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ME Exclusives
Bill Brioux
Movie Entertainment
February 2010
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then what is a top movie poster worth? Millions to a studio hoping to promote its next hit, and as much as half a million to a wealthy collector who has to have a rare original.
The highest price ever paid for a movie poster? At a London auction in 2004, California collector Ken Schacter paid $690,000 U.S. for a poster of director Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece Metropolis.
However, when it comes to movie poster collecting, the scarier the better. In March of 1997, a one sheet (the industry term for a standard-size poster) from the 1932 Boris Karloff feature The Mummy sold at Sotheby’s for $453,000 – more than double the original budget for the entire film. A gigantic six sheet of a King Kong poster sold for $345,000 in 2008. Posters for Universal horror classics The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931) have sold for between $189,000 and $335,000 in the last few years.
“Vintage horror is still the biggest and most sought-after collectible, period,” says Mike Orlando, who has been dealing in movie memorabilia for 30 years at his east-end Toronto shop, Hollywood Canteen.
Over those years, Orlando – who once owned the world’s largest private collection of Humphrey
Bogart posters – has seen many trends come and go. There are several reasons, he feels, why a Frankenstein today is worth way more than a Garbo or a Gable.
“Most of the time the art work is spectacular,” he says. Another is that original horror movie posters are extremely rare. “There’s very little of that vintage paper around,” he says, citing only two or three known copies of that original Karloff Mummy poster.
The scarcity of originals – and the high prices they fetch – led to a recent scandal in the collecting world when a sharp-eyed collector spotted a forgery. Con artists apparently took cheap posters dating back to the ’30s, sanded off the worthless images, and grafted reproductions of the valued horror artwork onto the vintage paper instead.
“It happened very specifically with those high-end horror titles,” author and film historian Leonard Maltin said in an interview with Movie Entertainment. “Nobody’s bothering to make counterfeits of the Bowery Boys posters.”
Still, the incident sent a chill through the collecting world, stifling recent bids at the Dallas-based Heritage Auction Galleries. Orlando expects things to heat up again for horror titles, as well as for other classics that have hung on to their staying power, including Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz and many Disney titles.
A great film, however, doesn’t always translate into a great or valued movie poster. Maltin says the poster for the 1941 Bogart classic The Maltese Falcon is “pretty gruesome for one of the best-loved movies of all time.” According to Maltin, Bogart’s star was just beginning to rise when he made The Maltese Falcon and so the studio rushed a shot of him from High Sierra, released earlier that year, onto the Falcon one sheet. “Trouble was, Bogart had a prison haircut in High Sierra,” says Maltin, “and looked absolutely nothing like Sam Spade.”
In recent years, collectors also have turned to foreign posters of American film classics in search of more desirable images. “Savvy collectors havecome to realize that the European tradition of poster art yielded more expressive, creative and often more attractive posters than what Hollywood turned out for great American films,” says Maltin.
Dozens of foreign-language posters of American movie classics are on display at filmmaker George Lucas’s Big Rock ranch outside San Francisco. The Star Wars director has used “the Force” to amass one of the world’s largest collections of classic movie art (and share it, he does: he recently donated many originals to the University of Southern California). A large, fiery French version of Gone With the Wind as well as an out-ofthis- world one sheet from the 1956 MGM sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet hang outside the 200-seat screening room at Big Rock’s film centre.
But not all the great poster artists were Europeans. Norman Rockwell did seven posters, including his astonishingly realistic portrait of Jennifer Jones in The Song of Bernadette (1943). Rockwell’s original painting of Jones sold at auction in 2005 for $478,000. His realistic rendering for director Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons lifts the value of that poster to around $10,000, according to Orlando.
Even more involved was Saul Bass, who broke ground in the early 1950s with his stark, conceptual graphics. “He created indelible visual images for Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger and Billy Wilder films,” says Maltin.
Bass, who also designed several eyecatching, on-screen title sequences, “is his own universe,” says Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences graphic arts librarian Anne Coco. Bass shifted the emphasis from the faces of the stars to “his own concept of key art,” says Coco, who keeps tabs on more than 35,000 movie posters archived at the Academy.
Unlike Rockwell or Bass, most poster artists toiled in complete obscurity and are just now getting their due. The Academy recently held an exhibit in their Beverly Hills lobby gallery of the works of designer Paul Crifo. He worked on more than 400 campaigns, including James Bond movies from the ’60s and such classics as Norman Jewison’s 1967 hit In the Heat of the Night.
Another unsung hero was Reynold Brown, a prolific magazine illustrator recently celebrated in the book Reynold Brown: A Life in Pictures. Brown was an art director at Universal Pictures in the ’50s and worked on some of the most sought-after sci-fi and B-movie posters at Orlando’s Hollywood Canteen, including Creature from the Black Lagoon and Attack of the 50-Foot Woman. Coco, who has Brown’s The Incredible Shrinking Man on a wall in her office, says you never know where classic film posters will turn up. She’s still searching for one more one sheet to complete the Academy’s collection of Best Picture winners: Cavalcade (1932).
Coco still gets calls from people renovating and finding posters between walls and ceilings. “Someone sent us a section of a wall once and we were able to pull the poster off and conserve it,” she says. It was a silent-era, stone lithography of an early movie star, she recalls, maybe even a Chaplin.
Check your walls and attics: sold at auction, The Little Tramp could likely have paid for the entire renovation.
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