Film museum finally in the works in Los Angeles

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which mounts the Oscars annually, has announced a joint arrangement with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to open the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures to showcase the history and craft of film. Located in a 1939 art deco building that was the former May Company department store, now owned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Academy will use the space to bring a long-discussed museum of cinema to the area called Museum Row, next to LACMA. The alliance was announced October 4 in a joint statement between the institutions describing the plans for the new museum, which could open in three to five years, offering film fans a cultural resource appropriate to Los Angeles, home to all major film studios. The 300,000 square feet of space will be dedicated to showing the influence and impact of films. It will house permanent and rotating exhibitions, an archive, a library and collections, such as 42,000 movie posters and 10 million film photographs, for an entertaining and interactive experience. Plans to create a movie museum have been considered since the mid-1960s, and this arrangement brings the idea into reality. Prior to the recession, a grand center in Hollywood was designed by French architect Christian de Portzamparc, a winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. Both the Academy and the museum will assist with developing plans for the design, fundraising, and modifications to the existing site. The Academy Museum will be run autonomously but benefit from LACMA's expertise of running the largest encyclopedic art museum in the Western US. Currently the LA County Museum of Art is showing the exhibition of art by film director Tim Burton, and an exhibition featuring the work of Stanley Kubrick is planned for next year.