Front page article in Press Enterprise today:
BERWICK’S $250G+ FIND: Rare film posters from attic called collectors’ ‘dream’
By SUSAN SCHWARTZ
Press Enterprise Writer
March 13, 2012
BERWICK — A set of rare movie posters from 1930 and 1931 reportedly turned up in a Berwick attic last summer glued together and being used as insulation. Now an auction house expects to get more than $250,000 for the collection. The posters, dubbed “The Berwick Discovery” by Heritage Auctions, include a 1931 poster for “Dracula” starring Bela Lugosi — only the fourth of its kind still known to exist. Heritage sold one for $310,000 in 2009. The treasures also include the only known copy of a poster from “The Public Enemy” and one of only two known posters for “Little Caesar.” Both were gangster movies from 1931. “All collectors live for the dream of making a great find, like a stack of posters in a bookstore that the bookstore didn’t know what to do with,” said Gray Smith, the poster expert for Heritage, who painstakingly peeled apart the Berwick posters. The job took 80 hours.
A mystery
Exactly where the posters have been all these years is a mystery. They probably came from one of Berwick’s three movie houses at the time: The Strand, The Palace or the Temple, the auction house said. Smith said in the 1930s, movie house owners would plaster posters for new releases over older ones. After the stack built up, they’d be removed from the boards.
On Oct. 23, a member of allposterforum.com wrote that six stacks of these glued together posters were found between the rafters of a Berwick attic, according to moviepostercollectors. com. The homeowner died, and a small estate sale was being held in this borough, said the member, who goes by the name “Harry Caul.” Caul wrote that he received some photos from the auctioneers, Patriot Antique and Auction Center out of West Virginia, and he eagerly awaited the Oct. 23 sale. “I was in it to win it with some pretty large max bids,” he wrote. But he was blown away by the final prices.
Smith said the winner paid between $30,000 and $40,000 for the six stacks of gluedtogether posters.
‘My jaw dropped’
That winner, who is remaining anonymous, apparently never planned to keep them; the purchaser sent photos of the stacks to Heritage even before buying them, asking if Heritage would be interested in reselling them. “Little Caesar” was already visible on top of one stack, said Smith. “My jaw dropped open.” That poster alone was worth more than $20,000, he said. “I told him we’d be very interested in what they are,” Smith said. “But we couldn’t tell what their value would be unless we got them.” When the poster stacks arrived at his door, Smith saw some of the top layers weren’t in good shape. But he could see more posters peeking through the shreds. “It’s fascinating,” said Smith. “It was sort of like looking for buried treasure.” Smith used a clothing steamer with distilled water to melt the wallpaper paste holding the stacks together and a water spritzer to carefully soak the posters. Then he used a paint spatula to painstakingly separate them. “It’s like removing wallpaper,” he said. “Only in this case, the wallpaper was extremely valuable.”
‘Come quickly!’
Smith worked from the back to avoid damaging the fronts of the posters. The first one he peeled off the first stack was “Dishonored,” starring Marlene Dietrich in her second U.S. film. As he worked on the second poster, a blue-purple stamp started showing through. Only Warner Brothers used such a stamp at that time, and he had a feeling it was something good. Then he worked his way to the title and yelled to his assistant. “It was sort of like Alexander Graham Bell,” he remembered. “I yelled, ‘Come quickly! Does that say what I think?’” He had just uncovered “The Public Enemy,” which had never before been on the market. He estimated that poster is worth at least $25,000. Along with “Little Caesar,” it formed the template for every gangster movie afterward, Smith said.
‘Great sampling’
In the end, he was able to peel off 33 saleable posters out of about 40. “It turned out to be a great sampling of good movies.” The colors were astonishingly bright, he added. Each poster probably saw the light of day only for three days before the advertisement for the next coming attraction was plastered over it. Smith later sent the posters to a restoration shop. Staff there washed them to remove the grime and remaining paste, used chemicals to deacidify the paper, mounted them on special pH-balanced paper, and fi nally attached them to cotton duck material so they could be rolled up. “They were unfolded and put on boards, so the creases were less apparent than they would have been if they’d been stored in a box and unfolded and refolded,” he said.
Online bidding for the posters has already started. The highest bids will be the starting point for the live auction March 23, Smith said. Bidders can show up in person at the auction in Dallas, Texas, or submit bids by phone or over the Internet.
