Hi All,
Thanks for admitting me to the forum (and sorry it took me a while to post this message). I hope to be on here quite a lot sharing and learning about different posters.
As far back as I can remember,
I have always loved watching movies. I have great memories of my grandfather's VHS collection (mostly copied) and his (and thus my own) fascination with "Rambo!" I have great memories of going to the theater to watch movies with either my whole family, my sister, or my best friend (which included several memorable duds which we still laugh about today) as a kid, and also with new friends in college and grad school.
I started collecting DVDs in high school, thanks in large part to Blockbuster's near constant Pre-viewed DVD sales, and have built that collection up to over a thousand titles (which now includes Blu-ray and 4k disks).
In Dec 2016, I bought my first original 1sh movie poster (from Bruce H.
et al. at eMoviePoster, of course) after being introduced to the hobby and eMP site by a good friend from grad school who I reconnected with in St. Louis after my brief three year stint back in California. I had always been quite fond and nostalgic for the movie posters of my childhood in the 80s and early 90s but had never realized that folks collected original posters. At that point, the flood gates briefly opened and I quickly acquired 29 posters from eMP in my first month (I remember winning several posters consigned by a collector/dealer named Dominque Besson, which made it even more thrilling knowing they were now part of the seed of my own collection). I acquired another 31 posters from eMP during Jan-Mar 2017. I am not entirely sure why I stopped buying 1sh posters at that point but it may have had something to do with the backup of our sewer lateral into our "finished" basement of our nearly 80-year-old home. At the time, I had planned to hang many of them in the basement and make the space into a theatre room, complete with custom shelving I was planning to build to house all of our physical media. That plan went, well, to sh!t. Fast forward to 2018 and I started buying lobby cards that could more easily be displayed throughout the house.
In early 2019, I stopped buying as I really did not have a great way to store, and more importantly showcase, all of my beautiful 1sh posters I had acquired up to that point. They were relegated to a closet sitting in plastic sheets and backer boards I bought from bags-unlimited. Of course, then COVID happened and instead of returning to the hobby I actually started to put even more time into work. (Although, I did at least finally build those DVD shelves with the wood we bought all the way back in 2016!) Everything worked out and we moved to Denver in 2022.
After settling into Denver,
I have finally re-entered back into the eMP fray this year (25 posters--not counting tonight or Thursday!) after re-connecting with a different grad school friend who also enjoys collecting (particularly anything Alien or Giger) and who I turned onto eMP. Unfortunately, I have noticed that winning eMP bids are substantially higher now than they were back in 2016-2019 (per my spreadsheet, I spent a similar amount of money on 77 items from that period compared to 25 items this year). But not all bad, as this is actually how I came across the APF site. I had been exploring alternative avenues to acquire original movie posters and trying to research how to spot fake posters and vet some of these sites, including eBay, which I had somehow never really used until now.
This site has been particularly helpful to steer me away from several 'Hall of Shame' eBay sellers I initially came across, and overall it seemed like a really fun group of people who all love collecting and celebrating movie art! Overall, I have supplemented my eMP fix with many 1sh posters from: Posteritati (n=3), Movieposters.com in Canada (n=9), and Rendezvous Cinemas in the UK (n=21), as well as a steadily increasing number of items from eBay (n=37); all of which I am fairly confident to be "original" (although I haven't tried to buy anything too valuable yet). This year,
I have also invested in a substantial number of Spotlight Displays front loader frames (eyeing since 2016!)
and I am expecting my third Baroque 1sh portfolio binder any day now. This past weekend, I finally started hanging things up and have been planning out the build of a flat file storage system of sorts to horizontally store up to 8 or 9 Baroque portfolios and provide a nice work surface for unboxing posters and taking pictures. I will get some more extensive pictures up very soon of the posters and LCs I got up on the walls in our (so far) enjoyable basement.
Anyway.... Long story super long,
I am particularly interested in collecting movie poster 'ART' (primarily but not exclusively 1sh)
from the 80s and 90s that I remember fondly. Unfortunately for my wallet this includes many great works by Struzan, Alvin, and Amsel.
A major goal of mine is to collect every single piece of movie art derived from the hand of Drew Struzan (this is why I am getting the third portfolio, exclusively for all of the Struzan posters so far),
and over time, collect as many examples of hand drawn art from this period as possible from other well known artists (including Alvin, Amsel, and Tanenbaum--who I have only recently discovered thanks to eMP's previous recommendation of the new Tanenbaum book) and otherwise unknown or not so well known artists (Sadly, I have several posters in which google and eMP do not know who the artist is). Aside from that, I can be pretty eclectic and I will also slowly collect whatever paper strikes my fancy without breaking the bank (e.g., Cannon Group movies, anything Rocky/Creed, Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder, Disney and Pixar, film noir, and Chaplin/Keaton)!
Cheer for now and I promise to have more pictures up soon in the relevant sections of the forum!
-Mike
The Bruce Wolfe
Temple of Doom and Struzan
Back to the Future III posters were the first two items I ever won at eMP. The Struzan HP poster was won the following week. All three were consigned by a French collector/dealer named Dominique Besson:
Got this set of Struzan triptych posters (all DS) off of the eMP Fixed Price menu for a whopping $56(!) back in 2016:
