Opening Night : Academy Members Give New Motion Picture Center Rave Reviews

Any filmmaker would die for the effusive reviews the Motion Picture Academy’s new Center for Motion Picture Study received when it premiered Wednesday night. It was the first of four nights of parties to show off the new facility to donors, academy members and guests.

The long-awaited 40,000-square-foot building, which opens to the public on Monday, was once the Beverly Hills Waterworks plant. It was saved from demolition at the last moment and now, $6 million later, is home to one of the largest film collections and libraries in the world.

“Now we have to make films good enough to deserve to be in this library,” Charlton Heston said.

“It looks to me like something that should have been done 50 years ago,” said Gregory Peck.

Eva Marie Saint added, “How did we live without it?”

“This will encourage people to give things,” Saint said. “I have scripts, posters, photos. The Library of Congress wanted them and I was tempted. But an actor’s things should be kept in this town.”

The star of the evening was the Cecil B. DeMille Reading Room, the first stop on the tour given to all 1,000 guests.

Arriving party-goers moved in a long, slow, line, up the stairs from the Bob Hope Lobby into the DeMille Room where the curved, vaulting ceiling has a cathedral-like quality.

“Making this into the reading room was just the right thing to do,” said academy president Karl Malden. “This is all natural lighting. It’s just the perfect use of the space.”

The crowd was broken up into groups of a dozen each for docent-led tours to the special collections, the conference rooms, past the photo exhibit and back through the archives where more than 200,000 files and 5,000 scripts are kept.

It was here that Michael Douglas broke away from his group and started browsing through the R files for the “Romancing the Stone” folder.

“It’s scary to see how much information they’ve got on you,” Douglas said.

Then it was down the backstairs and out to the 12,000-square-foot tent where Along Came Mary had set up eight food stations serving rack of lamb, pasta, caviar and desserts. What commenced was one of the most truly festive Hollywood parties in years.

Among those on hand for the celebration were Henry Winkler, Shelley Winters, silent-film star Francis Lederer, Macdonald Carey, Dino De Laurentiis, Diane Ladd, Sam Goldwyn Jr. and former academy presidents Fay Kanin, Gene Allen, Howard W. Koch and Robert Wise.

“We had high hopes,” Wise said. “You see it come together in bits and pieces of plans and models, but this is a dream come true. And that doesn’t always happen when you’re making a building. Or a movie.”