
Installation view of Tim Burton exhibition entrance with Monster Mouth
If I were to begin with a formal history of the Museum’s eighty or so gallery exhibitions on filmmakers, film studios, and international filmmaking since 1939, this might make for a dull start to our Burton blogs. Instead, here’s my personal story of how MoMA’s Tim Burton began.
In fact I can tell you the precise moment when the idea popped into my head. It happened on July 31, 2005 (my birthday by the way), at an 11:00 a.m. screening of Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at the Kaufman Astoria Stadium 14 Cinema in Queens, NY. Today, now that all of the single-screen neighborhood movie theaters I spent my childhood in are gone, my favorite place and time to go to a movie is a large multiplex at the earliest morning screening when the melancholy of the deserted, over-sized spaces somehow speaks to my feelings of nostalgia for past movie-going experiences.