Hey MoMI.

The walk from the train to the Museum of Moving Image brought me past not only one exterior film shoot on a street corner, but another significantly large production studio that was currently housing filming for CW mega hit The Beautiful Life. The building housing the museum, as of September 2009, was coated in tyvek in an extreme state of construction, numerous signs and diagrams along the way to the entrance telling me what expansive wonders were in store for the NEW Museum of the Moving Image. So not only is the museum situated within a hotspot of the very industry its collection vies to honor and promote, the aspirations for the institution to grow in magnitude and importance are also displayed as the venue endures renovations and only features a limited collection.

What I appreciated with the curation of the museum was how every stage of production was represented from the development of cameras in the hall of cameras, examples of prop design like the future building from Blade Runner, to post-production exhibits like the recreation of the baseball game control room and other steps in production like Orson Welles' lovingly written telegram communiques with a prosthetic nose maker. The telegrams were by far my favorite piece in the museum because of the way they highlighted the hard work that goes into the seemingly innocuous and unnoticed parts of a movie. Welles goes into great detail in what kind of nose from what kind of lineage for what kind of person he needed for the part and, in one message, tells the prosthetic maker to not get involved in talks with the studio in fear that the nose might be warped by their specifications. The time taken on this one minor element of the production shows the sheer magnitude of the work that goes into the moving image and how much work is necessary to get the audience to find it believable.

WORK BEGINS