History Goes Hollywood

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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).

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