New Warner Bros. Museum Is More Than Just a Looney Idea

John Wayne’s chaps. James Dean’s motorcycle. The Maltese Falcon.

Those are among the objects on display--some of them for the first time--at the Warner Bros. Museum opening today on the studio’s lot in Burbank. The 7,000-square-foot museum displays hundreds of items culled from the studio’s costume, art, music and prop departments as well as the Warner Bros. archives at USC.

The inaugural exhibit on the ground floor, dedicated to the studio’s first 50 years, is divided into subjects, said Ruth Gilliland, director of design and construction. The museum is divided into sections, each containing memorabilia related to a topic such as crime movies, westerns or the advent of sound.

“Casablanca,” however, gets its own area. On display is Jack Warner’s bound copy of the script--famous for being written and rewritten during filming. There are costumes worn by the film’s three stars, including a plaid suit worn by Humphrey Bogart. Wait . . . swanky nightclub owner Rick wore plaid? Only in the flashback to Paris, reassured Warner Bros. archivist Leith Adams. Most striking, however, is the piano on which Sam played “As Time Goes By.” Designed to be pushed around a club, it’s only about 4 feet wide.

Some of the most intriguing items are even smaller--correspondence to and from Warner Bros.’ biggest stars: Errol Flynn’s complaint about how his dressing room disappeared from the set of “Objective Burma”; a letter from the Duke on the set of “Hondo,” signed “John- take- me- back- to- the- silent- pictures- Wayne”; the memo explaining that Rin Tin Tin was being fired because talkies had arrived and, well, as smart as he was, the German shepherd couldn’t talk.

A stop at the museum will be added to the Warner Bros. tour, a two-hour trip through the studio lot taken by about 32,000 people each year. Though children under 10 aren’t allowed on the tour, the studio plans to invite school groups, said Marisa O’Neil, vice president of corporate services. Main exhibits will change every year.

For the next six months the museum will present a special exhibit on the three films James Dean made--all for Warner Bros.--before he was killed in a car accident in 1955. Dean’s Triumph 500 motorcycle, on loan from the James Dean Foundation, was banned from the studio lot because of the actor’s reckless driving, Adams said.

Warner Bros. Chairman and Co-CEO Robert Daly said the studio first considered such a display in 1990 during a rededication of the studio lot. In 1992, the studio produced a documentary on its history and took an exhibit of photos, costumes and letters on tour to the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

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Much of that collection is now in the new museum, which is attached to the Steven J. Ross Theatre building that was completed last year.

Warner Bros. is fortunate that some of its display has survived. Props and costumes, for example, were thrown back into warehouses to be reused in future films. Ingrid Bergman’s “Casablanca” dress was pulled off a rack of stock costumes only six months ago. On the other hand, the studio has had very few management changes in its 73 years, thus averting a purge of personnel--or the company’s institutional memory. Individual employees and departments saved the sketches, photos and plaster life masks of stars’ faces that fill much of the museum.

“I wish I could say to you that we saved so many things,” Daly said. “The problem is, we’ve had to scramble to get these things. But the continuity in management has done one thing: It’s made us feel stronger about our heritage.”

While there is a certain family scrapbook feel to some of the exhibit, other parts deal with films that transformed the medium--either technologically or socially. “The Jazz Singer” (1927)--the first Vitaphone sound feature--marked the irreversible transition to talkies. Video clips compare an original scene from “A Streetcar Named Desire” with the version released after a complaint from the Catholic Legion of Decency in 1951. “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” in 1966 was the first film to get an “adults only” designation from the Motion Picture Assn. of America--marking the beginning of the current ratings system.

The display upstairs--”65 Years of Animation”--details the history of Warner Bros. characters, from Bugs Bunny to Pinky & the Brain. Sketches, sheet music, background paintings and painted cels are suspended in glass along two walls, reflecting how animation is created in layers.

Chuck Jones, the 83-year-old artist and director who helped create the Looney Tunes gang, still heads up a unit on the Warner Bros. lot that makes short animated films. Strolling through the exhibit, Jones recalled the characteristics of his creations as if they were relatives.

Porky Pig, for example, picked up his stutter in an early film when he had to recite “The Ride of Paul Revere” in front of a class. Porky had to use the bathroom and was so distracted that he couldn’t spit out the words. Bugs Bunny, on the other hand, was such a strong character that Jones made sure he was provoked in each film--otherwise he’d come off as a bully. “When he fought back he was like Douglas Fairbanks--coupled with Dorothy Parker,” Jones said.

Also running on a video monitor are four films never seen by general audiences. The “Pvt. SNAFU” shorts were made for the armed services to teach soldiers about hazards they would face in World War II. The animation style is familiar--but not even Daffy Duck would have uttered some of the dialogue. “We were allowed to use some four-letter words to get their attention,” Jones said.

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The second wall is devoted to how the studio’s contemporary animation is created. Next to the storyboard for the “Batman” opening titles, for example, is a video that shows what the final product looked like.

Many of the items on display, such as the “What’s Opera Doc?” script, came from the personal collection of Jones and other Warner Bros. employees. Old animation cels were hard to find. It was standard practice to wash the paint off the clear acetate cels so they could be reused. Most others were destroyed in the 1970s because they were starting to emit hazardous fumes. “We save everything now out of fear of what happened,” said Jean MacCurdy, president of Warner Bros. Animation.

But it is Adams, Warner Bros.’ archivist, who is the professional pack rat. For the last three years, he’s read every script produced at the studio and saved hundreds of objects, including the costumes from “Batman Forever” and caskets from “Interview With the Vampire.” At the same time, he’s cataloging pieces from old movies left in the costume and prop departments. His staff has entered 25,000 items into a computer database so far--and Adams suspects that they’re about half done.

Other studios also have archives, but open their holdings only to employees and researchers. Disney, which started sorting out its collection in 1970, occasionally loans items to other museums. Twentieth Century Fox started cataloging its assets four years ago but has no plans for exhibits. MGM has recently hired an archivist.

Adams hopes that other studios follow Warner Bros.’ example in bringing their treasures to the public.

“I think they’re starting to realize that they’ve created this popular culture and that the public cherishes it more than anyone realized,” he said. “It brings a reality to movies that you can’t get any other way.”

* The Warner Bros. Museum is a stop on the studio tour given every 30 minutes from 9 a.m-5 p.m. weekdays and 9 a.m.-2 p.m. Saturdays. Tickets are $29. No children under 10 are admitted. Reservations recommended. Call (818) 972-TOUR.