Christie's employee Caitlin Graham with an original Darth Vader costume from the Star Wars films on display in Christie's auction house on October 27, 2010 in London, E
Back in spring, Dan Levin, the boss of Premiere Props, a Los Angeles auction house for movie memorabilia, kindly led me past a 3.7m-tall grimacing dinosaur in his reception area to show me the items in his forthcoming auction catalogue. There was a set of tiny model bicycle wheels from E.T. (just the wheels, no bike) and a monkey tunic from the original 1968 Planet Of The Apes worn by the "rarer female monkeys".
But pride of place went to Lot 12, from The Godfather, "Jack Woltz bedroom severed horse head".
"It's a real horse's head from a taxidermist," Levin told me brightly. "We've had the DNA authenticated."
The severed end of the neck had been sealed up with a hard, bubbly surface painted bright red. As it happens, even this wasn't good enough for director Francis Ford Coppola, who insisted on using a real, unstuffed horse's head in the scene where an unco-operative movie mogul wakes to find the bloody head of his beloved racehorse under his bed sheets, as promised by Don Corleone ("I'll make him an offer he can't refuse"). The head was ferried in on dry ice and handed over afterwards for disposal, apparently without irony, to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Lot 12, then, is a prop head that was used only in rehearsals - and yet such is the demand for movie memorabilia that it is the star item in the catalogue, with bidding expected to reach US$20,000 ($24,000) to US$30,000.
Premiere Props is just one of a burgeoning number of movie memorabilia auction houses that have sprung up over the past decade to capitalise on the explosion in prop and costume collecting. Los Angeles is now brimming with vendors such as Movie Collectibles, offering John Wayne's red checked shirt from The Searchers for US$49,999, or Nate D. Sanders, which offers a batch of Jaws mementos including the stars' life jackets or Gerard Butler's shirt and jeans from the 2009 rom-com The Ugly Truth (bidding starts at US$750).
Even auction catalogues themselves are becoming collectables, which is understandable when they have such lovingly compiled entries. For example, "The Spy Who Loved Me submarine - functional submersible used in 1977 James Bond thriller. Maximum depth 450ft. Top speed 3.5kys. Torpedoes: none (sorry)."
Or "X-Files: alien baby in jar - feature is an alien foetus prop from the episode 'The Erlenmeyer Flask', the cliffhanger finale to the first season. In excellent condition and still in its original slime."
In the good old days, the devoted fan was content just to collect the tie-in merchandise - The Ipcress Files board game, the Charlie's Angels lunchbox, the A-Team action figures. There were even Shirley Temple dolls as far back as the 30s, with frocks, curly hair and badges that said "The World's Darling". Now the devoted fan has moved on to bigger game - acquiring the clothes and props from the movies and television shows they love, "screen-worn" preferably but "used in production" if necessary.
Levin, who previously worked as a film producer, started in memorabilia when he brought back three 25c coins from Canada that he'd picked up off the ground during the making of Driven, a 2001 Sylvester Stallone film about car racing. The coins turned out to be key props in the finished film - Stallone himself picks them up - and Levin was able to sell them for US$100. "I couldn't believe it. Three quarters and someone bought them for 100 bucks."
He began to make deals with studios and rental companies for their cast-off costumes and props. His first full auction consisted of 50 items from a supernatural B-movie starring Lori Petty called Route 666, about FBI agents battling undead entities in the desert. The tagline reads: "One way in, no way out." One representative online review said, "The film is just plain laughably bad, idiocy without a single redeeming feature to recommend it."
Levin sold all the items. "Then I sold James Spader's toilet brush to a fan, literally his toilet brush from a film."
With their televised online auctions, Levin likes to think of them as "the Home Shopping Network for movie props". In his warehouse in El Segundo, he now has more than one million items from films and television. On the day I visit, he receives a consignment of rare James Dean photos. In the corner is a beaten-up red truck. To my eyes, it's a gas-guzzling fixer-upper at best but Levin explains it's Bella's truck from the Twilight films, the one driven by Kristen Stewart. As any Twilight fan will tell you, it's a 1963 Chevy Stepside C-10 pickup. The car in the book was a 1953 model but the 1963 model was easier to find. Levin estimates it's worth about US$100,000.
But this pales in comparison with other car movie sales. Last year, billionaire Elon Musk bought the Lotus Esprit submarine used by James Bond in The Spy Who Loved Me for US$966,560, while the original 007 Aston Martin DB5 from Goldfinger went for £2.9 million in 2010.
This May will bring the third and final sale of items owned by Singin' In The Rain legend Debbie Reynolds, whose massive archive of classic movie costumes and furniture was the largest in the world at its peak.
"They're all antiques, beautiful pieces," she tells me with a sigh over the telephone.
"I used to sit with all my stuff, all my memorabilia around me, and just play house, as they say."
