Hello all,
I have recently become a "collector" of movie posters!
Well, not quite. Too many movies, too many themes, so I decided to become a collector of only James Bond movie posters!
Still not quite. There are too many countries, and so I narrowed a little bit more my choices to the two countries that one can say are "more relevant" to James Bond. UK, first and above all, of course, and then, well, US, after all, I found out that Barbara Broccoli lives in California... :-)
Still, after reading a lot about JB posters, I found that there are too many formats, sizes, etc. I needed to narrow even more. So I chose UK original quad and US one sheet.
That narrows my collection to only around 60 posters. That is achievable!!
Well, not really. Dr. No UK quad original can be found for around $25k! That means, I will never be able to afford it and certainly even if I could I would not spend $25k in a movie poster. My dad would disinherit me, my wife would divorce me, my dog would bite me, my daughters would just not understand what's going on ... Just kidding.
So, all considered, I decided to collect PICTURES of the mentioned posters! That is correct, the images, jpg files of those 50-60 posters.
Even if I had all these posters for real, I would not have enough free wall here at home to hang them and even if I had, my wife would never allow me to. So, jpg files are good enough. I can rotate them easily as wallpapers in my big monitor and I certainly will stare at them much more often than if they were hanged in some wall.
So, after reading, searching and studying about JB UK quad and US 1-sheet posters, I got questions. Here they are:
1 - Die Another Day (DAD)
This page,
http://www.007magazine.co.uk/factfiles/factfiles_dad.htm, shows a small image for the UK Quad. I cannot see in this small image, the date "20.11.02", in red, at the bottom of it. This is the only site that shows the DAD UK quad with such image (poster with NO date). Any and every other site always shows the same poster but with the date down there. Official posters that show James Bond posters like this
http://www.posterparty.com/images/james-bond-23-british-quads-movie-poster-PYR33026.jpgalso show the date. The book "James Bond, 50 Years of Movie Posters", that shows the UK Quad at the beginning of each section for each JB movie, also shows, for DAD, the UK Quad with the date.
My question is: as far as I could figure out, final versions of posters, like UK quad and US 1 sheet, are not supposed to have the movie release dates, release dates are supposed to exist in "Advance" posters. Why then I cannot find anywhere the DAD UK Quad WITHOUT the said date, except for this one site?
2 - Moonraker (MR)
I have found credible pictures of real original UK quad for MR where some show the big writing as:
"Albert R. Broccoli presents Roger Moore as James Bond 007 in Ian Fleming's Moonraker"
while others show:
"Albert R. Broccoli presents Roger Moore as Ian Fleming's James Bond 007 in Moonraker"
Are there really two versions of the UK Quad for MR?
If so, is any of them more valuable than the other?
I noticed that in later posters (from previous and later movies), it is always "... "Albert R. Broccoli presents Roger Moore as Ian Fleming's James Bond 007 in ..." so I would guess that the other way to write it should be kind of out of the pattern. Am I right?
3 - The Living Daylights
Why is it so difficult to find information about the UK quad for TLD style B, the one in blue background with the sexy lady in white dress? It seems nobody cares much about this poster, maybe because style A, as I read, was the last JB poster manually drawn by an artist while probably Style B was not entirely manually drawn...
4 - Finding the pictures in high resolution.
I had a very very hard time trying to find high resolution pictures of the posters. I was actually about to give up when I found ha.com. This site was the only one that keeps records and images for all its past sales and I was then able to find nice, big images of almost all the posters that I wanted. BUT a few remain missing, mostly the newer ones (Licence to Kill, Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace and Skyfall).
Is there a way to "get" high resolution images of these four movies?
I understand movie posters are copyrighted material, so I even bought the book "James Bond, 50 Years of Movie Posters", hoping that it would show ALL main movie posters for all James Bond movies and it ALMOST does that. It does not show the UK Quad final for Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace and Skyfall, instead, it shows Advance for all of them. Why, I don't know. I felt betrayed to have bought the book, find that for every section of every movie it always starts with the UK Quad final, but for the three most recent movies, it does not. Makes no sense... (the book shows only ONE poster for Skyfall...)
My plan was to scan them but first, these three movies are missing the posters that I want, and secondly, the UK quad images are printed across two pages, which makes scanning the images very difficult. Anyway, I would destroy the book if necessary, to have the pages isolated and then get a good scan (and then "glue" the two parts with photoshop) even the book had these posters.
So, my question is... is there a good soul willing to send me good scans of those movies, UK quad and US 1 sheet? Why do I need high resolution? Well, my monitor is 2560x1600px. I can find Skyfall UK quad for sale at 50 sterling pounds, but it is interesting that only a few years after, it is impossible to find UK quad for Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace... You can find UK Quad for Casino Royale (1967) but you cannot for CR 2006. Go figure...
Well, that was it. Thank you.
Andy
