During her introductory remarks at the opening of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art on Saturday night, Mellody Hobson said her husband, famed “Star Wars” director George Lucas, was nervous about the evening’s turnout.
“This room is filled with our friends,” Hobson said. “Looking out at your faces, you have no idea how much you mean to us, how much you mean to us in every way. George kept saying, ‘Will this person come? Do you think that person will come?’ I said, ‘They will all come, George.’”
And come they did.
The powerhouse crowd was a melting pot of Hollywood, politics and business. The bold-faced names included Oprah Winfrey, Leonardo DiCaprio, Harrison Ford, Michael B. Jordan, Samuel L. Jackson, Spike Lee, Kim Kardashian, Cynthia Erivo, Christoper Nolan. Guillermo Del Toro, Peter Jackson, Denis Villeneuve, Edgar Wright, George R. R. Martin, Nicolas Cage, Doja Cat, Al Pacino, Francis Ford Coppola, Jon M. Chu, Vin Diesel, Gayle King, Katy Perry, Justin Trudeau, Keke Palmer, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Kathleen Kennedy, Frank Marshall, Michael Bloomberg, Bob Iger, Dana Walden, Janelle Monae, Lee Daniels, Ariana Huffington, Tracee Ellis Ross, Zac Posen, Jon Batiste, Diane Warren, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, among many others.
Lucas said he wanted to create a cultural institution that honors illustrators. “When we started this museum, we would sort of tag it as a ‘temple to illustrators,’” he said.
He continued, “I’ve worked with hundreds of illustrators, and I will tell you that they are as talented as any artist I have ever met. This is a way of giving back to them something they’ve all wanted…The illustrators inevitably say the same thing, from R. Crumb to [Norman] Rockwell, they all say the same, ‘I wish I could be in a museum.’”
While Winfrey, Erivo, Kardashian and Rodriguez strolled through the galleries, most of the heavy hitters made their way to the fifth-floor Skywalker Grill restaurant. DiCaprio enjoyed sushi in a banquette with Al Pacino, Andrew Watt and David Furnish. Nolan bent over to say hello to a seated Coppola. Ron Howard and his daughter Bryce Dallas Howard took photos with Kardashian and her boyfriend, car racing champion Lewis Hamilton.
Building the $1.5 billion museum, which was entirely funded by Lucas and Hobson, came with plenty of headaches. In the 20 years since Lucas first proposed the idea, the museum was close to being located in San Francisco and then Chicago. Located in L.A.’s Exposition Park, the Lucas Museum features 1,200 works from Lucas’s 30,000-piece private art collection. Designed by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects, the five-story building, which is frequently described as a “spaceship,” is 300,000 square feet, with 100,000 dedicated to 35 galleries, and sits among a 13-acre campus.
“If your husband or spouse comes home and says they want to build a museum, I suggest your response is a hard no,” Hobson cracked.
She addressed critics who turn their noses up at illustrators. “If critics say a museum of narrative art is too much like a popcorn movie and not enough like an art film, well, we like popcorn movies in our family,” Hobson said to applause. “In fact, we love them.”
The opening night co-chairs included Julie Bell, Guillermo del Toro, Greta Gerwig, Sir Lewis Hamilton, JR, Steven Spielberg and Pharrell Williams. They all stood on stage as Queen Latifah emceed the opening remarks.
“I’m not pinching myself because I felt all the energy and pain of birthing it with George,” Hobson told me on the arrivals red carpet. “I still have a feeling of disbelief. How do we have a museum? It doesn’t quite make sense. Who thinks they’re ever going to say, ‘Come to my museum?’ And you especially don’t do that if you’re me and you’re the youngest of six kids of a single mom in Chicago. That in and of itself is a story. And those are the kinds of stories that are reflected on the walls of the museum.”
As the well-heeled crowd gathered in the lobby for the evening’s introduction, Latifah played cheerleader. “Paris has the Louvre, New York has the Met, and now L.A. has its artistic equal – the Lucas,” she said to cheers and applause.
And with that comes inspiration. Erivo zeroed in on “The Huntress (Lenda),” Julie Bell’s 1996 oil painting of eight-time Ms. Olympia winner Lenda Murray depicted as the Roman goddess of the hunt, Diana. Snapping a photo of the fantasy portrait, Erivo smiled, “We have to make a TV series about her.”
The evening’s program included a drone show narrated by Winfrey and Jackson and a performance by the Black Eyed Peas.
The museum opens to the public on Sept. 22.