Reynolds, 81, says her only rival for collecting was Liberace. "He and I got along famously because we loved the same era - classic Hollywood, the Golden Age. It was all a part of us. It was just something in our soul."
She began collecting in earnest after a visit to Mary Pickford's mansion, Pickfair, in the early 60s, where she saw Pickford's costumes from her silent-movie days crammed into a rickety barn.
Her plan was to create a non-profit museum of classic Hollywood memorabilia. When MGM, her old employer, sold off its props and costumes in 1970, Reynolds borrowed money to snap up such classic items as an early prop version of Judy Garland's red slippers from The Wizard Of Oz.
Over the next 40 years, she added to the collection so assiduously (her daughter, Carrie Fisher, would say obsessively) that it had to be stored in vast climate-controlled warehouses at her ranch, north of Santa Barbara.
Reynolds, a veritable paradigm of the showbiz trouper, made many attempts to raise the funding for her museum with proposed sites in Las Vegas, Hollywood, even Tennessee.
The sagas and bankruptcies, exacerbated by the odd rogue husband, are wryly documented in her memoirs, Unsinkable, published last year. But even this most doughty of stars has finally admitted defeat.
"My collection was one of a kind," she says, "and it was a crime for it not to be saved. But you run out of strength and time and you just get tired of trying to do what should be done."
Her first two auctions, held in 2011, were a sensation, raising more than US$25 million.
But then, she was selling such charged icons as Charlie Chaplin's bowler hat and Julie Andrews' guitar from The Sound Of Music.
Marilyn Monroe's white "subway dress" from The Seven Year Itch sold for US$5.2 million alone.
Joe MADDALENA is the chief executive of Profiles in History, the auction house that handles Reynolds' auctions. It has sold everything from James Dean's switchblade in Rebel Without A Cause to the Cowardly Lion's canister of "Witch Remover" from The Wizard Of Oz.
"When I started this business in 1996," says Maddalena, "there was one buyer, Planet Hollywood. There was maybe a ragtag group of people who collected haphazardly, and Debbie was one of them. I literally created the business. The field didn't exist before I started."
Maddalena, who collected a million baseball cards as a child, says the movie memorabilia market has expanded, thanks in part to the internet and eBay, but mainly because of the intense global appeal of movies. "There are very few things that are universal, but films are. You can go to anyone in the world and they know who Harry Potter is. There's no difference between buying this stuff and buying a Ferrari or a Francis Bacon. It's the exact same emotion. It's the exact same impulse. The buyer felt a connection with it and wanted to own it."
For the past three years, Maddalena has hosted a television show called Hollywood Treasure, in which he "scours the globe with a team of talented investigators" to uncover movie artefacts. Memorabilia lore is full of lost treasures and holy grails.
For classic movie buffs, the most venerable missing icon is probably Maria, the hauntingly beautiful female robot from Fritz Lang's 1927 futuristic epic Metropolis. Maria was, in fact, a plaster-cast costume with plastic strips painted bronze. She/it was supposedly destroyed during the climactic scene, where she is burnt at the stake like a high-tech Joan of Arc, but some claimed she went into storage before being destroyed during the war.
For modern movie fans, the holy grail is probably the Darth Vader costume from the first Star Wars film. A purportedly original helmet and costume appeared at an American Film Institute exhibition in 2003, but no one was able to say for sure if it was the one used on screen. Just to confuse the issue, copies of the helmet were made from the original mould and used on the film's promotional tour. Original Prop, a blog and podcast devoted to prop collecting, discusses the matter in considerable depth.
Colourful stories and theories about items abound because, amazingly, even as late as the 70s, props and costumes were considered the by-product of the real product - the films or TV shows. Theatrical property was a grey area legally, and many independent prop and makeup houses kept their own stuff. At the end of filming, the cast and crew often took home props and costumes, or they could snap up bargains at the wrap-party fire sale. A crew member on one of the Bond movies actually bought shirts worn by Roger Moore to wear himself, as if they were a bargain from a jumble sale.
Maddalena's biggest find remains Captain Kirk's command chair from Star Trek, or "TOS" (The Original Series) as Trekkies call it. When the show ended the production company gave the sets to UCLA, only for the university to junk them, including the fabled cuboid grey chair of the Starship Enterprise. For 30 years, serious Trekkies considered it lost or destroyed.
Then actor George Takei, who played Sulu, met a woman on a cruise claiming to have Kirk's chair. It turned out she was the widow of a man who'd rescued the chair from a skip and for 30 years used it in his home bar. He'd even installed a button on the console panel that opened and closed his curtains.
Maddalena says when he walked in with Takei to verify the chair, "Our jaws dropped. It was surreal. The most famous chair in television history sitting in this bar in Pacoima." It sold at auction in 2002 for US$305,000 and now resides at a museum in Seattle.
