Burton's dark beginnings, and Ray's bright start

The entrance to LACMA's Tim Burton exhibition, the only place you can take photos.

You still have time to see the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Tim Burton exhibit, but be warned: it is for only the most ardent of fans.

A casual viewer of the eccentric filmmaker's work such as Batman, Batman Returns, Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, Nightmare before Christmas, the new Alice in Wonderland, and that dreadful version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory would probably not be very interested in Burton's childhood sketchbooks, and wall-full of drawings done when he was a bored animator at Disney studios.

For the rest of us, it was a treat. The first room you come to has sculpture made from Burton's early sketches, including a robot built by Cal State Fullerton grad students. The robot's flip-top head opens at random moments, and scared me to death.

My husband, Jim, in front of an inflatable
Tim Burton character at LACMA.

The second room is given over to artifacts from Burton's schooldays in Burbank, like the commendation from the Burbank fire department given in honor of his placing in an fire prevention art contest, and the list of movies he wanted for the film series he produced.

I recognized many of the films he screened as fundraisers for the Burbank Police Youth Band: Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman, Jason and the Argonauts, Mothra, Gamera, but I was disappointed not to see one of my all-time favorite 50's sci-fi movies: Fiend Without a Face.

Burton hated Burbank the way I hated Simi Valley growing up: it was too clean, too buttoned-up, and too wholesome. Misfits like us wanted the seamy underbelly, ancient moldering houses and graveyards with moss-covered headstones, not row after row of tract houses and brand-new strip malls. We watched Hammer Films, read gothic novels and adored anything with Vincent Price in it.

But if Tim Burton were growing up now, he'd have a peer group. He'd be a goth, and could wear black and be weird to his heart's content. He'd have teenage girls who thought he was cute, and would adore him for his artistic ability. He could find others with his same interests on the Internet. And that would be to the detriment of his art.

His feelings of alienation and isolation made him turn inward, and spend most of his time letting his imagination run riot. You can see the genesis of many of his most famous characters in those early drawings. And I think that having a peer group would have taken the edge off that artistic drive.

In the audio tour, the narrator talks about Edward Scissorhands being the character most like his creator: the quiet, darkly creative boy all in black wandering among the ticky-tacky pastel houses of suburbia. That may be true, but I've always considered the story of Jack Skellington in Nightmare Before Christmas to be Burton's self-administered advice: always be yourself.

Coming on the heels of Batman Returns as it did, the story of Jack, the lord of Halloweentown who makes a foray into the much lighter world of Christmastown with disastrous results, seems to be a cautionary tale. Jack's dark sensibility makes him ill-equipped to remake Christmas, the way that Burton should have listened to his reservations about making the sequel to his fairly well-recieved Batman and trying to shoehorn himself into the mold of Hollywood hit-maker. 

You can see how stultified he felt as a Disney animator by the wickedly humorous drawings he made. 

I'd love to take my granddaughter Charlotte, the budding goth, to the exhibit just to see the maquettes from Nightmare before Christmas, since it is her favorite movie, but I think she'd be bored by most of the exhibit. Every time she comes to my house, she wants to see "Jack and Sally," as she calls the film. One display has dozens of Jack heads in varying expressions, and another almost all of the characters' maquettes.

Costume designer Colleen Atwood's Edward Scissorhands costume is on display, and it is delightfully detailed and complex. Burton has worked with Atwood on almost all his live action movies, and I got to see her work on Alice in Wonderland and Sweeney Todd at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising yearly Academy Awards costume exhibit. 

Urban Lights, an installation of 202 antique street lamps at LACMA. 

It was crowded, since we waited until the end of the run to see it, but the Burton exhibit was well worth it. This was the first time I had been to LACMA since the installation of Urban Lights, the rows and rows of streetlights that were previously used on Los Angeles streets, by Chris Burden.

The display is magical at night, and visitors just love to move around inside of it. Behind the installation is the fairly new restaurant, Ray's and the adjoining Stark Bar, named after the late Ray Stark, a producer and LACMA trustee.

The food is pricy, but so well worth it. We had just come from the California Design, 1030-1965 "Living in a Modern Way"exhibit, and walking into Ray's looked like an extension of the Resnick Pavilion show. Ray's has a very modern decor, with red chairs, and 50's looking tables. I noticed a hidden drawer in the side of the table and pulled it out to find my table service.

Your cutlery and napkin await you
 in a drawer at Ray's restaurant.

I couldn't get my usual drink order —a Bombay Sapphire martini, dry, with three olives — because they only have small-batch gins made on the West Coast. Same with my husband's Glenlivet, they actually had a whiskey list with only small distilleries on it. Good for getting us out of our comfort zones, I guess.

The staff was attentive and food stellar. The specialize in fresh local ingredients, and the menu changes constantly because of that. For more details, you can check out my husband's blog. 

You can still catch the Tim Burton exhibit through Halloween, and there is a Dead Man's Ball  on Saturday, Oct. 29. Tickets are $100, and we could have gone for what we spent at Ray's.