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I stand in line (perhaps behind you) and I pay my money and I marvel. I marvel that wax museums still exist. I marvel at how creepily realistic many of the figures are and how creepily unrealistic others are. Some have oversized hands like the paws of golden retriever puppies; others have heads the size of microwave ovens tottering atop sticklike bodies with ill-fitting suits. (Typically, only the heads and hands are made of wax; the rest of the body is usually a wire armature bulked out with stuffing, unless it’s a starlet with abundant cleavage.)

At the Hollywood Wax Museum in Los Angeles (6767 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, 323-462-8860, www.hollywoodwax.com), the experience is more about the tableau than the individual figure, with many of the exhibits elaborately crafted to re-create scenes from movies. That’s appropriate; the bronze-and-terrazzo stars of the Hollywood Walk of Fame are just outside the door, and the wax museum is but a half-block from the Kodak Theatre, where the Academy Awards are held annually. (I happened to be visiting the day of the awards, and I later saw John Travolta pull up in a limo. Frankly, he wasn’t nearly as authentic as what I’d seen inside.) Just after you enter the museum you’ll see Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow aboard his galleon. Farther along, you come to Katherine Hepburn and a put-upon Humphrey Bogart aboard the African Queen, then Arnold Schwarzenegger—as Conan the Barbarian over here and as the Terminator over there.

Los Angeles is evidently big enough for only one wax museum, and the Hollywood Wax Museum emerged triumphant when the Movieland Wax Museum was shuttered in 2005. Movieland was the victim of declining attendance, and its 300 figures were exiled into a wax diaspora—some to a museum in South Korea, others to private collections. Quite a few ended up at the Hollywood Wax Museum.

Here’s the thing: You can tell the Movieland figures from the others. They seem less realistic, their “skin” more opaque.

As it turns out, making wax figures really is an art. In the best of circumstances, subjects come in for a studio sitting and more than 100 dimensions of their face are carefully measured with calipers. Then they’re photographed from every direction. If the subject can’t come to the studio, artists rely on a vast portfolio of photographs.

They then go to work sculpting a bust out of plaster or silicone, which is used to create the mold into which the beeswax (enhanced with stabilizing agents) is poured. The Movieland process was apparently different—it seems plaster heads were simply dipped in beeswax, which makes them look rather more like department store mannequins. A good wax museum needs to be more convincing than that, and perhaps this contributed to its demise.

The more wax museums I visit, the more I learn. For instance, I now know that different production techniques yield different-looking figures. And that wax museums periodically hire hairdressers to wash and style the hair. And that it’s very hard—if not utterly impossible—to capture Mick Jagger’s lip sneer in wax.

More places to check out wax in the west …

Madame Tussauds Las Vegas 3377 S. Las Vegas Blvd., Ste. 2001, Las Vegas, (702) 862-7800, www.mtvegas.com. Line up a putt with Tiger Woods, marry George Clooney, and, because it’s Vegas, go onstage with Elvis. Royal London Wax Museum 470 Belleville St., Victoria, B.C., (877) 929-3228, www.waxmuseum.bc.ca. British royalty, a fine Chamber of Horrors, and Charles Laughton. Steinbeck’s Spirit of Monterey Wax Museum 700 Cannery Row, Suite II, Monterey, Calif., (831) 375-3770.