Moving House-- in a Big Way

Laura Ziskin, producer of tonight’s telecast of the 74th Academy Awards, has an Oscar in her office. Not one of the gold statuettes to be handed out for best whatever and best supporting whatever, at this evening’s ceremony--but one of the 71/2-foot, gold-painted Oscar statues that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences deploys around town at special events throughout Oscar season.

This Oscar, tucked in a corner at Laura Ziskin Productions on the Sony Studios lot in Culver City, has been dressed up in a curly black wig, lilac-tinted sunglasses and a furry pink boa roughly the texture of a bathroom rug. From the neck down, Oscar does the traditional full Monty.

Much like Ziskin’s Oscar statue, the Academy Awards are getting a new look this year. Not only does the telecast have in Ziskin a new producer, but the show will be presented for the first time in its new location: Hollywood’s Kodak Theatre.

The venue, which opened its doors to the public in November, is the centerpiece of the new $615-million, 640,000-square-foot shopping, business and entertainment complex at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue. It’s just down the street from the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, where the first Oscar ceremony took place in 1929. The Oscars have not taken place in a Hollywood location since 1960, when the awards were presented at the Pantages Theatre.

After 73 years, the Academy Awards are finally getting a permanent home; the academy has agreed to lease the Kodak annually for the Oscars for the next 20 years.

The 3,500-seat Kodak Theatre, designed by architect David Rockwell, was conceived with a nod to old Hollywood glamour. So was the complex that houses it, designed by Ehrenkrantz Eckstut & Kuhn Architects. Some architecture critics, taking note of such features as the faux Babylonian portal in the complex’s central Babylon Court, flanked by two columns topped with enormous elephants, have preferred the term “kitsch.”

The outsized, retro glamour of the venue partly inspired Ziskin’s plan to create a show that makes the most of moviemaking talent--not just as nominees, but also as creative participants in producing the Oscar program. Filmmakers are either creating new footage or editing compilations, and some screenwriters have been asked to contribute written material. Costume designer Ann Roth and production designer J. Michael Riva are both movie veterans (Riva holds the sterling glamour credential of being the grandson of Marlene Dietrich).

“I’ve been to the Kodak many times; I was first taken there when it was still under construction, and it looked amazing to me,” Ziskin said in a recent conversation at her office. This year, instead of being located in the academy’s headquarters on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, the awards show production offices set up shop at Sony so Ziskin could divide her time between academy duties and post-production work on the soon-to-be-released movie “Spider-Man.” Between the two projects, she’s been sleepless at Sony. “I walk out of my door and turn left, I go into the cutting room. I turn right, go to the academy offices,” Ziskin joked.

“I loved the location and I was thrilled by the idea of being right on Hollywood Boulevard--but daunted by it,” Ziskin said. “I thought, well, we’ll get to rehearse the closing of the streets, bringing the cars in, but that’s not the case. The rehearsal is the day, there’s no dry run. There has been a tremendous amount of planning, but one feels that even with all the planning in the world, you don’t know what’s going to happen.

“Any theater has limitations, and I’m sure this one does too, but you design around it. It’s an absolutely beautiful house,” Ziskin added. “It’s very conducive to making people feel like they’re going into an old-time movie house, to create the feeling of what it is like to sit in the dark and watch a movie. I really think you cannot overstate the potency of the movie as both an artistic and cultural phenomenon. That, at the end of the day, is the thing we are saluting.”

Louis J. Horvitz, director of the telecast for the past six years, said that working in any new venue presents its own set of circumstances. “The Kodak Theatre is designed like a European opera house: The seating is less horizontal and more vertical,” he said. “The challenge will be to photograph this house with an aspect ratio that runs up and down, rather than horizontally. As our medium of film and television is more conducive to a 16-by-9 aspect ratio, the photography at the Kodak will be challenging, to say the very least.”

The director is asking the cast to hit its marks early this year. “The theater is also located in a very busy part of Hollywood.... I am strongly suggesting that people leave earlier than normal to allow for the newness of the facility, security, and the fact that they will all be featured in an opening sequence,” Horvitz said. “All in all, the new Kodak Theatre will be a tiger by the tail that I intend to ride and tame with the assistance of an army of the best professionals in the world.”

