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Sunday 12 October 2008

Moving pictures

John Torode watches his movie poster collection gain value

I started 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 screamer, The Mummy, starring Boris Karloff, went for £80,000 at auction. Or that the great and the good recycle iconic posters to deliver heavy-duty 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.

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