In anticipation of the latest “Planet of the Apes” movie release coming up in July, The Malibu Times met with one local superfan, who gave a tour of his extensive collection of memorabilia. The museum is a glimpse into the fandom surrounding one of the most iconic movies filmed in Malibu, and will be published in a two-part story in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of filming. This is the first installment.
When you conjure the most iconic scenes in American cinema, a few images immediately come to mind — the burning of Atlanta, Bogart and Bergman embracing on a foggy tarmac and, for many, the dramatic ending of “The Planet of the Apes.” Spoiler alert (perhaps unnecessary five decades out): when Charlton Heston, as astronaut Taylor, escapes on horseback, he finds to his horror that the planet of the apes was Earth all along. Some locals still recall the half-buried replica of the Statue of Liberty that could be found below the Point Dume headlands during the movie’s filming throughout the summer of 1967.
When the movie was released in 1968, it made a big impression on then-eight-year-old Brian Peck, who now at age 56 is perhaps the foremost collector of “Planet of the Apes” memorabilia. In fact, he maintains his own private “Planet of the Apes” museum, with a collection so extensive that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has made inquiries for its own currently planned Los Angeles museum, according to Peck. Peck is seriously considering parting with his 20-plus years’ work gathering “POTA” related material.
But first, he invited The Malibu Times to take a peek inside his weird and wonderful collection. This reporter was given directions to Peck’s “San Simian” in the deep reaches of the San Fernando Valley — a super-secret lair that houses what he refers to as the “Ape-atorium.” It’s housed in an unassuming building that would give no indication of the treasures inside, save a tiny garden obscured behind some trash bins. Half-buried in a patch of cactus and pebbles is Lady Liberty herself, who guards the entrance to the interior spectacle.
The anchor of the museum is the nine-foot-tall “Lawgiver” statue featured in the original movie. For years, it stood in the backyard of the film’s producer Arthur P. Jacobs and then at the estate of Sammy Davis Jr. who was a fan of the film and a friend of Jacobs. Peck bought the enormous piece in the 1990s when the estate of the “rat pack” icon was auctioned after his death.
The Lawgiver and a few other life-size statues from the movies stand sentry over hundreds of props, scripts, drawings and ephemera from the POTA franchise. The original was such a hit, four more ape movies followed and Peck has collectibles from each one. Because of the delicate nature of some of the material — latex masks, for instance — the room is temperature controlled and some of the masks are in hermetically sealed plexiglass boxes.
Of the hundreds of items, of course there’s always a beginning to the madness. Peck described getting his first piece, a chimp costume, as a teenager.
“I knew that Western Costume had all the original POTA costumes in storage. I went there and they showed me rows and rows of gorilla, chimp and orangutan costumes and I freaked out because it was probably the first time I had actually seen any props or costumes that had been used in an actual movie, much less a movie I was kind of obsessed with. I coveted that costume,” he recalled. “They didn’t keep their stuff very nice back then. It was dusty and rotting off the hanger so I cleaned the leather. I glued the helmet back together.
“I restored the costume and when I returned it the guy literally threw it across the room into a big bin where the returned costumes went,” Peck continued. “He threw it 12 feet where it smacked and against a wall and bounced into the bin and he exclaimed, ‘Whoo hoo. Two points!’ This iconic piece of movie history that I had literally cleaned, restored with leather cleaner and glued the lining back together and had taken such good care of, and the second I handed it back it was literally thrown against the wall and banked into a bin and that’s when I went, ‘They don’t deserve to have this stuff.’ And that’s when I started plotting to rent my next costume and ‘lose it’ and pay the replacement value.”