We have been meaning to visit the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, but have just never gotten around to it. They offer free admission from 4 to 8 pm on Fridays, and every time we set aside a Friday to go, something would come up or Brian would have to work late. Well, having Brian's parents in town gave Brian an excuse to take off early on Friday, so we decided to head on over.
The museum sits next door to Kaufman Astoria Studios, so we got to walk by it on our way. The studio was built in 1920 by the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation (an American motion picture and distribution company). There was actually a small exhibit on Kaufman Studios in the Museum. We learned that the first two Marx Brothers films were made here in 1929 and 1930. From 1942 to 1971, the studio was used by the United States Army Signal Corps to make army training videos. Over the years, it has been used for many movies such as The Wiz, Hair, Goodfellas, and Eat, Pray, Love. It's probably most famous for the TV series that film there. These include Sesame Street, Law & Order, Judge Judy, and past shows such as The Cosby Show and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. So that was kind of cool to see.
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Opened in 1988 as the American Museum of the Moving Image, it was the first museum in the U.S. to be entirely about film and television. The museum resides in a building that used to be a part of Kaufman Studios. After a renovation and expansion in the 2000's, it was reopened as The Museum of the Moving Image in 2011. Their entrance is unmistakable.
When you walk in through the doors, and past the gift shop and ticket counters on the right, you enter a lobby with very modern design. It was entirely white and appeared almost sterile against the trees outside windows occupying the room's back wall.
The one interesting thing in the lobby was this 1877 triunuial magic lantern. This is a very early form of the projector. Three painted glass slides are placed in the device, one behind each lens. The device then shines lights behind each of the lenses, projecting the image onto a wall or other flat vertical surface in front of it. By manipulating the lenses, the projectionist created "moving images." The slides were switched out and shown in a specific order to tell a story with their pictures.
From the lobby we walked up the staircase to the first exhibit floor. To the right was the exhibit about the Kaufman Studios, and to the left was a doorway that led into a series of rooms displaying all sorts of items from the movie industry. First we came to this giant wall covered with actors' photographs. It started with old time actors such as Charlie Chaplin, Mildred Harris, and Greta Garbo and moved on chronologically to the present day. We saw headshots of Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, Judy Garland, Kathrine Hepburn, Roy Rogers, Steve McQueen, Audrey Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Cary Grant to name a few.
From the wall of headshots, the exhibit moved on to display set models and designs, makeup, masks, hair styling and wigs, costumes and merchandising. This is where we turned around and found Chewbacca from Star Wars staring at us. We got especially excited when we realized that this was the actual costume head worn by Peter Mayhew in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. How cool is that? We are big fans of Star Wars, so to get to see Chewy was awesome. We learned Chewy's hair is a mix of human and yak hair.
Later in the museum on the next floor, we found Yoda! This is the anamatronic puppet from Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back. He looked a little worn, but is still in good shape for being 34 years old. It was really neat to get to see characters from movies that we've loved since childhood.
One display case held the face cast and masking materials worn by Robin Williams when he played Mrs. Doubtfire.
They had a whole section containing makeup. This was the makeup used for various actresses on The Cosby Show.
There was various wigs on display, including the one Elizabeth Taylor wore when she starred in Cleopatra and a reconstruction of the one that Elsa Lanchestor wore in The Bride of Frankenstein in the 1930's (pictured below). The same wig maker that made the original piece created the reconstruction.
Along with all the wigs, they had on display some rollers and bobby pins from 1945, and curling irons and an electrical curling iron heater from 1955. These tools were used by the studio's hairdressers and wig makers.
The next section contained various costumes and costume sketches. I wasn't familiar with very many of the movies that the costumes where from.
The costume on the left below was worn by Evan Rachel Wood while she played Veda Pierce in the 2011 TV miniseries Mildred Pierce. The costume on the right was worn by Kate Winslet as she played Mildred Pierce in the same show. I've never seen the show, but I loved these costumes.
Also on display were the costumes worn by Robin Williams in Mrs. Doubtfire and one of the sweaters Bill Cosby wore on The Cosby Show. The cowboy hat was worn by the character J.R. Ewing in Dallas.
I realy liked the sketches of the costume designs that they had on display nearby. The sketches in the left picture below of of the costumes from Mildred Pierce and the one on the right depicts a costume sketch for the character Sandy in Grease.
There was a whole section with merchandise from various movies and TV shows. They had a ton of Star Wars stuff. Brian and I laughed at the Tauntaun Teapot and the Princess Leia and Han Solo Mugs. You've got to be a die hard star wars fan to have a set of those!
There was a whole case of small Star Wars action figures -- there seemed to be a figure for every character in the Star Wars Galaxy.
Along with the action figures there were a lot of other Star Wars toys.
The museum also had plenty of Star Trek merchandise on display.
How funny are these Star Trek collector spoons?
My mom would always tell us kids stories about Lamb Chop, Charlie Horse, and Hush Puppy when we were little. She watched their show in the 60's when she was growing up. So when I saw these dolls from the 60's, I snapped a picture for her.
After we finished viewing everything on the floor, we headed up the next flight of stairs to the Chuck Jones Exhibit. This was really cool, and next to Chewy and Yoda, my favorite exhibit at the museum.
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The exhibit was wonderful and contained a ton of stuff. We got to see a lot of his artwork, including sketches of his characters, the finished backgrounds for the animations, storyboards, and animation cells. Throughout the exhibit they were playing the cartoons from the which the artwork came, and scattered above the items on display were some of his quotes. Some of the films included in the exhibit were What's Opera, Doc?, One Froggy Evening, The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics, and Duck Amuck. They were all hilarious.
