Los Angeles County Hollywood Museum
First announced in 1959, the Motion Picture and Television Museum was scheduled for construction on a two-acre, county-owned site near the Hollywood Bowl, after rejecting several alternate locations.
With a starting cost of around $4M, the long-planned facility, led by a group headed by producer Sol Lesser, enlisted architect William L. Pereira. The architects first presented their plans to the Commission at the home of Mervyn LeRoy. It comprised five buildings, connected by walkways and glass-covered corridors, and landscaped gardens.
The plans assumed the museum would be financed by revenues, with no cost to taxpayers. The hope was to attract about 30 percent of visitors to Southern California, with estimates of producing roughly $1.5M in revenue. Initial reports said the museum would pay for itself within 30 years.
Cecilia deMille Harper and Sol Lesser, May 1960.
The structures would include a 500-seat theatre, a sound stage for tourists, galleries, a museum, classrooms, and a restaurant.
The Hollywood Museum Commission, led by independent movie producer Sol Lesser, announced in mid-1960 that the museum was a reality. The year concluded with an enviable donation of artifacts from the heirs of the late Cecil B. DeMille.
However, the path had to go through the legislature (as well as the approval of area residents). In late 1960, the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors submitted the proposal to state law to Sacramento for "Authorization for the operation of the proposed Hollywood Motion Picture and Television Museum."
In August 1961, additional details revealed the location: a three-level structure on a parcel of land on the east side of Highland Avenue, south of Odin Street, and extending toward Las Palmas Avenue. Over time, newspapers referenced a "four-level" structure and provided an exact address: 2142 North Highland Avenue.
Because the Museum hopes to — and for economic reasons, must attract millions of tourists each year, the gallery displays inevitably will have their Disneyland aspects. Ben-Hur's chariot, already in the collection, will be conveniently parked so that visitors can have themselves photographed at the reins to show the folks back home. - Curator's Choice, Arthur Knight / Film Quarterly, vol. 15, no. 3, 1962, pp. 35–39
Progressive Architecture, 1961During this period, curator and film critic Arthur Knight was officially tasked with preserving rare film. Several of filmland's finest had donated memorabilia, including Mary Pickford, King Vidor, and David O'Selznick. More about Mary Pickford later on.
Sol Lesser and Eric JohnstonThe project continued moving forward with the official unveiling of a detailed model, shown at a three-day convention at the Disneyland Hotel in September 1961. On hand were Ralph Edwards and Maureen O'Hara.
Careful With That Axe, Eugene… Members of the Museum Commision; Billy Vaughn, Mrs. Sybill Brand, Mrs. Olin Wellborn III,
Angela Greene, Carolyn Jones, Bonia Granville and Sol Lesser. June 13, 1962.
Harold Lloyd, Shirley Jones and Joel McCrea. The chain of title to the land site was delivered to the County. October 15, 1962.With the groundbreaking now scheduled for June 1962, the museum's next hurdle came when Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors member Kenneth Hahn threatened to withhold funds unless the movie industry cleaned up its act on "blue" films. Despite the preposterous snag, the project inched ahead, with the county supervisors' approval.
Several lots were purchased near the site, including an option to buy the 1953 Kadorf Apartments, a 16-unit complex at 2060 North Highland Avenue, owned by Rose Nierdorf. Plans also called for demolishing the famed Crane plumbing mansion, which was brought down in August 1962.
A Cast of Thousands
Finally, in 1963, ground was broken. Billed as "the most important group ever to assemble in entertainment history for any single event," the police estimated the crowd at 7,000, well short of the expected 20,000 to 50,000.
Nevertheless, the star-studded ceremony was attended, among others, by the Museum's Sol Lesser, Supervisor Ernest Debs, Gloria Swanson, and the mistress of ceremonies, Rosalind Russell. Richard Powell Jr., the 11-year-old son of the late actor Dick Powell, did the honors with a trusty spade.
The 30 page booklet included designs by local illustrator, Barbara Begg.
