Yahoo Finance Years later, this teenage purchase could be highly valuable at auction
Film posters are fast becoming extinct. The days of large billboard advertisements promoting the latest movie in your local cinema have been replaced by digital ads on your smartphone. All the more reason then for Sotheby’s to stage an auction.
From Friday until September 7th they will be appealing to your nostalgic soft spots by offering nearly 250 of them covering the ‘golden years’ from 1920s silents (one of only ten surviving 1921 Tarzan posters estimated at up to £18,000), through the ever popular James Bond and Star Wars (up to £12,000 for a 1964 Goldfinger poster signed by its leading lady, the late Honor Blackman), petering out in 2014.
The most expensive movie poster of all time is a futuristic skyscraper design made for the silent, black and white science fiction drama, Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang in 1927. Only four prints are known. Two are in museums and a third belongs to Leonardo di Caprio. The fourth was sold by London’s Reel Poster Gallery in 2005 for $690,000 and then resold two months ago in a bankruptcy sale in America for $1.35 million.
At Sotheby’s none will come close to that price. The majority of works are estimated in the hundreds and lower thousands to attract newcomers to this niche, but popular collecting field. Other well-known classics on offer include vintage Snow White, Gone With the Wind, Space Odyssey and Bullitt.
“Bond posters featuring Sean Connery are the most sought after”, says Sotheby’s expert, Bruce Marchant, “though Roger Moore is making headway, doubling in value over the last five years.” Moore makes several appearances in this sale - a mural sized Man with the Golden Gun; For Your Eyes Only, and A View to Kill (1984) which is likely to lead this group as it is signed by Moore (estimate £1,400 – £2,200.)
Signatures can be quite rare says Marchant. Michael Caine, for instance, only ever signed posters for his PA, and one of those, for ‘The Italian Job’, 1964, is in the sale estimated at £3,000. The poster previously belonged to Sergit Sohal, a determined collector who would find out where the stars were, and stay up all night to secure their signatures. He is selling to give his daughter a better education.
Condition is another important variable when assessing value. So many were torn down and shredded after display usage, meaning there are limited numbers of well-preserved prints that collectors will pay a premium for. Sotheby’s does condition reports in their online catalogue, but, Marchant says, they’re all good because he just wouldn’t offer anything in bad condition – unless perhaps a shoddy fifth Metrolpolis turned up.
Although poster appeal is beginning to spread to Asia, the majority of collectors are in the USA, says Marchant. Apart from Di Caprio, notable collectors include the film producer, George Lucas, who has his own museum, Martin Scorsese, and the Scottish producer Andrew McDonald (Trainspotting). Probably the largest collection of posters – numbering some 45,000 – was assembled by Chicago real estate developer Dwight Cleveland until he decided to donate 90% of them to museums including the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum at the University of Exeter.
In a forward to a book on the collection published last year, Ben Mankiewicz, the host of America’s Turner Classic Movies programme and grandson of Citizen Kane screenwriter Joseph Mankiewicz, says “movie posters represent what is perhaps the purest collision of art and commerce … they are imbued with optimism and filled with the escapist thrill of what we imagine the screen holds in store for us: romance, adventure, laughter, betrayal, tragedy, justice, redemption, truth.”
And, perhaps, a windfall years down the line.
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