It's Monster Movie Madness At The Los Angeles Museum Of Art!

Written By: Ken Hulsey

Sources: LA Times / LA County Museum of Art

The Los Angeles Museum is going crazy for monster movies in July with an exhibit of artwork by macabre movie master Tim Burton plus a series of monster movie screenings suggested by the film maker.

The first in the series of movie screenings is this Saturday (July 2nd) and features "The 7th Voyage of Sinbad"!

Here is the info:

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art presents a major retrospective exploring the full range of Tim Burton's creative work, both as a film director and as an artist, illustrator, photographer, and writer.

Tim Burton was born in Burbank in 1958. After studying at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), he worked as an animator at the Walt Disney Studios before breaking out on his own. Taking inspiration from popular culture, fairy tales and traditions of the gothic, Burton has reinvented Hollywood genre filmmaking as an expression of a personal vision.

The exhibition brings together over 700 drawings, paintings, photographs, moving-image works, storyboards, puppets, concept artworks, maquettes, costumes, and cinematic ephemera, including art from a number of unrealized and little-known personal projects. Many of these objects come from the artist's own archive, as well as from studio archives and private collections of Burton's collaborators. Hundreds of never-before-exhibited artworks and sketches will be joined by a selection of film posters accompanied by music composed for the exhibition by Burton's longtime collaborator Danny Elfman.

Two large-scale outdoor artworks are also installed on campus: a topiary inspired by Edward Scissorhands (1990), and Balloon Boy, an enormous figure based on an amalgamation of characters that Burton first introduced in his 1997 book The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories.

This exhibition was organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York.The Los Angeles presentation was made possible in part by LACMA’s Wallis Annenberg Director’s Endowment Fund.

And on the monster movie series:

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad
July 2, 2011 | 2:00pm

“The 7th Voyage of Sinbad” (1958): Directed by Nathan Juran, the film was the first of three “Sinbad” movies Columbia produced that special effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen designed and animated with the dazzling stop-motion technique he called Dynamation. It took Harryhausen 11 months to complete the painstaking work on the film, which features creatures including a cyclops and a cobra-woman; Sinbad (Kerwin Matthews) even has a sword battle with a skeleton. The late Bernard Herrmann, who is the subject of several centenary celebrations this year, penned the score. Three years ago, “Sinbad” was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.

Fantastic Voyage
July 9, 2011 | 2:00pm

“Fantastic Voyage” (1966) Directed by Richard Fleischer, this thriller finds a group of doctors, assistants and a CIA agent miniaturized and injected into the body of a scientist who escaped from the Soviet Union. (The scientist is comatose after an assassination attempt and this experimental effort is believed to be the only way to save him.) Stephen Boyd, Edmond O’Brien, Donald Pleasance and Raquel Welch, in her first major film role, star. The movie won Oscars for art direction (color) and for its then-cutting-edge special effects.

The Thing
July 16, 2011 | 2:00pm

“The Thing From Another World” (1951) Produced by Howard Hawks and directed by Christian Nyby (though for years it has been contended that Hawks actually directed the classic), “The Thing From Another World” is set at a base in the North Pole where six scientists find evidence of a crash by an unknown flying object. A U.S. Air Force re-supply crew is sent to the base where a frozen, tall alien creature (played by a young James Arness) is discovered. Margaret Sheridan, Kenneth Tobey and Dewey Martin are among the stars. Time magazine named the movie, which was remade in 1982 by John Carpenter, as the greatest sci-fi film produced in the 1950s

Journey to the Center of the Earth
July 23, 2011 | 2:00pm

“Journey to the Center of the Earth” (1959) James Mason, Pat Boone, Diane Baker and Arlene Dahl headline this film, based on the novel by Jules Verne. The sci-fi fantasy revolves a professor in Edinburgh who leads an expedition to the center of the earth after he receives an unusual rock from one of his students. Bernard Herrmann also penned the score for the film, which earned three Oscar nominations, for art decoration-set decoration, effects and sound

The Incredible Shrinking Man
July 30, 2011 | 2:00pm

“The Incredible Shrinking Man” (1957) The great sci-fi writer Richard Matheson penned the film, which is based on his novel; Jack Arnold, who helmed the 1954 3-D hit “Creature From the Black Lagoon,” directed. Grant Williams stars in the title role, playing a businessman who is hit by a radioactive cloud while sailing with his wife. Six months later, he begins to shrink due to the radiation and pesticides. A hit with both critics and audiences, the film won the 1958 Hugo Award for the year’s best science fiction or fantasy dramatic presentation

Jason and the Argonauts
August 6, 2011 | 2:00pm

“Jason and the Argonauts” (1963) Ray Harryhausen considers this to be his best film, and it does feature his memorable stop-motion sequence in which Jason (Todd Armstrong) and two of his men battle an army of skeletons. The sequence took Harryhausen nearly five months to complete. Bernard Herrmann also penned the evocative score

Mothra
August 13, 2011 | 2:00pm

“Mothra” (1961) The female creature first appeared in the serialized novel “The Luminous Fairies and Mothra” before she made her film debut in this Japanese feature. A giant lepidopteron with butterfly-moth characteristics, Mothra has been an ally with Godzilla but often the two square off in combat — with Mothra winning most of the bouts. When the film was released in the U.S. in 1962, it ran on a double bill with “The Three Stooges in Orbit.”

This Island Earth
August 20, 2011 | 2:00pm

“This Island Earth” (1955) Shot in Technicolor and featuring innovative special effects for its time, the film, directed by Joseph M. Newman, stars Jeff Morrow as the intellectual alien Exeter who recruits Rex Reason as scientist Cal Meacham and Faith Domergue as Dr. Ruth Adams for a “special” research project.

Horror of Dracula
August 27, 2011 | 2:00pm

“Horror of Dracula” (1958) The first — and arguably the best — in a long line of Dracula films from Hammer, the film cast towering Christopher Lee as the vampire count and Peter Cushing as his nemesis Van Helsing. It was released in the UK as “Dracula” but was renamed for the U.S. so as not to be confused with Tod Browning‘s 1931 Universal classic starring Bela Lugosi.

The exhibit of Tim Burton artwork runs from May 29th through October 31st!

For more info please visit - http://www.lacma.org/series/saturday-monster-matinees