History Goes Hollywood

By Nathan Thornburgh / Mount Vernon

Historical-museum curators can be a contentious bunch--get between two of them debating whether the Smithsonian exhibit of First Ladies' ball gowns is real history, and you may want to John Wilkes Booth one or both of them. But nearly all curators will agree that they are battling a common enemy: public indifference. If you're in the history business, you're competing for shrinking wallets and tighter leisure time. Schools teach less history, so kids have less of an idea about what happened at your venue or why it matters. And those same kids have perhaps more veto power over vacation plans and weekend outings than ever before. Worse yet, there's probably a theme park right down the road with the same dark thoughts about its survival but with 10 times your advertising budget. Even your local multiplex is feeling a little sorry for itself, but it has millions of dollars worth of fresh Hollywood product cycling in every few weeks. "Theme parks and movies are leaving museums scrambling to keep up," says Lin Ezell, director of the National Museum of the Marine Corps. "Passive exhibits just aren't going to attract young people today."

There is a cure, but it can be controversial. The basic philosophy: if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Become one of the increasing number of museums and historical sites that are redesigning their collections with high-tech interfaces, action-packed short films and theme-park aesthetics. The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum opened in Springfield, Ill., last year with a talking Honest Abe hologram and a host of other educational parlor tricks. The Marine Corps museum, opening in Quantico, Va., near Washington in November, will use changes in temperature and humidity to immerse its visitors--and, it hopes, drum up recruits--in harrowing and heroic battlescapes ranging from the icy mountains of Korea to the sweltering jungles of Vietnam. Colonial Williamsburg is looking at supplementing the costumed re-creations that made it an early pioneer in that approach with Palm Pilots that visitors can point at various landmarks to get video presentations.

Venerable Mount Vernon, Va., home of the nation's first President, will next month offer its own blend of entertainment and education. Workers and curators are putting the finishing touches on a $60 million, 66,700-sq.-ft. museum and visitors center. When they open, on Oct. 27, half the museum will have traditional displays: maps, artifacts, Martha's jewelry. The other side, however, will offer a heavy dose of showmanship. A scrolling cartoon of Washington's life will be projected on one wall. A theater will show an action flick about Washington at war. The audience's seats will rumble when the cannons go off, and visitors will be dusted with simulated snow when Washington crosses the Delaware River. There will be a handful of authentic items, but the educational center is also meant to be easily absorbed. Says Eric Getz, one of its designers: "If you go through on roller skates, you're still going to get it."

Enough curators want to give their museums similar makeovers that a whole industry has sprung up to cater to them. BRC Imagination Arts in Burbank, Calif., a leader in the field, was started 25 years ago by Bob Rogers, who defected from Disney to connect history geeks with writer geeks and technology geeks in search of a new type of museum experience. Its sprawling office has not only the requisite computer workstations for designers and artists but also chill-out couches for creative types who figure out how to make history hip, particularly for kids. Index cards on a whiteboard left over from one such brainstorming session hint at their guesses about what makes teens tick. One card reads SEX. On another card, MUST BE "COOL" seems a bit predictable, but a third offers the more elemental formula PEE + POOP.

BRC was the creative force behind the massive Lincoln museum in Springfield, Ill. When it opened in the spring of 2005, some were skeptical about its Disney-like features, but the museum soon earned the grudging respect of much of the history community. Its sparkling array of videos and talking holograms--and 600,000 paying visitors in its first year--have revitalized Springfield's ailing tourist trade and made the museum the new standard for how to entertain the masses with history.

Rogers and his team narrowly lost the bid to do the Mount Vernon expansion. He wistfully recalls his idea for displaying one of the central artifacts at Mount Vernon: Washington's false teeth. He had proposed a life-size diorama of Washington sprawled semiconscious on a kitchen table, a bottle of whiskey in one hand, while a country doctor extracted all the general's teeth with a rusty arsenal of hammers, picks and pliers. "They said, 'That's terrible!'" recalls Rogers. "And I said, 'Yeah! Why not be real about it? Besides, I bet you the kids would be talking about it the next day in school.'" In the end, Boston-based Christopher Chadbourne & Associates won the Mount Vernon contract. Its teeth exhibit is more subdued: they're in a glass case surrounded by wall displays and a film showing how 18th century dentures were made.

A central part of Mount Vernon's new mission is to give its master a p.r. makeover. Longtime executive director Jim Rees conducted focus groups on George Washington and found that people knew him only from the dollar bill. The result? "They think he's stiff, too old, too formal," says Rees. "They use words like 'grumpy.'" The Washington that dominates the new exhibits, in contrast, is the redheaded 6-ft. 3-in. war hero who was, incidentally, a great dancer and a skilled horseman. A number of short films will bring other aspects of Washington to life: spymaster, Martha suitor, slaveholder. The centerpiece of this image renovation is a forensic regression of existing busts and portraits of Washington as an older man. Archaeologists, FBI technicians and advisers from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children all contributed to the effort. The end product is a set of three life-size models of Washington at ages 19, 45 and 57, which will be placed in traditional dioramas (he surveys land beneath an animatronic hoot owl in one and rides a taxidermied horse in another).

Most innovative is the first room of the exhibit, a CSI-inspired forensics lab complete with spare body parts left over from the manufacture of the Washington models, joined by a short film about how the models were made. Think of it as the ultimate museum label. Instead of a simple placard that reads something like WASHINGTON ATOP A STUFFED HORSE, the new Mount Vernon center will use its CSI room to grab visitors with a narrative backstory about the displays they see.

Money is the major obstacle keeping more museums from going the Mount Vernon route. Government funding for arts institutions has dried up, and a migration in philanthropy from historic preservation to social causes is leaving museums behind. Colonial Williamsburg was born as a historical site in 1926 with funding from John D. Rockefeller Jr. But when a modern Rockefeller equivalent, Warren Buffett, recently made his big gift, it was to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's disease hunters, not to museums.

Financial pressures can be a double-edged sword. While they keep some museums from updating, they may push others into going too far in catering to the customer, trying to boost attendance by dumbing down the history, ripping out intellectually challenging exhibits to make room for vapid video presentations. "While it's important to give the visitor what they want," says Lonnie Bunch, founding director of the planned National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, "we also have to give the visitor what they need."

Bunch is right, of course. But increasingly what visitors really need may be the same as what they want: less in-depth education and more seduction. After all, if people really wanted to dig into Washington's life, they could check out one of the fine new Washington biographies. Or they could just Google the guy. When it comes to history, Americans don't lack information; they lack the attention span to wade through the dusty collections of the old history museums. And that's where the new museums, using technology to make themselves savvier storytellers, can do their part to preserve the future of history.