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Hollywood wax museum miami1/15/2024 (A much smaller, and quirkier outfit than Tussauds, Hollywood Wax declined to share its attendance numbers.) Today, the museum displays roughly 180 figures at a time, rotating them regularly most, if not all, seem to have been created freehand by in-house sculptors-which would explain the slightly inexact nature of sculptures like our aforementioned Beyoncé. Celebrating its half-century mark this year, the family-owned Hollywood Wax Museum has four locations nationwide, two of which were opened in the last 10 years. “These are fine-art sculptures, and we're creating more art as we continue to grow, and as we bring new figures into the attraction, ,” says Dalia Goldgor, the general manager of Madame Tussauds San Francisco.īut the success of the industry certainly does not hinge entirely on a painstaking, technologically advanced process. Instead of being constructed on-site at any one location, these specifications are relayed to the company’s London headquarters-like Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, but for Lady Gagas and Morgan Freemans. As measurement-taking technology like digital photography and 3-D modeling has improved, so has the artists’ ability to make more accurate celebrity likenesses. A team of Tussauds artists will meet a celebrity wherever they are (the Dalai Lama had his at an airport) and measure meticulously for two hours, taking color samples and more than 250 photos from as many angles as possible. The “celebrity sitting” is the linchpin to which the chain attributes its success as a business in the modern era. In a museum, you’ve got big signs, ‘Don't touch.’” “People can interact with the wax figures, you can stand close to them, you can take pictures, you can hug them. “Basically what we see in this room, there’s no ropes,” van der Meer says. It will open its 20th in Orlando this spring. Van der Meer, a 20-plus-year veteran artist of the wax-house world, was in town on her regular maintenance circuit around the company’s six American locations, about a third of the 19 it operates globally. (The family-owned San Francisco Wax Museum that used to occupy the same space closed its doors on its 50th anniversary in 2013 it currently leases the building to Merlin and Tussauds.) She sat on a bench in a dimly lit, well air-conditioned hall between Jennifer Aniston, who had her back to us, and an adorable Betty White, posed and styled in a floor-length gown, as if she were walking the red carpet. I spoke with van der Meer in December, in the 32,000-square-foot exhibit hall of the company’s new San Francisco outpost. However such an archaic (not to mention a smidge macabre) conceit might be viewed in theory, the attractions are still a self-contained international industry, without having to change much since Marie Tussaud established her first museum on London’s Baker Street in 1835. Today, wax figures of Beyoncé and One Direction can appear so mortal that you might not have noticed they weren’t, if it wasn’t for their frozen-eyed stare. As early as the Middle Ages, wax figures representing deceased royals and clergymen were displayed to allow the living to pay their respects “in person” to the objects of their veneration. Scientists, artists, and those who fall somewhere in between have been obsessed with creating the perfect fake human for centuries. But it turns out their actions went a long way toward explaining how the celebrity wax museum still exists, and, arguably, flourishes as a business in 2015. It seemed strange at first, watching as they exercised this most Instagram era of impulses with the most analog of attractions. On a recent weekday afternoon, in the dimly lit rooms of the Hollywood Wax Museum on Hollywood Boulevard, I saw, in no particular order: a girl wrap her arms around Elvis Presley, frozen with an acoustic guitar in mid-career form, a woman lounging in bed with a red-silk-robed Hugh Hefner, and a scrawny teenage boy pretending to twerk against a bizarrely inaccurate rendering of Beyoncé.Įach slightly abashed museum patron captured the moment via camera phone.
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