The Rybinsk. Movie. Hollywood Museum

In 1991, the Vneshtorgizdat publishing house published a book on Marilyn Monroe by Cyril Emilievich Razlogov. In it, Vladimir Ryaboy read that Oscar winner Joseph Schenck and his brother Nicholas who, became the leaders of the largest American film companies in Hollywood, were born in Rybinsk.

So the idea of creating a city cinema history museum appeared. The search began in archives and libraries, and links were established with public and cultural figures in America, which helped form the museum’s funds.

V. I. Ryaboy published the first articles on the Hollywood founders in the Novaya Gazeta in 1997 and then in the World of News. In 2008, he wrote a book, co-authored with his son Igor, called Marilyn Monroe’s Russian lover, or how the Volga Barge Haulers Built Hollywood.

In the early 2000s, thanks to Boris Nekhemievich Crane’s participation in the project, a collection was created of materials and artifacts related to the lives of not only the Hollywood founders, but also the work of our compatriots Stanislav Iosifovich Rostotsky, a Rybinsk native (whose personal belongings, film prizes and iconography were donated to the museum by the film director’s widow, Nina Evgenieva), Arkady Isaakovich Raikin, and Alexander Viktorovich Zbruev, who lived here for several years. The museum has a sculpture of Marilyn Monroe, brought from Europe in the early 90s. Museum funds are replenished thanks to foreign and local trustees. Thus, Joseph Schenck’s autograph and books and magazines with publications about the Hollywood founders from the United States, Spain, England, Germany, etc. were acquired.

The museum today has become a kind of creative laboratory for the schoolchildren and students studying the fields of culture and tourism.

Its employees organize traveling exhibitions and public performances in order to popularize the art of cinema.

The museum’s collection contains such amazing artifacts as a sculptural composition of Marilyn Monroe in the image of Europe, a sculptural composition called Abducted by Zeus, a Hollywood album, a Metro-Goldwin-Maier album, and autographs of Sergey Alexandrovich Soloviev and Eugene Yurevich Steblov, whose ancestors lived in Rybinsk, etc.