George Lucas's museum is giving free annual passes to everyone in its ZIP code

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has been rising out of Exposition Park for eight years, a swooping white thing by architect Ma Yansong that looks like it landed rather than got built. On July 9 the museum announced what happens when the doors finally open on September 22: anyone who lives in the 90037 ZIP code that wraps around it can get in free.

The program is called LM37. Residents register at the museum's site, and a pass lets the holder reserve free tickets for themselves and one guest. A dedicated allotment of tickets is set aside for pass holders, including for the opening. Registration opens in August. There is also a Community Preview Day on September 13, nine days before the public gets in, for local residents, community partners, business owners and civic leaders.

"We wanted to make sure the neighbors that have been seeing the museum built from the ground up for the past eight years are the first ones inside," CEO Tracey Bates told The Hollywood Reporter.

The ZIP code matters here

90037 is three square miles of South Los Angeles with more than 17,000 households, and a quarter of its residents live below the poverty line, per census data cited by THR. The museum sitting on its northern edge cost about $1 billion and runs 300,000 square feet, paid for by the Star Wars fortune that George Lucas kept after selling Lucasfilm to Disney for $4 billion in 2012.

That gap is the whole story. A billion-dollar art institution parked next to a low-income neighborhood usually generates a press release about "community engagement" and a couple of free days a year. A renewable annual pass for everyone in the ZIP code is a bigger commitment than that, and it costs the museum real admission revenue, which is the only way to tell whether a gesture is serious.

Landscape architect Mia Lehrer, whose firm Studio-MLA also did the grounds at SoFi Stadium, designed the 11-acre park around the building. "Our gardens and public spaces are really their backyard now," Bates said. "We want to give them reasons to visit."

What's actually inside

The opening presentations run to more than 1,200 artworks across roughly 100,000 square feet of gallery space, according to the museum. The Star Wars material is there and will do the heavy lifting on ticket sales: "Star Wars in Motion" collects props, costumes and vehicle designs from the first six films, including Luke Skywalker's landspeeder and the first physical build of General Grievous' wheel bike.

The rest is the argument Lucas has been making for a decade, which is that narrative art is one continuous tradition and comics and film frames belong in it:

• Comic and graphic storytelling, with Jack Kirby and Alison Bechdel
• Japanese manga and anime
• Children's book illustration
• Thomas Hart Benton, Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth, Frank Frazetta
• Photography by Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks, and mural work including Diego Rivera

You can argue about whether Rockwell and Frazetta hang comfortably next to Rivera. That argument is more or less the point of the building.

The timing

The Lucas Museum arrives after LACMA's David Geffen Galleries opened in April, and while the La Brea Tar Pits are closed for renovation. It joins the California Science Center and the Natural History Museum inside Exposition Park, which means a neighborhood that already hosts two major museums is getting a third, and this one is handing out keys.

Whether the passes get used is the test. A free ticket is not the same as a habit. Ask again in a year.