Moving pictures
John Torode watches his movie poster collection gain value Istarted collecting movie posters half a century ago. It was a nerdy and downmarket hobby for an ambitious East End grammar-school swot, and the posters were worth next to nothing. Yet, recently, the nerd quotient has dropped sharply Can you believe a vintage poster advertising the 1932 cult scream er, The Mummy
, starring Bori Karloff, went for £80,000 at auc tion. Or that the great and th good recycle iconic posters to deliver heavyduty cultural messages? Soon after the Islamist attack on the World Trade Center, George Bush presented the Japanese Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, with a 1950s High Noon poster. Duty and courage. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. Koizumi duly replied that Gary Cooper had fought alone, but the whole world stood beside America.
Then, three years ago, London’s Design Museum effectively classified posters as art, holding a very successful retrospective of works by the great Saul Bass, who produced ice-cold, minimalist works for Preminger’s pretentious movies. Remember the revolutionary ads for Sinatra’s heroin-chic epic, The Man with the Golden Arm — a stylised but distorted arm, in black, on a plain white background? Or Anatomy of a Murder — a stark matchstick man dismembered and lying on a dirty yellow background?
So it is not surprising that trendy poster galleries are replacing the dusty and charmingly chaotic and idiosyncratic shops of years ago. What has pushed movie posters upscale? My one friend in the movies, Brian Skeet — the British producer/director who made The Weekend starring Brooke Shields, and that innocent Gallic sex comedy, The Misadventures of Margaret — once told me he blamed Hollywood. Frankly, Margaret was not great art. But the poster accompanying its release in France certainly was. One evening Skeet, who lived next door to me in Soho, invited me to see the stunning framed copy which dominated his living-room. Brian expounded his theory that posturing Hollywood intellectuals were driving prices up. Stars and directors once exchanged Rolexes or Rolls-Royces at the end of a shoot. Now they present historic posters for which they happily pay a fortune.
Maybe so. But it is still possible to furnish your walls for as little as a couple of hundred pounds a throw. And to speculate successfully. I own about 50 pieces, worth perhaps £30,000. Most I bought long after prices had started to rise, but I can’t have paid more than £3,000 for the lot.
In spite of the emergence of an efficient, internet-based global market, collecting remains a matter of luck, judgment and hard graft. Consider my treasured French poster for the original Lolita, with the delicious nymphet, Sue Lyon, sporting red-framed, heart-shaped sunglasses, and sucking provocatively on a lollypop. I came across it while pawing through the junk on a stall in London’s Portobello Road. The stallholder said it was a reproduction, and let me have it for next to nothing. I judged it was the real thing, and so it proved. It advertises the 1972 French re-release of my all-time favourite movie, and the last example, sold at auction seven years ago, fetched $450.
Then there are those iconic Bass posters described above. They are well beyond my price range. But I possess an even more striking example of his work. It is for Billy Wilder’s Cold War comedy, One, Two, Three, set in divided Berlin. Because the film is little known, the poster cost me a couple of hundred pounds, instead of a couple of thousand.
A mixture of luck and judg ment led me to collect glo riously tacky B-movie sci-fi posters from the 1950s and early 1960s. Take Varan the : the poster depicts Unbelievable giant lizard rising from a bun
er beneath a lake, to menace ana Wynter, who is falling ut of her translucent blouse.
aran’s mission was ‘to terror , to destroy... to revenge’. The Day Mars Invaded Earth offers a hysterical all-American family, about to be reduced to ‘human shells, their brains destroyed by super-minds of another world’. Great stuff. Such posters are worth a bit now, partly because — postmodern irony — they adorn the walls of advertising agencies and classy design consultancies, rather than the bedrooms of schoolboy nerds.
Or how about the Carry On series? As the films became cultural artefacts, the value of their bawdy posters rose. I judged the knock-on effect would drag up the price of posters for the derivative Doctor In... series. I was right. I remain convinced that my posters for Warhol’s pseudo-shocking cult movies will eventually take off too. Alas, they have not done so yet. But the joy of even poor investments is that they still look amazingly cool on your wall. And, these days, no one will call you a nerd.
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