exhibition gallery with rotating special exhibits, a museum shop crammed with movie-related items, and two theaters, the 60-seat Warner Communications screening room and the 190-seat Riklis Theater.

At least nine programs are scheduled weekly in the main theater, with continuous programming in the screening room (both free with museum admission).

More than 1,000 programs a year are scheduled in AMMI’s viewing facilities, including lectures, seminars, workshops, trailer marathons, video classics and monthlong special performances such as comedy, avant-garde and Japanese silent films.

Programs have ranged from “The Films of Cecil B. DeMille” and “Media and the Vietnam War” (a survey of television broadcasts and videos) to “The Rise and Fall of the Television Western” and “Sixty Years of Animated Features.”

If you wanted to, you could spend an entire day just overdosing on movies. When I visited I could have watched five continuous screenings, starting at 11:30 a.m. with “The Syndicated Western” and finishing with the 5 p.m. showing of the “Yellow Submarine.”

AMMI’s first-floor gallery is exhibiting “Tony Walton: Designing for Stage and Screen,” which runs through Aug. 26.

The show contains almost 300 original sketches, models, location boards and production photographs from the award-winning designer’s 30-year career. He worked on such projects as “The Boy Friend,” “Mary Poppins,” “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” and “All That Jazz.” Related screenings and lectures take place in the Riklis Theater.

Most museum-goers then head upstairs for the fun and games.

A preview of what’s to come awaits you on the first-floor landing. There you can hand-crank one of three old Mutoscopes, those wondrous 1895 devices that rapidly rotate more than 800 cards on wheels to create the illusion of motion pictures. Sort of like an early version of a peep show.

I watched Charlie Chaplin in “Hell’s Kitchen.” It took about a minute.

The new third-floor gallery opened with the exhibition “Hot Circuits, A Video Arcade,” a retrospective of the 18-year history of coin-operated video games (it runs through May).

All 45 of the games (from early classics such as Atari’s Pong to the more technically sophisticated games such as NARC) are operating, and visitors are encouraged to play. The museum admission price includes five game tokens (additional tokens cost five for $1).

The second-floor permanent exhibition, billed as “Behind the Screen: Making, Marketing and Exhibiting Motion Pictures and Television,” covers just about every conceivable aspect of making movies and TV.

Sometimes it’s a hands-on experience, such as letting you mix your own sound track for a commercial or seeing yourself in costume via a “magic mirror”--as, say, Sylvester Stallone in “Rocky” or Vivien Leigh in “Gone With the Wind.”

Sometimes it’s educational, like the section devoted to who does what in the industry. More than 30 careers--from the little-known gaffer and key grip to the projectionist--are illustrated and explained.

The work of makeup artists are represented with reconstruction models from “The Elephant Man” and the full body prosthesis from “Cocoon.”

Sometimes it’s just super memorabilia to wax nostalgic over: costumes from “The Great Gatsby” and “I Love Lucy”; wonderful collections of promotional and marketing memorabilia from more than 100 Disney toys (and almost as many movie magazines from the ‘40s) to nearly three dozen games, like Ralph Edwards’ “This Is Your Life”; movie posters from the early 20th Century to the present, and consumer products and endorsements, including games, toys and a collection of 30 lunch boxes, dating from a 1950 Hopalong Cassidy to a 1982 E.T.

Paul Newman donated the complete living room set from “The Glass Menagerie” (designed by Tony Walton). A guide accompanies visitors to the set to explain the designer’s motives, while a monitor nearby screens sequences from the film.

AMMI commissioned Nam June Paik’s video sculpture, the “Get-Away Car,” made up of 80 TV screens all going at once in rapid sequence, arranged in the shape of an automobile. It is, they say, a visual pun on the moving image. I never got it. But it was fascinating, almost dizzying, to watch.

Best of all, you’ll find some first-class entertainment. You can watch old film and television clips in one of five booths, and listen to writers, producers and directors talk about their productions just by picking up a telephone.

Among others, writer-producer Joseph Mankiewitz discusses Bette Davis’ performance in “All About Eve,” and director Jay Sandrich fills you in about “The Cosby Show.”

You can sit in comfortable chairs, just like home, and watch marvelous TV clips--one- to three-second vignettes--from famous movies and television, including “Famous Last Words,” “Precious Images” and “Golden Moments.” Some hilarious, some nostalgic, all very entertaining.

Better yet, stop off for an old serial classic like “Captain Marvel” at Tut’s Fever Movie Palace, a brightly painted parody of a gaudy Egyptian theater of the 1920s designed by Red Grooms and Lysiane Luong. It seats 40.

When I was there they were showing chapter 10 of a 20-minute serial “Nyoka and the Tigerman.” The film ended when the car in which the hero and heroine are tied up in the back seat (with the bad guy driving, naturally) plunges over a cliff after a dynamite explosion in the road. Come back next week to see how it turns out in chapter 11.

Ah, the old Saturday matinees. Hollywood is going to have to work hard to create something better than this.

The American Museum of the Moving Image, 35th Avenue at 36th Street in Astoria, Queens, is open Tuesday through Friday from noon to 5 p.m., Saturday and Sunday 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Closed Monday.

Admission is $5 for adults, $4 for seniors and $2.50 for children and students.

AMMI is within walking distance of the R, G or N subway, to either Steinway or Broadway in Astoria. There is street parking or a lot ($5 a day) on 35th Avenue between 37th and 38th streets.

For more information and program schedules, call (718) 784-0077.