Available to view; the Hollywood Museum Ground Breaking Program, 1963.
Available to view; the Hollywood Museum Program Papers, 1963.
Watchdog Committee
But in early 1964, financier Bart Lytton expressed doubts about the project (which had risen to about $6.5M) and called for a watchdog committee. The Board of Supervisors denied his request and moved forward with leases and approval of other expenses.
However, the Hollywood Museum Commission was soon disbanded in favor of three nonprofit corporations led by Lytton. In December 1964, Kenneth Hahn said, "I don't think we should spend another dime on the museum."
The Battle of Alta Loma
With a spiraling budget putting the cost closer to a whopping $14M, the Museum project resembled a white elephant. Additional troubles were down the road. During the process of acquiring property under an eminent domain ordinance (filed in 1962), one homeowner staunchly refused to give up his condemned lot.
Situated on Alta Loma Terrace was the former residence of Gordon Pollock. By the mid-1960s, the Episcopal Home for the Aged owned the 1923 property. Actor, bartender, and family man Steven Anthony (real name Ernest Vnuk) vigorously defended his right to remain, arguing the proposed museum was a "private" venture and unconstitutional.
Fortress Falls
In February 1964, after defying an earlier court order to vacate, a standoff ensued between the deputy sheriffs and Anthony, now with a shotgun and a small child in hand. Hoping to defuse the situation, museum administrators offered the embattled father of three a year of free rent on any home he wished to lease, but he rejected the offer.
We might have bloodshed. Let's all remember we are just building a motion picture museum. This isn’t a freeway, an overcrowded jail or a hospital. Let us re-evaluate his case.- Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, 02/13/1964.
Although Anthony managed to ward off imminent bulldozing with appeals, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Anthony's final petition and refused to intervene.
Not holding back his elation, Supervisor Ernest E. Debs told reporters, "This should remove the last stumbling block to getting work underway." And indeed, work did get underway in April 1964, when a county wrecking crew, working under the protection of scores of deputy sheriffs, demolished "Ft. Anthony" with bulldozers and a clam bucket.
The wrecking was widely condemned. Locals argued it was a misuse of public funds, and bomb threats were made on the Arcadia residence of Sheriff Peter J. Pitchess.
And despite the Museum's overreaching efforts to claim its last obstacle, the project faltered, plagued by dwindling public support and financial problems (the cost ballooned to a reported $21M).
Dead Dodo
Spearheaded by Kenneth Hahn, who felt the city had squandered money, the city renewed its efforts to have the museum open its books to the public and to seek a $5M guarantee from sectors of the entertainment industry.
After coughing up just over $1M on startup costs, the Board of Supervisors and a three-member panel headed by financier Bart Lytton cut funding to what was dubbed "an unfeasible Taj Mahal".
Even revered architect William L. Pereira drew flak; the Los Angeles Times reported that Bart Lytton's oversight committee, while praising Pereira's "magnificent" and "dynamic" concept, found the designs economically unfeasible for a self-supporting institution.
The anxious group feared the current building would not accommodate enough people, speculating that the museum would need to operate at between $4M and $6M annually. At a $1 admission fee, the museum would need between 4 and 6 million visitors per year.
Preserving Pickford
The conversation about loaning Hollywood artifacts gained steam in 1965. In a letter to the Los Angeles Times that year, John Anson Ford, one-time County Supervisor, noted that along with Mary Pickford's interest in housing her rich collection, Cecil B. DeMille was ready to donate the camera he used to film The Squaw Man, along with a treasure trove of items, including scripts and handwritten notes.
The Museum's éminence grise, Sol Lesser, told Film Daily he was "in receipt of $25,000 from Musée Français to be used in reproducing the Mary Pickford collection, as previously restored by Hollywood Museum…"
More recently, the Pickford materials were referenced in 2003 by author Christel Schmidt: "In 1965, [Matty] Kemp and Mary Pickford convinced the Hollywood Museum to start 35mm preservation of the actress's nitrate films, even though the new structure had not been built. Entire nitrate titles and large sections of others were already decomposed, including Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley, and Daddy-Long-Legs"
"Desperate to restore missing footage, Kemp borrowed GEH's (George Eastman House) 16mm prints to make blowups of lost scenes. Two years later, Kemp approached George Stevens Jr. and Richard Kahlenberg at the AFI (American Film Institute)."
