Library Special Collections Blog
Best Picture Nominees Flash Exhibit Series: The World of "Grand Budapest Hotel"
They’re Back! Our Series of Flash Exhibits on Oscar Nominations for Best Picture
Each exhibit runs for 2 days only—stop by Library Special Collections to catch all of them--- they’ll be gone in a flash!
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Suddenly the world is talking again about the Viennese writer Stefan Zweig, whose work inspired Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel, a zany comedy, but also a nostalgic meditation on a pre-war Europe whose values of beauty and civilized tolerance were slipping away as Hitler rose to power. Anderson drew inspiration from Zweig’s only novel, Beware of Pity, and his autobiography The World of Yesterday: Memories of a European, in which the author mourns the end of that era. Zweig was at the center of European intellectual life in the 1920s and early 1930s, with an impressive circle of friends that included writers, poets, composers, and thinkers like Freud, Einstein, Joyce, Rilke, Schnitzler, and Strauss. Displayed here are Schnitzler’s signed copy of Zweig’s reminiscences of the Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren, which Zweig had had privately printed for a group of his friends; and the 1916 first edition of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which Zweig later translated into Italian as a result of his friendship with Joyce. The hotel of Grand Budapest Hotel—the “real” star of the film—was modeled after one of the great old European hotels, the Grand hotel Pupp (renamed Hotel Moskva in 1950), located in the spa town of Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic, and pictured here in a travel pamphlet from the Susan Sontag library (Collection 892). The albumen print of the Empire Hotel in Buxton, Derbyshire, one of the great English railway hotels, was taken by the Scottish photographer William Dobson Valentine, who signed his photos "J.V." in honor of his father, James Valentine, also a well-known photographer (Photograph Album Collection (Collection 94)). Finally, from the Arts Library’s Artists’ Book Collections, we’ve borrowed Matthias Herrmann’s Hotel Diary, which expresses the artist’s own struggle with AIDS. All of the photographs were shot in hotel rooms throughout the world, in cities like Dublin, Helsinki, Salzburg, Stockholm, Toronto, and Zurich.
By Jane Carpenter
Oscar™ in the Archive
The annual Academy Awards ceremony – now universally known as The Oscars – is first among equals in entertainment awards prestige. Now a late winter affair, the first statuettes were awarded in the spring of 1929 – May 16, to be precise. Held in a banquet room of the Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles there were only three nominees for Best Picture that year; nine films are in competition in 2013. Contrary to the glamour and pomp associated with the Oscars, the Collection of Awards Ephemera (Collection 209) tells a different tale about the event. Within it are mementos from ceremonies dating from 1939 to 2000 revealing that attendance could be real work. There are copies of the voting rules and eligibility criteria; a calendar guide to local theaters’ screening times of nominated pictures; innumerable press releases, as well as direct appeals to Academy voters. And although formal attire was always a requirement, ticket stubs in the collection show that seats were initially inexpensive; for example, in 1953 a seat in the 27th row set you back just $12.00. The glossy programs were work product for journalists who covered the event. Marginalia captures the routine listing of who-wore-what, a running score-card of the winners, as well as more critical observations. In 1953, the journalist who used this program noted that William Holden not only didn’t make a speech after his Best Actor win but failed to even thank the Academy for his honor.
Close up of marginalia.
This collection combines keepsakes from several sources into one collection. Working or not, these items were important mementos to their former owners. These tokens speak to the extraordinary power of Oscar in our collective imagination.
By Lauren Buisson, Technical Services
