“Hollywood on the Cuyahoga” will celebrate filmmaking in Northeast Ohio

Opening this weekend, the “Hollywood on the Cuyahoga” exhibit at the Cleveland History Center will exalt and celebrate all of the highly successful actors, directors, producers, writers, designers, technicians and filmmakers that carved Northeast Ohio’s place in film history. Sponsored by PNC Bank, the exhibit runs through October 2026 and will feature special guest speakers from the region who have made significant contributions to film and other related programming throughout the year. 

“We want visitors to experience the fact that there’s been a great film history here, and most people don’t know that filmmaking has been going on in Northeast Ohio for decades,” said Dennis Barrie, vice president of experience design for the Western Reserve Historical Society. “That has certainly accelerated in the last 30 or 40 years with all sorts of filmmaking going on, and a lot of the efforts by these people resulted in great accomplishments, whether it’s “The Deer Hunter” [which has major scenes filmed in Cleveland] or Trent Reznor’s two Academy Awards for Best Original Score for “The Social Network” (2010) and then for “Soul” (2020).”

How the exhibit came to a major museum near you

Born of Barrie’s personal passion for films and film history, the idea started to percolate for him between 2005 and 2010 when he worked on the development of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. Acclaimed as one of the world’s premiere museum curators, directors and design consultants, Barrie led the construction and opening of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum in Cleveland.

Barrie’s distinguished resume of curatorial efforts includes the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C.; the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts (Woodstock concert museum) in Bethel Woods, New York; the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement (aka The Mob Museum) in Las Vegas; and the Maltz Museum in Beachwood, Ohio.

Knowing there was an important history here for Ohio and especially northern Ohio, Barrie started thinking about doing an exhibition before COVID disrupted his planning. Then Kelly Falcone-Hall, president and CEO, Western Reserve Historical Society, became interested.

“At the end of 2023, we decided to do an exhibition on filmmaking and filmmakers connected with Northern Ohio,” Barrie said. “Our goal was to trace that history and look at the many people who worked here or who came out of this area and went on to be major figures in the movie world.” 

To help with the in-depth research and creative input required for an exhibition of this scale, Barrie enlisted the film history expertise of Bill Garvey, president of the Greater Cleveland Film Commission; critically acclaimed Cleveland filmmaker Robert Banks; John Grabowski, Ph.D., chief historian at the Western Reserve Historical Society and history professor at Case Western Reserve University; and graphic designer Tim Lachina. Barrie’s son Kevin, who works for Barrie Projects founded by Barrie and his wife Kathy, led the installation of the exhibit.

“Our goal was to get people to embrace the filmmaking history here as well as celebrate and share it and let people know it wasn’t just one or two people, but it was a community, an industry of hard-working staff, artists and union guys,” Banks said. “People need to be proud and sincere about this thing that we manifested for the 20^th century and how we’ve gone above and beyond that now.”

Banks created nine videos for the exhibition, including interviews with Garvey; documentarian Catherine Gund; film director, producer, screenwriter, and special effects makeup artist Robert Kurtzman and his wife Marcy; Grafton Nunes, retired president and CEO of the Cleveland Institute of Art who is also a film producer who worked with Milosh Forman and was involved in the making of the film “Light of Day” shot at the Euclid Tavern; independent filmmaker Tyler Davidson based in Chagrin Falls; and acclaimed costumer Harold Crawford (aka, “Rags”), who has worked closely with famous actors and directors on myriad films, television shows and plays.

He also did an extended interview with local filmmaker legends Anthony and Joseph Russo best known for directing four blockbuster Marvel Cinematic Universe films: “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” “Captain America: Civil War,” “Avengers: Infinity War,” and “Avengers: Endgame.” They will be featured in their own “Welcome to Collinwood” room at the end of the exhibition, as will the Greater Cleveland Film Commission and its contributions to the region.

“We wanted to showcase that the film industry is important to our self image and to our economy,” Barrie said. “People think of Hollywood, New York, Chicago, or Atlanta as filmmaking places, but it adds a lot to our economy, too, and over the years it totals tens of millions of dollars.” 

Highlights of the exhibit

Visitors will enjoy a wide range of photographs, film clips, recordings, costumes and props from films that will be displayed through several rooms in the historic Bingham-Hanna Mansion of the Cleveland History Center. 

