When art goes to the movies: The International

The Guggenheim might have stepped away from Tom Krens’s über PR, but the brand is still on the high he helped build over the years of his directorship. It was because of this brand that the movie people talked to the museum people about shooting the big action scene for The International inside the famous Frank Lloyd Wright building. While Krens might have said yes, the answer was no. Well sort of no. Instead they gave permission for the movie makers to build a 98 percent scale, four-storey look alike of the museum’s interior on a sound stage in Berlin plus one day of low action filming in the building proper. The Guggenheim even supplied plans of the building. Four months of planning and four months of construction later they were ready to shoot the 13 minute sequence.

To fill the Guggenheim stunt-double's galleries with art, an existing video work by German artist Julian Rosenfeldt was projected on large screens. At the end of the movie the Guggenheim required the producer to include the following disclaimer, “The fictional exhibition depicted in the main galleries of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum was not curated by nor an actual exhibition of the museum.” Now that’s brand management.
Images: Top poster and action sequence in the look-alike Guggenheim. Bottom, shooting the Guggenheim set in Berlin