Don’t hold your breath for relics from the Titanic anytime soon

March 25, 2009
Posted by Noah

You can’t be in this business without having wondered – at least once during the last 24 years since it was located – whether the 5,000+ relics actually salvaged from the sunken remains of The Titanic would ever actually come to the auction block and what they would be worth. The answer to the former is, as of today, probably never, and the answer to the latter is: who knows?

The AP is reporting widely today that a U.S. Maritime District Judge in Virginia, one Rebecca Beach Smith, is set to rule within weeks that the wreck is “an international treasure” and that “the salvaged items must remain together and accessible to the public… ensuring the 5,900 pieces of china, ship fittings and personal belongings won't end up in a collector's hands or in a London auction house, where some Titanic artifacts have landed.”

The disputed sale of just a few of these things brought great scrutiny and some impressive prices when they were auctioned off, and I’m sure the imminent ruling doesn’t do a whole lot for the folks at RMS Titanic, Inc., who salvaged the relics and were seeking limited ownership of the artifacts from the world’s most famous shipwreck. It is a legal to-do that began in 1985 when the first images of the ship were broadcast to surface.

I won’t lie and tell you that I’m 100% happy about this, because I would have hoped that Heritage’s crack team of Consignment Directors would have been all over this and would have brought the goods, and the glory, home to HA HQ in Dallas. On the other hand, this is indeed good news for the tens of millions of people who have already stood in line to see the artifacts in exhibitions, and for the millions more who will. It may not be a win for Heritage, necessarily, but it is a win for the world at-large. Let’s all give a hearty cheer! Hooray Humanity!

As I enjoy doing with any story like this, I went to Heritage Auction Archives and did a search for “Titanic.” The results were somewhat varied. I expected the myriad movie posters from the late-1990s James Cameron pic, and from various other movies about the sinking, but there are also a good selection of autographs from survivors. The coolest lot, though a prop from the movie, is a lifejacket, which was used during filming. Do you think that Leo might have actually touched it? Maybe Kate spilled her Diet Coke on it? Perhaps James Cameron berated the extra wearing it?

The autographs, especially for one Milvina Dean – the youngest survivor from the ship, btw – seem to have turned into a cottage industry. I suppose, though, I would have done the same thing had I survived the most famous wreck in history…

I was no great fan of the Leo and Kate movie. Despite good FX for the time, the script was horrendous and a lot of the acting wooden. My friends and I actually referred to the movie as The Craptanic. What do you want? I was very cynical, if not clever. I did, though, develop a new appreciation for the movie a year or two after its release when I traveled through India for several months with a good friend. Everywhere we went, it seemed, the movie was playing to massive sold out audiences – especially in Bangalore, Mumbai and Chennai (formerly known as Madras) – and I must have seen at least 1,000 Titanic t-shirts up and down the sub-continent and into Nepal. That was added to the hundreds of greetings we received as we walked the streets of cities or rode trains where people would stop us, shake our hands and say: “Namaste! Leo DiCaprio Titanic! Best film! Best film!”

Check out the HA Titanic archive above, or right here.

'Freaks' find acceptance – an update on a very cool movie poster…

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March 24, 2009
Posted by Noah

You may recall that, oh, exactly 14 days ago your humble blogger looked into the churning fog of his crystal ball and recognized an absolute gem just dying to be discovered in Heritage’s March movie poster auction. The humble little prize was a very rare 1932 original Freaks movie poster. I’m not saying that I personally made it a great poster – you flatter me, you flatterer you – I’m just sayin’…

That poster sold last weekend for more than $100,000, and was the second highest lot in the entire auction, right behind an exquisite 1931 Dracula one sheet that I also wrote about more than a month ago in these very pages. Let me just say that, yes, the thing still creeps me out.

The story behind the Freaks poster – which hopefully will become very familiar to everyone soon if it gets picked up off the AP wire and distributed nationally – is one of those great tales that makes the final sale of it that much better.

I had the good fortune to help with the crafting and pitching of the story and to talk to the consignor, one Anne Stafford, out of Southern California. She bought the poster in a dusty old antiques story in Corona Del Mar in the early 1970s. She and her husband were young and struggling at the time – the way so many of us struggle(d) at that age – and she agonized over the $10 the dealer wanted for it. Her love for her husband, and his love of B-movies, was greater than the immediate hardship caused by the missing sawbuck. He loved the poster, they hung it on the wall with tacks until years later when Anne decided to have it framed. Fast forward almost 40 years and the thing sells at auction for 10,000 times its original price. Pretty good investment, yes?

I love stories like this not just because they end happily with the consignor getting justly rewarded for a true treasure, but because the original purchase of the thing, and its subsequent preservation, was an act inspired by the love of a wife for her husband. I don’t have to tell anyone that the journey of a marriage is sometimes biting and sometimes bit – to paraphrase Russel Hoban in Riddley Walker – but ultimately worth it when you give yourself over to what it represents. I like to think that this poster was a witness to both the good times and the bad in their marriage, and ultimately a witness to the value of the institution itself.

