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Saturday 22 November 2008

Moving pictures

John Torode watches his movie poster collection gain value

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 judgment led me to collect gloriously tacky B-movie sci-fi posters from the 1950s and early 1960s. Take Varan the Unbelievable: the poster depicts a giant lizard rising from a bunker beneath a lake, to menace Dana Wynter, who is falling out of her translucent blouse. Varan’s mission was ‘to terrorise, 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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