Max Factor Hollywood Museum: A Hollywood Icon Actually Worth Your Time
If you spend any time in Hollywood, you'll notice the parking situation is designed to financially ruin you before you've seen a single thing. Flat-fee lots around the tourist corridor run $30 to $40, which is a perfectly reasonable price if you're a Rockefeller (timely reference). On the Saturday I visited the Max Factor Hollywood Museum, in a Christmas in April miracle, Waze showed me a $10 option I hadn't even searched for: the parking lot at Hollywood High School, cash only, almost directly across the street! I doubt that lot operates on school days, but on a weekend it felt like the city had made a clerical error in my favor!
The museum is inside the original Max Factor building on Hollywood Boulevard, and the Art Deco facade is worth a few minutes of sidewalk appreciation before you go in. Admission is $15. By the time I left, I considered it money well spent, which is not something I say about most experiences in Hollywood.
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The first floor is probably the one you came for.
The building's first floor original room layout is mostly intact, and it gives the floor a strange intimacy. You're walking through spaces where Lucille Ball, Marilyn Monroe, and a few dozen other names that defined 20th-century glamour actually sat in chairs and had their faces done. The rooms are organized by hair color: redheads, blondes, brunettes. Display cases hold personal items from people like Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo: jewelry, makeup cases, the kind of objects that would be sitting in a landfill somewhere if someone hadn't thought to rescue them.
Then there are the clothes. The museum holds an extensive collection of actual worn garments, and I wasn't entirely prepared for the experience. Standing in front of a dress Marilyn Monroe wore, the first thing you notice is that it's beautiful. The second thing you notice is that it's the size of something you'd find in the children's department. She wore about a size 2 by today's standards. The woman whose image was essentially synonymous with voluptuous curves was, in real life, extremely small.
Floors two and three feature large gallery rooms with cases holding costumes and props spanning the full sweep of Hollywood history. Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart's screen-worn clothing from Casablanca sits a few feet from the 1970s Wonder Woman costume and Adam West's Batman suit, which is even more unsettling in person than on television.
One personal highlight: the outfits worn by Tony and Carmela Soprano. Standing next to James Gandolfini's suit, you understand immediately that Tony would have been pretty imposing in person. The man was enormous.
The fourth floor is the basement, and it is the horror wing. I went in only because my daughter was with me, and my strategy was to grip her arm for the entire visit, which had the added benefit of preventing her from jump-scaring me.
The corridor is set up like Hannibal Lecter's prison cell area from Silence of the Lambs, which is a design choice that commits fully to its premise. The anticipation was worse than the reality, though I would not describe the reality as relaxing.
Walking through all of it, I kept returning to the same thought. There's something genuinely melancholy about a museum whose entire emotional payload depends on recognition. I'm an older Gen X person who grew up watching 1950s TV reruns on whatever local channels had cheap airtime to fill, so I recognized roughly 90% of what was on display. My daughter, who has been aggressively educated in Hollywood history by me (a person with, let's say, enthusiasms), probably clocked closer to 60%. Someone her age raised by normal parents might walk through and recognize almost nothing.
The Lucille Ball room had a framed list of every television show produced by Desilu Productions. The list is long and covers not just I Love Lucy but Star Trek, Mission: Impossible, and more. For me, that list was full of shows I'd encountered as a kid on those same cheap local channels. For a lot of visitors today, those titles are just words on a wall.
That's not a complaint about the museum. It's more of an observation about time, which keeps moving whether or not anyone finds that convenient. Joan Crawford's false eyelashes are in a case, and I'm glad they are. It would be a shame if someone had just thrown them away. Eventually the number of people who understand why that matters will get smaller. Right now I'm one of them, and if you're reading this, you probably are too.
The logistics: $15 admission, self-guided, plan on two to three hours if you're actually reading all of the labels. Bring cash for the Hollywood High parking lot. The building is on Hollywood Boulevard and not difficult to find, which puts it ahead of several other things I've tried to locate in Los Angeles.
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