Sharks, Sirens, and Other Hollywood Icons

 

I’m lucky indeed to live in a place where movies are part of the landscape. And I’m doubly lucky because I’m a member of the Motion Picture Academy’s new museum, which takes pride in investigating the culture of movies from every angle. Since its opening in 2021, I’ve been to the Academy Museum multiple times, exploring movies in terms of their artistry, their technological mastery, and their impact upon world culture.

 The Academy Museum hardly ignores the motion pictures that represent foreign lands. I remember an exhibit vividly showing off key clips from the audacious Spanish writer/director Pedro Almodóvar. Currently, there’s a lovely tribute to Hayao Miyazaki’s charming animated Ponyo, as well as an in-depth look at the career of Korean auteur Bong Joon Ho, the brilliant satirist behind Okja and the Oscar-winning Parasite.   

 Still, the museum is fundamentally in and of Hollywood, and so you can rightly expect that many exhibits will focus on the men and women of the Hollywood studio system. (A newish permanent exhibit highlights the building of studio lots in the still-wide-open Southern California landscape, as well as the background of the men—several of them immigrants—who arrived in town with a gleam in their eyes and began to create an industry.) And some of the museum’s most lavish exhibits delve into the making of Hollywood’s greatest hits as well as the careers of Hollywood’s most indelible stars.

 Set to close soon is an appropriately massive  exhibit on the making and marketing of Jaws. (No surprise that this blockbuster is given star treatment, given that its director—Steven Spielberg—has been a generous supporter of the museum since its inception. And the surviving 25-foot fiberglass model of the film’s arch-villain, Bruce the Shark, permanently hangs over the museum’s escalator to give visitors a quick thrill.)  It was fascinating to discover how the timely improvisation of the three central actors helped bring to life Peter Benchley’s novel, but I equally enjoyed my glimpses of the film’s global marketing campaign. It featured  Jaws foreign language posters (the one from Japan, riffing on a hugely famous Hokusai woodblock print, is particularly clever) as well as zany collectors’ items like a shark-shaped souvenir cup with a straw that looks like a hapless swimmer.

 Though Jaws is going bye-bye, there’s a new and extensive salute to Marilyn Monroe, Hollywood Icon. For those who associate Monroe solely with her sexy role in Some Like It Hot or with the gossip surrounding her connection with President John F. Kennedy, it’s refreshing to focus in on other aspects of her talents. Though she certainly nourished her siren image, the off-screen Monroe was a serious reader who worked hard to polish her dramatic skills. The exhibit includes, along with some fabulous spangled gowns, the casual streetwear she preferred when she was not in front of the cameras. By happenstance, I’d just re-watched The Seven Year Itch, the (slightly toned-down) film version of a naughty Broadway hit about a middle-aged husband—home alone for the summer—who fantasizes abut the sexy young woman living upstairs. Tom Ewell, a terrifically average-looking comic actor, was the male lead on both stage and screen. In the film version, the dream girl was played by Monroe, as a charming though slightly dizzy blonde languishing in the heat of her top-floor digs. This is the film in which her flouncy white dress billows up when she stands over a subway grate. But the museum also displays the modest pink pjs she wears when invited downstairs for a nightcap, thus crushing Ewell’s erotic expectations.

 

Japanese "woodblock" ad for "Jaws"

Marilyn's PJs in "The Seven Year Itch"