SCHMIDT, C. (2003). PRESERVING PICKFORD: The Mary Pickford Collection and the Library of Congress. The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, 3(1), 59–81. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41167104
The proposed site of the former home at Alta Loma Terrace and Fairfield Avenue became nothing more than a parking lot—graded and blacktopped in mid-1965 —creating 90 temporary parking spaces for the Hollywood Bowl. After former top staff left, Lesser followed suit and resigned from the Museum project, citing health reasons.
For Sol Lesser, who died in 1980, it was his last public project. His son, Julian, told the Los Angeles Times in 1996, "It broke his heart. He spent years on it. It was just a problem of government getting in something that private industry was more adept at."
And yet the comatose project continued to loiter. Two years after being abandoned, grandiose plans were announced to construct Mt. Hollywood – a massive complex built atop Griffith Park. Proposed by architect Charles Luckman, the commercial complex was meant to be a year-round source of revenue.
Plans included a walkway with 360-degree views, a revolving restaurant, a mall, and a Hollywood Hall of Fame that later evolved into the stalled museum. The brazen concept also included an aerial tramway down to the Los Angeles World Zoo.
The Griffith Park project was met with strong disapproval and ultimately shelved.
Gone to the Dogs
Yet in 1970, the Department of Recreation and Parks announced a plan to revive the defunct Hollywood Museum in West Hollywood. For roughly $1M, the attraction — under the new moniker Hollywood Center for Audio Visual Arts — would be developed on the site of the William S. Hart property on De Longpre Avenue, donated to the city in 1944.
Plans involved demolishing Hart's first Los Angeles residence — a two-story house leased by the Actors Studio since the 1960s.
Behind Bars
Over several years, the dusty artifacts—valued between $1M and $2M—moved around various locations. In 1967, the Board of Recreation and Parks inherited the lot from the nonprofit group Hollywood Museum Corporation and agreed to store and maintain the property.
The Parkview Photography Center, founded by Clarence Inman in 1961, managed the task of sorting and cataloging the mass of movie material for the planned museum.
A dozen curators managed the year-long project, which included almost 2000 reels of film dating back to 1915, antique projectors, props, and costumes.
A number of items were displayed at their facility, while the remaining items languished elsewhere, including, the Central Service Yard in Griffith Park and a warehouse near County Hospital.
However, the roughly 200,000 dusty goods found more suitable digs on the second floor of the former Lincoln Heights Jail.
Presiding over the "drunk tank" was custodian Walt Daugherty (1916-2007). The affable curator had an interesting resume: the son of silent movie actor Two-Gun Montana Williams, Daugherty was a 1946 tango champ, bred championship parakeets, and appeared in Key Largo as "five corpses."
Aftermath
Long after the dust settled on the Hollywood Museum, former Supervisor Eugene Debs said the media overplayed the Anthony affair but conceded museum organizers and the industry shot it in the foot. Debs concluded, "The museum we envisioned, there just wasn't the public support for it."
As for Steven Anthony, the beleaguered bartender who was charged with battery and resisting arrest during his deceptive eviction, he unsuccessfully sued the county in 1968 for $2M in damages. During sentencing, to determine where he would serve his sentence, Judge Byron Walters unduly called Anthony "an anarchist, rabble-rouser, and publicity seeker."
The Anthony family moved to Tuolumne County, Northern California, in 1971, where they lived until Steven Anthony passed away in 1996.
After attempts by a number of Hollywood dignitaries, including the unsinkable Debbie Reynolds, successive efforts to create a permanent Hollywood museum resurfaced in 1982. The old Lasky-DeMille Barn was saved and moved from Paramount Studios to the Fairfield parking lot… by the Hollywood Bowl.
