Michael Govan

5: number of years left in Govan's contract with LACMA 14: number of books on Amazon.com that list Govan as a contributor 349: number of employees he oversees at LACMA 12,000: approximate number of artworks acquired since he started as director 637,299: LACMA attendance in 2006, year he started on the job 914,356: museum visitorship in 2010 $915,000: Govan's compensation for 2009-2010 fiscal year $1 million: bonus...

At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, an acclaimed Swiss architect is hoping to pull off what an acclaimed Dutch one could not. Next month LACMA will publicly unveil a $650-million plan by Pritzker Prize winner Peter Zumthor for a dramatic new museum building along Wilshire Boulevard. If completed it would rank as one of the most significant works of architecture to rise in Los Angeles since Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall opened 10 years ago. It would also require demolishing the core of the museum's campus, including the original 1965 buildings by William L. Pereira and a 1986 addition by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates of New York.

Once you've seen Michael Govan's office, it makes perfect sense that — besides being the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art — he is a pilot. The ceiling is a Gordian tangle of freeways; the floor is a perfect white-and-blue heaven of clouds. It's the handiwork of California artist John Baldessari, and exactly the kind of tweaking of earth, horizon and sky that a pilot would appreciate. For more than four years, Govan has been sitting in LACMA's more terrestrial cockpit, charting a new flight plan for the county institution.

The price of behind-the-scenes access at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is going up. And some donors in the museum's oldest support groups are talking about dropping out. The changes affect the long-standing art councils at LACMA, groups of art enthusiasts and professionals who currently pay a minimum of $400 a year in dues and organize projects to raise money for a favorite department, such as photography or decorative arts. The perks include access to private events featuring artists, curators or collectors.

These days, one of Michael Govan's private pleasures, flying a single-engine prop plane, gives him a useful perspective on the challenges of his public role: piloting the Los Angeles County Museum of Art during a time of economic turbulence. "I know head winds when I see them or feel them," he says. With the 1979 Beechcraft Bonanza he keeps at Santa Monica Airport, Govan has the option of waiting out bad weather. With LACMA, he has to keep airborne and on course no matter what: The museum is about midway through a multipronged, multimillion-dollar "Transformation."

Never underestimate the power of Martin Scorsese to galvanize a room full of movie buffs. The director drew cheers and standing ovations when he appeared Wednesday evening at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to discuss the fate of the institution's imperiled weekend film program. The discussion with LACMA director Michael Govan covered film-preservation and museum topics. But many attendees expressed frustration over the lack of a clear statement about the 40-year-old screening series, which the museum has said would end in June.

THREE days into his tenure as director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, at 5 a.m., Michael Govan found the painting to hang behind his desk. It's a blue-hued composition from 1992 by artist Mark Tansey, two daring young men on a hilltop with a flying machine about 100 years ago. Except that these guys are not the Wright brothers. They're the painters who created Cubism, and the work's title is "Braque and Picasso."

Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, crouched in the pit of a stone quarry in Riverside. Wearing black jeans and a brown sports coat, he dragged a finger through the sandy floor to draw the northern edge of the LACMA campus. On a key spot in his ad hoc map, he placed a granite stone the size of an orange, meant to represent a rugged 340-ton boulder standing in the quarry behind him. If all goes according to plan, that boulder will make a seven-day journey in August from the quarry to the museum's Miracle Mile location on a specially designed 200-wheel truck.

Nicolas Berggruen travels more in three months than most people do in a lifetime. Dubbed "the homeless billionaire" because he prefers living out of five-star hotels to owning any homes, his business and nonprofit ventures this winter alone have taken him to Singapore, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Beijing, New Delhi and Zurich, with a side trip to Antarctica. So it's not entirely surprising to learn that Berggruen, who owns a Gulfstream IV, is not big on cars. "I can drive," said the energetic, boyish-looking 50-year-old.

After meeting for nearly three hours with a group of angry movie fans and professionals today, Michael Govan, the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, said he was accelerating plans to replace the film program that is on the chopping block with a more expansive one -- but only if the museum can raise as much as $10 million in the next year. In an interview, Govan laid out for the first time a set of proposed budget figures for what he sees as a revamped film department at LACMA.