Barrie promised there will be abundant surprises and information that most Northeast Ohioans are unaware of and that it was not possible to include all of the people who contributed to the film industry here. Some of the highlights include:

∙ Costumes worn by famous Cleveland-connected actors, including Bob Hope’s from “Here Come the Girls,” Halle Berry’s from “Things We Lost in the Fire,” and Paul Newman’s from “Road to Perdition.” There is also a jacket worn by Clark Gable (a native of Cadiz, Ohio) in “Test Pilot,” an Oscar-nominated, 1938 film co-starring Spencer Tracy, Myrna Loy and Lionel Barrymore that was filmed in Hollywood but includes roughly half an hour of footage from the National Air Races in Cleveland.

∙ Props by famous prop designer John Zabrucky, including a giant robot, sizable laser gun used in several films, and “the Clam” from a Star Wars film. Kent State graduate Zabrucky designed sci-fi props for more than 200 films, including “Austin Powers,” “Men in Black,” “Ghostbusters,” “Star Trek” and “X-Men.” The items are on loan from the Trumbull County Historical Society, and they will be displayed in the new sci-fi museum being built in his hometown of Warren.

∙ Industrial films made by Cinecraft, a Cleveland company still in business, that include actors such as Alan Alda, Ronald Regan, Richard Nixon and Merv Griffin. By the mid-20^th century, Cleveland and Detroit were the industrial film centers of America.

∙ Beautiful movie posters from Charlie Chaplin films, Dracula and other movies that were made by Morgan Lithography, another Cleveland company still in business.

∙ A Behind the Camera section that highlights the work of producers and directors from Northeast Ohio, including Lew Wasserman once considered “the most powerful man in Hollywood,” Ross Hunter who directed many famous films from “Airport” to “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” Wes Craven who created the “Nightmare on Elm Street” franchise and many other horror films, indie film innovator Jim Jarmusch (“Stranger Than Paradise,” “Paterson”), and new film phenomenon Steven Caple, Jr. (“Creed II,” “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts”).

∙ A screenwriters section that includes Earl Derr Biggers, the Warren native who wrote all of the Charlie Chan novels, many that were made into films; Harlan Ellison, who wrote numerous scripts for the original Star Trek and Twilight Zone TV series; Joe Eszterhas (“Telling Lies in America,” “Basic Instinct”) who still lives in the area; Charles Chestnutt who had two of his novels adapted into silent films in 1926 and ’27; and Lorain native Toni Morrison who’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “Beloved” was made into a film in 1998.

∙ A soundtrack composers section highlights the accomplishments of a range of people, from Reznor and Mark Mothersbaugh known for his Wes Anderson film soundtracks to Henry Mancini who composed many soundtracks, perhaps most famously “The Pink Panther Theme,” to John Stepan Zamecnik, a composer and conductor from Cleveland who wrote the score for “Wings” and hundreds of scores for silent films, to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins whose song “I Put a Spell on You” has been used in many TV programs and films, most prominently in Jarmusch’s “Mystery Train.”

∙ An interactive, touch screen movie quiz that Barrie says doesn’t require genius level expertise but a “little bit of film knowledge.” Visitors can also search an extensive database of movie theaters, many of them long closed, in the region.

“This is one of the most important exhibits that the Society has mounted during my very long tenure at WRHS,” Grabowski concluded. “Yes, it uses all the techniques necessary for a contemporary museum exhibit, but additionally it focuses on a topic – moving pictures – that today have, beyond the theater, become a powerful means of communication.”

A key component for a statewide initiative

“Hollywood on the Cuyahoga” will serve as a kickoff event for a statewide initiative “Ohio Goes to the Movies” that will serve as Ohio’s signature project to celebrate America’s 250^th anniversary. Running until October 2026, OGTTM will hold more than 280 events throughout the state in all 88 counties. 

The website includes an exhaustive and still growing database of films made in Ohio as well as actors, directors, writers, composers and technicians who are from or have worked on films made in Ohio.

Events will range from a “dive in” movie event held at the swimming pool in Martins Ferry Memorial Park in Belmont County, Ohio, to Paul Newman’s daughter Melissa discussing her book “Head Over Heels: Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward: A Love Affair in Words and Pictures” at Cedar-Lee Theatre in Cleveland Heights, where her father as a youth growing up in Shaker Heights worked as an usher.

Here is the exhibition trailer produced by Robert Banks and the Cleveland History Center.