Whether it’s his sets, color schemes, costumes, soundtracks or actors’ deadpan humor, Wes Anderson has a unique cinematic style. From comedies such as Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums and The Grand Budapest Hotel to the stop-motion animated Fantastic Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs, the director’s filmmaking is the basis of an entire exhibit, Accidentally Wes Anderson: Adventures in Santa Cruz, opening Jan. 24 at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History.
“He has an aesthetic of his own,” says MAH exhibitions manager Natalie Jenkins. “He uses a color palette that’s often either saturated colors or pastels. He uses any kind of building or signage that is going to be centered directly in the film. There’s a kind of asymmetrical thing that he’ll do with the characters. There’s certain fonts that he uses. I would say every single one of his films becomes its own world. Everything is very bespoke for each movie.”
The collection features more than 100 photographs taken from the Accidentally Wes Anderson (AWA) Instagram account of places from around the world that look like they could’ve been used in Anderson’s movies, in addition to ones that pay tribute to the sights in Santa Cruz County.
“The color palette in Anderson’s movies have a tactile quality to them, too,” says MAH deputy director Marla Novo. “I think that’s what you’ll see in the photographs in this exhibition. It’s that juxtaposition with primary colors and pastels, like a warm orange with the blue. It brings you to a place and it kind of tingles all your senses.”
“His aesthetic is a combination of a lot of things,” adds AWA co-founder Wally Koval. “I think that’s what gives it some opportunity to be interpreted in a more widely seen way. There’s definitely some symmetry. There’s some pastels and pops of color. There’s always a touch of nostalgia. Maybe there’s a rotary phone or some sort of old-school technology. There’s a lot of different aspects to it.”
Koval started AWA in 2017 as a “travel bucket list.” The first picture he posted on Instagram was of the Hotel Belvedere, a structure and former hotel opened in 1882 on a hairpin turn in the Furka Pass in Switzerland that appeared in Goldeneye, the 1995 James Bond movie.
The account has since amassed nearly 2 million followers who’ve contributed thousands of their own photographs of Anderson-esque hotels, museums, theaters, places of worship, storefronts, markets, amusement parks and a lot of lighthouses, some that date back to the 15th century. They range from famous landmarks like Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, Chicago’s Navy Pier, Buckingham Palace and Hearst Castle—one of several California locations—to boats, bowling alleys, photo booths, hot air balloons, payphones and even a camel crossing sign in Israel.
Koval and his wife, Amanda, who live in Wilmington, Delaware, look through regular email submissions to see what qualifies as a good image.
“There has to be a beautiful snapshot,” says Koval. “But it’s not just the photo. There has to be an interesting story, because that’s what AWA is. It’s the intersection of distinctive design and unexpected narrative. You can’t have one without one or the other. For us, the criteria continues to evolve. It changes a lot. The community continues to share photos with us that maybe we would not have shared a few years ago, but today we’re exploring those outer rings of the dartboard. The bullseye on the dartboard could be a pretty pink hotel that perfectly looks like it could be plucked from a Wes Anderson movie. But if you start to go on the outer rings of that dartboard, you start to explore other areas. When people say, ‘This doesn’t really look very Wes Anderson,’ I love to respond and say, ‘It’s not. It’s AWA.’ Maybe it doesn’t look as perfectly Wes Anderson, but it is so perfectly AWA.”
The account spawned a website, postcard set, puzzle and two books, 2020’s Accidentally Wes Anderson and 2024’s Accidentally Wes Anderson: Adventures.
“I know what it means to be accidentally myself,” Anderson himself writes in the book’s foreword.
It also inspired a string of exhibits, beginning in 2022 at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma. MAH contacted Koval and his wife last year about adapting the show to Santa Cruz. So they put out a call for submissions and received 400 images.
“We voted on which ones look the most like they came from a Wes Anderson movie,” Jenkins says. “With that, we really wanted to represent different areas of the county, too. So we didn’t want to only have pictures from Santa Cruz. We wanted to make sure we were getting things from Watsonville, from Davenport. We really wanted to celebrate all of Santa Cruz County.”
Sections are organized thematically according to different lands, neighborhoods, buildings and homes, old signage and pink and yellow colors. There’s photography of the redbrick Mark Abbott Memorial Lighthouse, which holds a small surfing museum; Calvary Episcopal Church, the oldest church building in Santa Cruz still being used for its original purpose; Venetian Court, the Spanish-Mediterranean resort in Capitola; neon sign from Taylor Brothers Hot Dogs in Watsonville; and especially Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk and its rides, namely the colorful Sky Glider and Giant Dipper, the historic wooden roller coaster that celebrated its centennial last year.
“Those are beautiful vacation homes,” says Novo of the Venetian Court. “They’re like the jewel of downtown Capitola. They look like ice cream to me.”
There’s even a shell of an actual roller coaster and a pop-up area where visitors can take photographs. The exhibit also highlights artwork and artifacts culled from the museum’s permanent collection.
“With this show, we’re really thinking about how Santa Cruz relates to the look and theme of his movies,” says Novo. “It’s a town that’s very much about travel and exploration. There’s beautiful things and quirky things that stand out here that are reminiscent of films.”
“I can’t tell you the number of times that the Santa Cruz Boardwalk has been shared with us,” Koval adds. “I see them and they look fake. The colors, the light. Everything about them. They’re oozing with nostalgia. They look like a fantasy to me.”
The exhibit is currently also on view in Seoul, Shanghai and Melbourne.
“I want people who come to the exhibit to realize that there’s a lot of beauty in the things that they see on a regular basis, whether they’re locals or just visiting,” says Koval. “If you allow yourself to see your surroundings from a slightly different perspective or through a slightly different lens, it opens up a completely different world that maybe you didn’t expect to see. If you dig just a little bit deeper, the stories, the community members and the things that you’ll discover are really fascinating.”
“Come to the museum, get some inspiration from the show and then go out in your community and be a part of it,” Novo adds. “You’re going to be one of the stars in your own movie. You get to see the magic that’s there.”
Accidentally Wes Anderson: Adventures in Santa Cruz runs Jan. 24-May 18 at MAH, 705 Front St., Santa Cruz. Museum members can attend a preview Jan. 23 at 6pm. Hours: Thursday-Sunday; admission: $8-$10.
