Visited Bedford Falls Lately?

Michael Henninger for The New York TimesA life-size statue of James Stewart in the Jimmy Stewart Museum in Indiana, Pa. More Photos ?

IF the Jimmy Stewart Museum didn’t already exist, it might be the perfect place to invent for a sequel to “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

The museum is housed in a modest brown-brick, four-story public library building just down the street from the county courthouse in Indiana, Pa., a town of 15,000 about 60 miles northeast of Pittsburgh that could easily serve as the location for this century’s version of Bedford Falls. Inside, a quiet and low-lighted third floor is given over to an equally low-key yet substantial exhibition of hundreds of James Stewart’s artifacts and mementos, including his diploma from a nearby prep school and a favorite booth from Chasen’s, his later Hollywood haunt.

But there’s a back story: Like the Bailey Brothers Building & Loan Association in “Wonderful Life,” this homegrown institution is facing insolvency and recently needed the generosity of Stewart’s many admirers. “We were close to closure last year,” said the museum’s executive director, Timothy Harley. “Luckily, media coverage generated interest and an amount of donations that is modest but enough to remain open. But those funds will be depleted in a couple of years, and it’s hard to think that many of those who helped will step forward to save us again. They were of an older generation.”

Scattered around the country in nearly a dozen small towns are places like the Jimmy Stewart Museum. The Beech Grove, Ind., public library has built a collection of the native Steve McQueen’s films and biographies. Winterset, Iowa, has preserved the birthplace of John Wayne. Grand Rapids, Minn., has established a Judy Garland Museum in the childhood home of the girl then known as Frances Gumm. There is a range of curatorial sophistication and collection quality, but what all these places have in common is local pride in the glitzy fame achieved by a native son or daughter, the hope for some tourist dollars in otherwise out-of-the-way places, and often a beginning based on the obsessive collecting of memorabilia by a devoted fan. And they all count on something uncertain: a tireless fascination with big movie stars that continues decades after their last films.

“These museums are a relatively new phenomenon,” said Mr. Harley, who has run the Stewart Museum for 6 of its 15 years. “We don’t have a model to look at. Whether this type of presentation has a shelf life is too early to say.”

A little over a year ago Mr. Harley noticed that attendance was plummeting. “Each spring and fall we would have 10 or 15 bookings a month of 48-seat charter buses of lovely senior citizens,” he recalled. “Last fall that completely ended. Not gradually; it just stopped. This spring is the same. Clearly the people that Mr. Stewart called his partners have, at the very least, aged out of traveling, if not passed on.” At its low point recently attendance dipped to nearly half of the 10,000 annual visitors who came in the years after the museum opened in 1995.

A similar story is told by Nan Mattern, executive director of the Clark Gable Birthplace and Museum in the small former coal mining town of Cadiz, Ohio, about 90 miles southwest of Pittsburgh. In 1998, after years of fund-raising, a local group spent more than $150,000 to build a copy of the small two-story home on a quiet residential street where William Clark Gable, the boy who would become known as the King of Hollywood, was born in 1901. They have filled the place with some period furniture, memorabilia from Gable films (heavy on the “Gone With the Wind” tchotchkes) and a few of Gable’s personal items, like a boyhood sled, letters from Dwight Eisenhower and J. Edgar Hoover, and a canceled check for $6 that Gable once wrote to an exterminator.

The most expensive item in the collection, a 1954 Cadillac Coupe de Ville driven by Gable, is garaged in the basement of a separate house that has been turned into a Gable-theme bed-and-breakfast. There’s an “It Happened One Night” room (single beds with a curtain to pull between them) and a more lavish Gable and Lombard suite. (Gable’s marriage to the actress Carol Lombard was cut short by Lombard’s death in a place crash in 1942.)

“We call ourselves a birthplace,” said Ms. Mattern. “But we’re more of a living museum.” Living perhaps, but not exactly thriving. The museum is open six hours a day with varying frequency depending on the season and drew about 2,700 visitors over the last two years, an average of about 5 per day, and about half what it had been in some previous years. “We get buses sometimes,” she said. “But not as much as we’d like.”