Hollywood Museum

The Hollywood History Museum is housed in the venerable Max Factor Building, where the wizard of movie make-up worked his magic on stars since 1935. The lobby, basically unchanged from those golden days, is a polished Art Deco gem - a white & rose-colored oasis of lavish marble, crystal chandeliers, pastel hues, antique furniture, and potted palms. On the ground floor, you’ll find many of the same displays that used to make up the old Max Factor Museum (before it closed in 1996). But now that is only the beginning. The new museum is considerably larger than it might appear at first glance. It features four floors of exhibits (two floors above the lobby and a basement below), offering a good 38,000 square feet of exhibit space. To put that in perspective, it is seven times the size of the nearby Guinness World of Record Museum (5,200 square feet), almost four times the size of the neighboring Ripley’s Believe It Or Not museum (10,000 square feet), and five times larger than the Warner Bros Museum (at 7,000 square feet). Yet that still isn’t really room enough to do justice to the thousands of items on exhibit here. And the size pales by comparison to the Autry Museum’s 148,000 square feet, or the massive Petersen Automotive Museum’s 300,000.

After paying your admission at the desk in the lobby, just inside the front doors, you’ll be told to take the stairs up to the third floor and work your way down. It’s a self-guided tour, so you can spend as long as you like admiring any exhibit. Each of the floors is different. The ground floor is made up of the gorgeous Max Factor rooms and a few large-scale exhibits from recent science-fiction films. The second floor is devoted almost exclusively to costumes by the stars in famous films. The third floor is a hodgepodge of Hollywood memorabilia, ranging from the earliest Technicolor film ever shot, to a Roman bed from "Gladiator".