“Forgotten Hollywood”- Extensive Poster Collection Auction

Posted on November 19, 2014 by raideoman1 | No Comments

Manny P. here…

   A massive single-owner collection of vintage movie posters covering the entire history of feature films — from 1907 to the present — is going on the auction block as one lot next month. It belongs to Morris Everett Jr., who began collecting posters and lobby cards 53 years ago. He’s parting with them on December 17th at Profiles in History auction house in Calabasas, California.

   Everett, who lives in Cleveland, Ohio, and owns a New York City movie photo leasing company, said his collecting passion began as a student at the University of Virginia, sparked by a fellow student who had a fabulous small photo collection of such Hollywood’s legends as Bette Davis and Myrna Loy. On spring break in 1961, Everett found himself buying two posters at Movie Star News, a New York City landmark of movie stills, posters, and negatives that closed its doors two years ago. He started small, focusing on 20 film stars including his favorite, Natalie Wood. Then he saw an ad in a collectors’ magazine for 6,000 original movie photos from the 1920s and 1930s which he purchased for around $400. He continued to buy at conventions, auctions, from dealers and stores, until he amassed a collection totaling 196,000 posters and lobby cards representing 44,000 titles for some of Hollywood’s greatest films.

Movie Poster Collection Auction

   The single most valuable piece in the collection is a lobby card of the 1927 silent movie and science-fiction epic Metropolis. Nearly as valuable is a poster of Babe Ruth from the 1927 Babe Comes Home. Other rarities include lobby cards or posters for The Wizard of Oz, both the one from 1939 starring Judy Garland and a 1925 version with Oliver Hardy, and King Kong. There are posters from early Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplin movies and classics like Gone With the Wind and Casablanca. The collection also contains near-complete career runs on major cinema icons Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, Lon Chaney, Greta Garbo, and countless others.

   Likely buyers would be advanced genre collectors, historical institutions, well-informed dealers, or other memorabilia auction houses. The real value is in keeping the collection together as it dates to a dawn of the narrative of American cinema, the birth of feature films.

   I agree…

Until next time>                               “never forget”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 19th, 2014 at 11:37 am and is filed under Blog by Manny Pacheco. You can follow any comments to this post through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.


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