We also learned that Chuck Jones followed a set of rules when he created each Coyote vs. Road Runner film. The rules are:
- The Road Runner cannot harm the Coyote except by going "meep, meep."
- No outside force can harm the Coyote -- only his own ineptitude or the failure of Acme products. Trains and trucks were the exception from time to time.
- The Coyote could stop anytime -- if he were not a fanatic.
- No dialogue ever, except "meep, meep" and yowling in pain.
- The Road Runner must stay on the road -- for no other reason than that he's a roadrunner.
- All action must be confined to the natural environment of the two characters -- the southwest American desert.
- All tools, weapons, or mechanical conveniences must be obtained from the Acme Corporation.
- Whenever possible, make gravity the Coyote's greatest enemy.
- The Coyote is always more humiliated than harmed by his failures.
- The audience's sympathy must remain with the Coyote.
- The Coyote is not allowed to catch or eat the Road Runner.
Another thing we learned was that Bugs Bunny was based on Groucho Marx -- Bugs' carrot was comparable to Marx's cigar.
I did not know that Chuck Jones directed the animated show Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, and was pleasantly surprised to see some of the artwork from the film on display. I love that show -- it is one of my favorites from childhood.
There was so much more to the exhibit, and we all had so much fun viewing it. Here is a short video about the exhibit if you want to learn more.
There was another whole section of the museum sharing the same floor as the Chuck Jones exhibit. This section had a lot of items relating to the evolution of film. We first found more magic lanterns. These were only made to hold a single glass slide.
Below them were displayed various images found painted on the slides.
In 1824, an English scientist by the name of Peter Mark Roget discovered that the human eye retains an image for a fraction of a second after it stops viewing said image. Further research by other scientists led to the discovery that when shown a series of still images that are each a bit different, the human eye will perceive motion.
Soon, many toys were created for entertainment purposes that were based upon these discoveries. A few of these devices were on display at the museum. We saw a thaumatrope (a disc with an image on either side, that when spun fast enough will join the two images together; we saw a bird in a cage), a Phenakistoscope (a flat metal disc containing slits around its edges, attached to its opposite side is a round card sporting a series of images, the side with the images is pointed at a mirror and the disc spun, when you look through the slits at the mirror you see a moving image) and a zoetrope (a cylindar with slits in its sides and a strip of slightly differing images inside; if you look through the slits as the cylinder quickly rotates you will see the image move; we saw a running man).
Photography was discovered in the 1820's, paper film in the 1840's and flexible celluiod film in 1889. A photographer by the name of Eadweard Muybridge constructed a device with multiple cameras that allowed him to take pictures in quick succession. He built a machine called the zoopraxiscope that allowed him to project these images one after another to create a moving image. Etienne-Jules Marey, a French physiologist developed a photographic gun in 1882. The device consisted of a camera combined with the mechanism of a Colt revolver, and allowed him to take quick successive pictures of the moving animals he was studying. He revised his devise over the next few years and ended up creating the first motion-picture camera.
The device in the picture below is called the mutoscope. It is basically a very large, very early version of the flip book. Inside is a series of photographs bound into a rollodex-type configuration. As you turn the machines crank and look into its veiwfinder, the machine rotates the bundle of photographs, flipping them into view one by one. The quicker you turn the crank, the quicker the photographs flip and the faster the image moves. This one contained a series of black and white photographs starring Charlie Chaplin in a short movie titled Hell's Kitchen.
The next section contained an array of motion picture cameras. They had models from the early 1920's that used film to capture one image per slide every 24 seconds, models from the 30's that used electrical signals to capture images and store them onto mechanical discs, and various other models that were developed over time up to those devices of the present day that capture images digitally. The camera has come a long way in the last 100 years.
Along with the camera display was an exhibit showcasing sound recording equipment. Back in the early days, sound would have to be recorded separately and then played back simultaneously with the projection of the images. Eventually microphone technology was discovered and incorporated into the camera so that both sounds and images were captured at once.
Once the sounds and images are recorded, the next step is editing. These editing devices were used to cut and splice the film together. The device on the far left and in the middle were used in the late 1920's, while the device on the far right is dated 1975. Just as cameras have evolved over time, the editing devices evolved as well.
So once you have capture, edited and copied the film to create a complete roll that contains the movie, you have to have a way to view it. That is where the projector comes in. They had a whole display of projectors. Pictured below is the Edison 35mm Projecting Kinetiscope developed by the Edison Manufacturing Company (Thomas Edison) in 1897. It cost $100 and was used in vaudeville houses.
This next project is called the Amet 35mm Magniscope and was released in 1896. This specific projector was owned by a traveling exhibitor named Myron Gates Wood. He traveled mostly through the southern states and would use it to project films in barns, social halls and even outdoors in fields.
Over time, the projectors evolved in order to accommodate the advances in film technology.
The projector below would play records containing the films sound at the same time it projected the movie from the film roll.
The last part of the museum that we walked through had television sets on display. This was a fun exhibit because the oldest televisions were built into radios and look a lot different than the flat screen tv's we have today. In fact, some of the older screens were not much bigger than the screen on our smartphones.
It was also a fun section to walk through, because Brian's parents remembered some of the sets on display from when they were growing up. Brian and I were laughing at some of the stuff on display. Then we stopped and realized that when we have children, they will never know what a cassette tape, walkman, VHS tape or VCR is. I remember when my parents bought their first VCR. Technology is so crazy.
After the museum we walked around the neighborhood for a little while. We stopped at a small pizza place on 30th Street between Steinway St and 31st St. It was delicious. We had a really fun time at the museum and I would recommend a visit if you have a free Friday night.
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