Monroe County boasts its Hollywood connections

The Oscars might feature movie stars who seem to live in a distant world, but Bloomington and Monroe County have so many connections to Hollywood that a local history museum decided to feature them in an exhibit.

"It's nice to walk into a history museum and see something that you're not expecting," said Lisa Simmons, education/membership/volunteer coordinator of the Monroe County Historical Society which runs the Monroe County History Center. "It's not this serious, heavy exhibit, and it's very different from what people associated with their high school history class."

The museum within the history center opened its "Lights! Camera! Action! MoCo Goes Hollywood" exhibit Jan. 16 and will keep it open until March 28 when the museum must make room for another exhibit. Though exhibit co-curator Jamee Wissink said they had been thinking of the idea for years, she and co-curator Sue Shelden weren't sure they would be able to find enough material.

Wissink said when she and her colleagues first came up with the idea for the museum, they could only come up with about 30 to 40 connections from Monroe County to Hollywood.

"A lot of it's kind of self-generating in the sense that you would find one connection and that would lead you to another," Wissink said. "We started talking about it to people and they would give us a name. In fact, that has continued even after the exhibit went up."

But after doing some research, the pair and other museum volunteers had found well more than 100. Eight months of preparation later, the exhibit opened.

Most students probably wouldn't be surprised to find that a large portion of the exhibit is dedicated to the movie, "Breaking Away," which is about IU's Little 500, or to hear the music of John Mellencamp playing throughout the small exhibit.

But the museum didn't neglect to explore the lesser-known connections between Hollywood and Bloomington. Who knew one of the munchkin children from the "Wizard of Oz" was born in Gosport, Ind.? Or that IU alumna Betsy Palmer played Jason's mom in the original "Friday the 13th"? Another IU grad, Madelyn Pugh Davis, emerged as the series writer for "I Love Lucy."

IU alums even contributed to the music in famous films. Howard Ashman received his Master of Fine Arts from IU. He and Alan Menken later won two Oscars for Best Song for "Beauty and the Beast" and "Under the Sea" in "The Little Mermaid."

Countless other movie scripts donned the large back wall of the exhibit, featuring more and more IU alums or Bloomington natives who either made it big-time or wrote the lines for stars who did.

But perhaps the most surprising piece is the original sign from the Von Lee Theater.

Rusted over and covered in chipped paint, the 500-pound, 14-foot sign dominates the exhibit, a remnant of Bloomington's past.

Two women from Bloomington browsing through the exhibit Saturday expressed their awe for the piece of history, recalling the days when it actually lit up downtown Bloomington years ago.

"Aw, look -- the Von Lee," one of the women said, amazed as she discovered the original sign that once played host to summer movies she saw as a child.

Donnette Bell Bowen, a Bloomington native who now lives in Colorado, said going to the movies in the summer was a big deal.

"If you went downtown to a movie … it was a thing you looked forward to the whole summer," she said.

Simmons said the "forever heavy" sign took the efforts of several people to get it into the exhibit. Its replica is now in its place on Kirkwood Avenue but weighs much less, Wissink said.

"Oh my goodness. We were dragging people off the street," Wissink said of the sign's difficult transfer. "It was a huge challenge, but people seem to really, really enjoy seeing it."

The exhibit even featured an interactive display that showed how blue screen technology is used in movies to create floating heads. Visitors can hold up a blue sheet in front of a device that replaces anything blue with the images from a TV screen in front of them. The device, called a chroma key, is used in many special effects and weather reports. The exhibit's display, from WonderLab Museum of Health, Science and Technology, explained how human skin doesn't have many blue tones, allowing the device to work.

Even students not from Indiana might find the exhibit interesting simply because it's "kind of cool to be proud of your school heritage," Wissink said. "It's just fun to watch movies and get that connection going. And also you can win bar bets. That's the biggest draw right there -- just win bar bets."

The exhibit can be viewed from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday at the museum, located in the Monroe County History Center at 202 E. Sixth St. Admission is $2 for adults and $1 for children 6-18.