The campus of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has changed markedly since Michael Govan took over as director in 2006. Two gallery buildings by Renzo Piano have opened their doors: the Broad Contemporary Art Museum in 2008 and the Resnick Pavilion two years later. The old May Co. building anchoring the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue, which LACMA had for a time planned to renovate for its own use, is slated to hold a film museum run by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Earlier this spring, Annette Bening and Ed Harris strolled the galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, marveling in hushed tones over Monet's majestic images of Giverny and Rembrandt's sublime masterpiece "The Raising of Lazarus. " They were filming a key scene in director Arie Posin's drama "The Look of Love," which plumbs the mysteries of romantic attraction between a woman who has lost her husband and a male painter who's a dead ringer for her deceased spouse. Yet the movie's most intriguing guest star - aside perhaps from Robin Williams, who plays a close friend of Bening's character - is LACMA itself.

LOS ANGELES -- Michael Govan

Nicolas Berggruen travels more in three months than most people do in a lifetime. Dubbed "the homeless billionaire" because he prefers living out of five-star hotels to owning any homes, his business and nonprofit ventures this winter alone have taken him to Singapore, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Beijing, New Delhi and Zurich, with a side trip to Antarctica. So it's not entirely surprising to learn that Berggruen, who owns a Gulfstream IV, is not big on cars. "I can drive," said the energetic, boyish-looking 50-year-old.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art will introduce its newest VIP today in a Riverside quarry: the 340-ton, 211/2-foot-high granite boulder that will form the centerpiece of Michael Heizer's massive outdoor sculpture, "Levitated Mass. " When the piece is complete, the rock will sit on steel rails at ground level, north of the Wilshire Boulevard museum's Resnick Pavilion. A 456-foot-long, ramp-like slot in the ground, descending to 15 feet deep, will run beneath it. The rock will appear to levitate above people walking through the underground channel.

5: number of years left in Govan's contract with LACMA 14: number of books on Amazon.com that list Govan as a contributor 349: number of employees he oversees at LACMA 12,000: approximate number of artworks acquired since he started as director 637,299: LACMA attendance in 2006, year he started on the job 914,356: museum visitorship in 2010 $915,000: Govan's compensation for 2009-2010 fiscal year $1 million: bonus...

In his role as the head of the film department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Ian Birnie said his professional relationship with his boss was distant verging on nonexistent. And the majority of the museum's curatorial staff showed little or no interest in the film department during his tenure. The final insult came Saturday when he was officially demoted to a contract position with the awkward title of "consulting curator" for the film department. If he's angry about the situation, however, Birnie hides it well.

In the museum world, there are any number of ways to spend $1 million. That's nearly as much as Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, will earn this year in salary, deferred compensation and benefits. That also happens to be how much LACMA's film program lost over the last decade -- a big part of the reason that Govan recently laid off the program's director and cut the weekend screening series, provoking an outcry from hundreds of cinéastes . In good times, eyebrows might be raised over whether $1 million a year is a fair wage for a director of a nonprofit museum.

Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, crouched in the pit of a stone quarry in Riverside. Wearing black jeans and a brown sports coat, he dragged a finger through the sandy floor to draw the northern edge of the LACMA campus. On a key spot in his ad hoc map, he placed a granite stone the size of an orange, meant to represent a rugged 340-ton boulder standing in the quarry behind him. If all goes according to plan, that boulder will make a seven-day journey in August from the quarry to the museum's Miracle Mile location on a specially designed 200-wheel truck.

Michael Govan will steer the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for at least six more years, under a contract renewal that quietly went into effect July 1. The museum didn't announce the renewal then, but it emerged Friday when LACMA posted its audited financial statements for 2009-10 on its website. Govan has been LACMA's director since April 1, 2006. Having completed his original contract, he collected a $1-million bonus agreed to when he was hired. Govan, 47, was traveling Friday and not available for comment.