Things like the story of this poster are what the story of marriage is built on, what generations relate down the line. That story, with the poster’s auction, is now part of the public domain, and the poster is now in a new home. All these years the Staffords had been sitting on a museum quality rarity, one of the greatest posters in the entire hobby, and one that is worth every cent the buyer ultimately paid for it. Had I had the cash then you can bet I would have dropped it on the thing in a second. For them, however, it was simply that great birthday present from the early 1970s that seemed to cost so much at the time.

Still married, and waiting for that healthy payment check for their consignment, they can laugh about the initial stress of that original purchase, and wish that they had bought a few more posters, spending a few more dollars they weren’t sure they had.

“One of us, one of us! Gooble gobble, gooble gobble!”

March 10, 2009
Posted by Noah

You either know exactly what I’m talking about above, or what you already suspected has truly come to pass; that I’ve lost my mind. For anyone with money on the latter, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but it’s a clear reference to the 1932 cult classic horror movie Freaks. See it once and you’ll never forget it, and you’ll definitely find yourself chanting the title quote of this post at some point in your life. I’m not saying I like it; it’s simply a fact…

It also happens that the original 1932 movie poster for Freaks is one of the most sought after, and rarest posters in all of the hobby. It also just so happens that Heritage has one – maybe the only surviving one, who knows… – in the March 20 Vintage Movie Poster Auction. It is a rare gem of the highest order, and truly one of the greatest horror movie posters ever to surface. This particular one is an insert poster, about 14-inches across and three feet high, so not massive, but a true beauty from a movie that is almost 80 years old and still as difficult to watch today as it was back then.

“It’s one of a kind, that’s for sure,” said Grey Smith, our Movie Poster Director. “What’s there really to say? It’s just an exceedingly rare poster. MGM realized they made a mistake, pulled it, and let it sit in their vaults for 15 years, or more, before giving it to an independent distributor.”

One of the account executives that I work with here in Marketing, Eric, overheard me talking about the movie with our Marketing VP, Debbie.

“I’ve seen that movie,” he said. “That’s, uh…. That’s a disturbing movie.”

Eric keeps it pretty low-key, so I can only assume he was shaking and cowering on the inside at the memory.

Freaks was so gruesome, and so over the top, and people were so tweaked by it that MGM first tried to cut the movie from 90 minutes to 60 to minimize the outrage, and ultimately shelved it. In the hands of independent distributors, it became a true cult classic in the 1960s and 1970s, and then in the 1980s and 1990s kids like me and my brothers, and countless thousands of others like us, were able to rent it from the local video store. I pored over the movie with friends obsessively during many a late night in college – a few beers or a bottle were sometimes involved – and we invariably drew the ire of neighbors when one or two people would get the bug to take up the chant of “Gooble gobble, gooble, gobble!”

The movie, directed by Dracula director Tod Browning – it effectively ended his career – is dramatically no great shakes. In a nutshell: Blonde bombshell trapeze artist falls for strongman. They plot to seduce the sideshow midget, who stands to gain a large inheritance. Complications ensue. Couple is found out. Freaks attack couple, mangling them. The moral? It’s not the physical freaks who are the real freaks. It’s the “normal” couple with their dastardly intent. The original version of the movie had the freaks castrating the strong man and completely disfiguring the trapeze artist, to the point where she had to live in the side show as The Squawking Chicken Lady. So un-PC.

The freaks in Freaks are all real, every last one of them. And yes, it is still hard to watch. It is only necessary, however, to watch but once to have it indelibly seared in your brain in perpetuity.

Still creepy after all these years…

Jan. 30, 2009
Posted by Noah

I just can’t help but shudder a little when I think about it. Hmmm… So big by about so big… It was a cardboard reprint of a movie poster for the original Dracula movie, with Lon Chaney – not the Style B One Sheet Dracula in the upcoming Movie Poster Auction, which got me thinking in the first place – and I was about six when it came in to our house. It was a gift from my parents.

“Um… Thanks, mom…”

It came with a companion: A Boris Karloff Frankenstein poster. All these years later, a grown man with a family, sitting in a cube in this beautiful building, I get a link for the star of the movie poster auction. It’s from the movie poster director Grey Smith. It’s a consignment he’s been waiting for with bated breath because the poster is so rare. I open it up – as you can right here. It’s Dracula. I shudder.

No doubt it’s a great poster, incredibly rare, expensive as all get out, yet all I can see is the Dracula poster from our house that my brother Cris insisted always hang in the hallway outside my room, because he knew how it creeped me out. And he knew I would have to walk past it every night in the middle of the night to get to the bathroom.

I suppose that it is the point of this poster – to be so scary – and that I should be grateful to the studio geniuses, and to Lugosi, for providing me with such supreme creepiness. The 1931 Dracula is still the archetype of the character and clearly this poster is a cornerstone piece in any major collection. I am afraid that were I alone with it, however, I would become so unsettled that I would do to it what I finally did to the poster that haunted me grades one through four. It involved our backyard, a dirt pit and some matches. My brother Cris was pretty mad. My parents just laughed.