Comedy writer Bruce Vilanch, now in his 13th year as head writer for the telecast and a semi-regular celebrity guest on “Hollywood Squares,” said he expects the show to look a little different now that it has moved into a Hollywood square of its own. “There’s always a difference between when you rent and when you own,” Vilanch said. “It’s the new place, the new permanent home, so of course it’s going to become a permanent cast member of the show--that’s worth some kind of comment. We’re going to be showing off the theater a lot, shooting in different parts of the theater, so that will be different.

“Will there be ... Kodak moments? On the corporate plug level, no,” he continued. “But just the fact that it is a new place, and it’s gotten so much press because it’s where the Oscars are going to be, we’re going to show it off.”

Academy executive administrator Ric Robertson, a 20-year academy veteran responsible for the technical nuts and bolts of readying the theater, said bringing the Academy Awards to the new location posed more logistical problems than either the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion or the Shrine Auditorium, which have alternated as home to the awards show since 1988.

“It’s much more difficult, because it’s a denser, urban neighborhood,” Robertson said in a recent interview in front of the new complex, near the bleachers for 400 fans going up alongside the complex’s grand entrance, near Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and just across the street from the historic El Capitan.

For months, rumors swirled that the academy would ban the bleachers because of traffic and security concerns. The bleachers will exist, but this year, instead of camping out at the site, fans will get bleacher seats by reservation only. They’ll have to fill out applications, submit to background checks and metal detectors, and wear ID badges. Without offering details, Robertson said that security, always tight at the Oscars, will be tighter than ever at the first awards show held post-Sept. 11.

Behind Robertson is the “red carpet” area where the stars will enter; storefronts and the theater signage will be covered the day of the ceremony to avoid unintentional free advertising for the Gap, Victoria’s Secret, Tommy Hilfiger or Kodak. All businesses in the mall will be closed Oscar day. MTA subways will also bypass the Hollywood-Highland station until Monday morning. Hollywood Boulevard between Highland Avenue and Orange Drive has been closed since Tuesday, and other street closures in the area have been in effect in the past few days as well.

“At the Shrine, all this happens in a parking lot--there are no street closures, no issues with neighbors or business owners or inconveniencing a major thoroughfare,” Robertson said. “Here, we are in the middle of a major retail center too. It’s different.

“Did you see the movie ‘Vanilla Sky’? There’s a shot in it of Tom Cruise in Times Square, and it’s empty,” Robertson added. “I saw a picture of the shot, and I thought it was digital, but they actually did it, early in the morning. It’s amazing--no people. If they can do that, then we can do this.”

It’s not just a question of moving into a new home. Although the theater is a multipurpose auditorium, it was designed with the awards telecast in mind. The complex’s Art Deco Grand Ballroom, designed by the firm of Dianna Wong Architecture & Interior Design, was created with the annual Oscar after-party, the Governors Ball, in mind. This year’s party has 1,600 expected guests.

“It’s not like they built the whole structure to suit us, but we did have input,” Robertson said. “It feels like we’ve been working on this show for four years.”

It was indeed that many years ago that talks began between TrizecHahn, the Canadian developer responsible for the Hollywood & Highland project, and Bruce Davis, executive director of the academy, about creating some sort of academy presence at the new development, which is part of a master plan to revitalize the heart of Hollywood that first took shape in the early 1990s.

At first, the idea was a modest plan to include a motion picture museum in the complex. But for years, the academy has fought for rehearsal time amid other commitments at the Shrine and the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. “So Bruce [Davis] said, half-joking, ‘We’d like you to build us a theater.’ The idea began to generate steam and that’s how it began,” Robertson said.

“The idea that the theater would, if not be built for just us, make us one of the real anchor tenants, was real appealing. So we began working with their architects, designers and lawyers.”

Now seated in the high-ceilinged theater, which features three balconies and boxes along the sides, Roberston pointed proudly to the “media cockpit” in the middle of the room. “In the center of the theater [during an Oscar telecast] there is always a main camera, a TelePrompTer, often a camera on a jib and other kinds of equipment. At our other venues, that knocked out dozens of seats. Here, the cockpit is low enough so people can see over it. Hopefully, every seat will be a good seat.”