Prop Store, which has branches in Britain and the United States, is at the more sedate end of collecting. It sells items at a fixed price and avoids the drama of auctions. But still, emotions run deep. "People are buying these things because of their passion," says chief operating officer Brandon Alinger.
Most of the staff at Prop Store, which boasts the original 3.3m-long Nostromo spaceship model from Alien in its LA office, are film buffs and collectors themselves.
Alinger was such a fan of Star Wars and the Indiana Jones films that he visited the original locations in Tunisia in 2001. "I found there were still big fibreglass pieces of the plane they blew up in the desert for Raiders Of The Lost Ark. I still have a box full of the pieces at home."
Unlike many auction houses, Prop Store can offer a lifetime guarantee of authenticity.
Provenance, as with all forms of collecting, is the deciding factor for any item. Outright forgeries are rare, though one man did come forward last year claiming to have a long-lost pair of ruby slippers from The Wizard Of Oz. (Legend has it Toto chewed up one of the four or five pairs made for the film, one of which sold for US$2 million to US$3 million in 2001.) He was quickly discredited, although a real pair of the red slippers was stolen from the Judy Garland Museum in Minnesota in 2005 and has yet to resurface.
Alinger says it is more common for sellers to come forward with a mass-produced item, thinking it is a prop from the film.
"We get people coming in with a Star Wars Stormtrooper helmet all the time. Even though it says on the back of the helmet 'Copyright 20th Century Fox', which no prop would have. I have to break the sad news to them that it is only a $40 piece of licensed merchandise."
By common consensus, the most avid collectors are sci-fi and fantasy fans, and the most avid subgroup are the Trekkies. Gerald Gurian, an industrial engineer from Las Vegas, has been collecting Star Trek memorabilia for 35 years. He runs a lovingly researched website devoted to TOS lore and has converted one of his rooms into a replica of the Star Trek USS Enterprise bridge.
He once took his original TOS mid-grade phaser pistol to a Star Trek convention in Las Vegas, where it caused quite a stir among the actors. Takei was sufficiently animated to "pose for a photo and point it at my face", he says.
Most recently, Gurian tells me in an email, he has acquired a "miniature" of the Enterprise-D saucer section used in the crash-landing sequence in Star Trek: Generations (1994). He keeps it in his garage, he says, where it is protected from the elements.
Explaining his affection for the show, Gurian says: "I think it would have to do with the very positive portrait of humanity and the future of mankind that is embodied in the show. Star Trek TOS has always been my first love. I have a very early memory of constructing a model of the Starship Enterprise from metal coat-hangers and silver foil."
Unlike, say, property developers, memorabilia collectors are genuine fans at heart and boast a long and glorious tradition of eccentric acquisitiveness. Forrest J. Ackerman, the late science-fiction writer, was one such notable in the field. He filled his Los Feliz house with so many movie mementos (more than 300,000) it was dubbed the Ackermansion and celebrated in a coffee-table book. The house became a mecca for film fans and boasted everything from Bela Lugosi's Dracula cape to the alien arm from The War Of The Worlds (1953).
"One day you'll wind up in an 18-room home with three garages in which you couldn't park a pogo stick," he warned would-be collectors who visited.
Bob Burns, a prop master and actor in 1950s horror films, amassed a collection that was similarly honoured with a book, It Came From Bob's Basement. The jovial Burns, who calls himself the "head geek" of memento wonderland, is the proud owner of Darth Vader's severed hand from The Empire Strikes Back - still clutching the lightsabre. He gives witty tours of his horror icon mask collection: "Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, myself when I was alive, Lon Chaney jnr ..."
Burns is probably best known for rescuing the original contraption used in the 1960 film adaptation of H.G. Wells' novel, The Time Machine, starring Rod Taylor. He first lost out to the owner of a travelling show when bidding at the 1970 MGM auction.
Burns had US$1000 to spend and it sold for US$8000. Heartbroken, he was reassured by the film's director, George Pal, that it would all work out in the end. Amazingly, two years later, a friend ran across the chair in a thrift store in Orange, California. Burns snapped it up for his original bid of US$1000. Using the original plans and a team of fellow enthusiasts, the machine was diligently restored. The prop's original barber's chair was missing, so a replica was added. It now resides in Burns' basement, with a life-size Rod Taylor model in the original smoking jacket at the helm.
The original missing barber's chair, an 1899 Berninghaus Hercules #58 hydraulic, has turned up in various places over the years, including a Victorian Casino auction in Las Vegas priced at US$15,000, and more recently a store at Disney World. The latest asking price was up to US$37,000.
As Debbie Reynolds told me, "It's one thing to be a fan, it's another thing to be a collector."
Dolly Parton will receive the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for her charity work.