An Interview with Sid Cahuenga
Page 1 of 5
Many of you will recognise the name of Sid Cahuenga. His One-of-a-Kind Antiques and Curios Store at the Disney-MGM Studios has been doing stellar business for the past thirteen years. Sid has a new venture in the works, The Museum of California Crazy - featuring Cahuenga’s Kooky California, due to open in late 2004. Lindsay Cave visited him at his home in Sacramento, California.
Lindsay Cave: Good morning Sid, thank you for inviting me to your home. I’m quite fascinated about this new venture of yours, could you introduce the idea to our readers.
Sid Cahuenga: And a good morning to you, too. It is a pleasure to talk to LaughingPlace. I’m hoping that this new project will be of interest to Disney fans. I have been pursuing interests away from Hollywood history and antiquities towards another important aspect of the Californian landscape - literally in fact - the golden age of California Crazy Architecture. During the pursuit I have found many original artifacts, drawings and actual remnants of the structures themselves. The success of the store at the Studios has meant I have had more time to research and collate the materials I have found. I had initially wanted to build a simple museum to house and display the stuff, but, you know, with time comes ideas and the venture has turned out much larger than planned.
Click here for a larger version of this picture
LC: So what has the project become?
SC: Well, it still is still a museum, but we’ve thrown an attraction in so you can look at this history in two ways. The first is through traditional passive displays of photographs, drawings and and artifacts, along with more current methods of interaction, an example of which is a large scale Californian map linked to a console system which shows all the structures and designs which can come under the banner of ‘Crazy’ in the form of screen images, which when accessed, light up on the map to show their location. I can tell you we are having to make a separate map just for Los Angeles! The second way takes a new spin on this history... via a golf ball!
LC: A golf ball?
SC: Yes! A golf ball, but I'll get back to that. When we started looking at the materials I had collected, there was, it was felt, something missing in the traditional museum experience in really being able to express the wonder that these buildings would have had on the people of the time. We looked into re-creating some of the buildings and placing them into the grounds of the Museum, but we felt that didn’t emphasise the way that these structures were encountered - people were generally on the move; and it is not just coincidence that the heyday and popularity of these buildings was around the same time as the car became popular.
LC: So, you wanted to do a car journey of sorts?
SC: At first, yes. The car was paramount to the experience of these buildings, and we were even going to play on the phonetic sound of the CA in California and make it CAR-lifornia in the attraction’s name. One of the concepts that was toyed with was the idea that this would be an evening road trip taken by a family, at the father's insistence, where he could show his kids how much the modern landscape had lost its character since the days of Crazy architecture. The modern nighttime streets would slowly reveal the buildings which once stood, and the father’s narration would tell the story.
LC: Why did you move away from that?
SC: It played as too serious, and a little downbeat, more about a melancholy for what had been lost, rather than a real celebration of the buildings. We definitely wanted a sense of education in the ride, but a route to education is through entertainment, and so we started to pursue a different, slightly skewed perspective.