Robertson also noted that the theater, as well as its labyrinth of backstage corridors, is equipped with an overhead network of ladder-like grids for laying the cable necessary to link the theater with the TV production trucks parked next to the complex in the Orange Motor Court, ordinarily used to accommodate tour buses. The cable also serves as a link to the vehicles serving the many media outlets covering the awards. They will be parked across the street in a lot behind the El Capitan. At the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and the Shrine, all that cable was awkwardly strung in visible locations, or sometimes taped to the floor--a disaster waiting to happen, should a Manolo Blahnik heel run afoul of that cable.

Although the theater suits the needs of the academy telecast, critics have panned it for that very reason, saying the Kodak has the look and feel of a TV studio rather than a theater. The acoustics, they observe, are ready for prime time, but not much else.

The Kodak Theatre opened in November with a concert featuring the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra and popular tenor Russell Watson. Wrote Richard S. Ginell in Daily Variety, “One is reminded that the last few generations have grown up with nothing but amplified music in their ears--and this hall is made for them and only them.” Times music critic Mark Swed called the Kodak “an auditorium for a statuette with a blind eye and a tin ear.”

Robertson seems unfazed by the reviews. “I don’t know of any new theater that doesn’t need some tuning,” he said cheerfully. “You can bet that our conductor, John Williams [composer of film scores for “Star Wars” and “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” among others] is going to make sure his part of it sounds great.”

Robertson also conceded that some members of the surrounding business and residential districts did not immediately thank the academy upon learning of the traffic disruptions and business closures the ceremony would entail. The City Council suggested that academy representatives hold community meetings to defuse the tension.

“About two weeks ago, we had a meeting at the Egyptian Theatre down the street, and there was an amazing turnout--300-plus people,” Robertson said. “There were people that were still working on rumors, that we were closing down Hollywood Boulevard for two weeks, no one would be able to get through to their jobs and so on. We were able to quell some of this. It’s going to be an inconvenience for people, but the publicity that the Academy Awards is going to bring into the area is hard to overlook.

“I don’t like the idea of saying to people: ‘Can’t you see that we’re making a movie here?’ We want to coexist and try to accommodate as much as we can. But this is a big show.”

From an onstage perspective, the last couple of years of Oscar have already wrought some changes. For the 72nd awards show in 2000, first-time producers Richard D. Zanuck and Lili Fini Zanuck vowed to tighten the show by eliminating the dance numbers. Gil Cates, producer of 10 of the last 12 Academy Awards telecasts, maintained the dance ban for the 73rd installment when he returned to the job last year. Ziskin will do the same--eliminating any fear that viewers might be forced to witness what happens when “The Lord of the Rings” meets Lord of the Dance.

Ziskin has replaced dancing with flying; she has engineered the first Academy Awards show appearance of Cirque du Soleil. The Canadian acrobatic ensemble will perform a live four-minute act, the details of which remain a closely guarded secret. Debra Brown, director and choreographer of the segment, would say only that the performance is a tribute to cinema. Brown said the piece was rehearsed at a Cirque theater in Orlando, Fla., and moved in for rehearsal at the Kodak on Thursday. “We’ll have to adapt--but most of the artists are used to adapting to television galas or adapting to different stages. But this is the first time we’re doing it with so many artists.”

But, Ziskin said that in any location, the venerable Oscar telecast “defies reinvention.”

“I think what it is is a good thing,” said Ziskin, whose credits include executive producer of “As Good as It Gets” and “Pretty Woman.” She got a taste of live TV producing when she shared credit as executive producer with George Clooney and Pam Williams for the live CBS presentation of “Fail Safe” in 2000. “But like producing anything, it’s about the talent you bring to the endeavor, so I’ve chosen to pull in filmmaking talent, even though we’re producing a TV show.”

Vilanch, who will camp out in the wings with members of his writing staff to write and rewrite material for host Whoopi Goldberg and others as the show progresses, said that ultimately it’s the movies, not the venue, that dictate the character of each year’s awards show. “The movies lend themselves to so much--I mean, schizophrenia is always rewarded in Hollywood, but this year I think it’s going to be getting more awards than usual,” he said. “The movies are what dictate the material, and when you are handed the Moulin Rouge and Middle-earth and dysfunctional families, it’s pretty tasty.”

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Diane Haithman is a Times staff writer.