WE’VE COMPILED THE ULTIMATE MOVIE MEMORABILIA WISH LIST
By the Intelligent Collector Staff
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“Fantasy For the Price of a Burger,” read The New York Times’ headline on October 23, 1991, the morning after Planet Hollywood made its star-studded splash on West 57th Street. Every A-lister in Hollywood’s alphabet was there for the restaurant’s opening night, where Cap’n Crunch-encrusted chicken tenders were served alongside one of Judy Garland’s test costumes from The Wizard of Oz, a life-size Terminator and countless more props and costumes. Among their illustrious ranks were Planet Hollywood’s initial shareholders: Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone.
More than 30 years after that first grand opening, Heritage Auctions presents Treasures from Planet Hollywood, featuring more than 1,600 props and costumes displayed in locations around the globe. Nearly every offering in the March 20-24 event is a movie memory that needs no introduction, from the Titanic wood panel upon which Kate Winslet stayed afloat and the Harley-Davidson chopper Bruce Willis rode in Pulp Fiction after Zed was dead, baby, to the blaster Princess Leia carried across the forest moon of Endor in Return of the Jedi and the spaceship that sent baby Kal-El from Krypton to Earth in Superman: The Movie. Or, as Heritage Executive Vice President Joe Maddalena says, “Something from everything you like is in here.”
The Intelligent Collector staff couldn’t agree more. Read on for the lots that have us ready to hit that “Place Bid” button.
Kevin Costner “Crash Davis” Baseball Uniform From Bull Durham
Ron Shelton’s Bull Durham is, was and will forever stand tall as The Best Sports Film Ever Made. It’s not about the winning and the losing; it’s not even about the scoring, except for Susan Sarandon’s Annie Savoy, who credits her season-long hook-ups to “quantum physics, molecular attraction and timing,” which is no way to get to second base. Its biggest revelations reside in the smallest places and the quietest moments: the smoky, beer-scented manager’s office; the 10-balls-for-a-quarter batting cages; the tedious bus rides between nowhere towns in the Carolina League; the front-porch whispers of an opening for a manager in Visalia next season. It’s a comedy burdened by the reality that life in the minors is closer to having to get a real job than getting called up to The Show. Baseball might be a kids’ game. But it’s hell on grown-ups.
Which is the entire point of Bull Durham, a masterpiece in a minor key. It renders The Young Stud (Tim Robbins’ Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh) as a sad punchline, the dope on the rise who’s too dumb to get out of his own way. And it presents The Mentor (Kevin Costner’s Crash Davis) as the hired gunslinger “who went from town to town plying his trade” to collect a check and kiss the girl, as Shelton wrote in his making-of book The Church of Baseball. Ebby was Shelton’s take on the court jester; Crash, his version of the Western hero armed with a bat instead of a rifle, a catcher’s mitt instead of a saddle. For those of us who’ve seen Bull Durham 100 times, give or take, Crash’s Durham Bulls uniform – which came from one of the film’s producers! – is as meaningful as anything John Wayne wore to a gunfight. And whenever you see that uni, you can’t help but remember that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap; Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone; there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter; and that it’s always better to open your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve. –Robert Wilonsky, staff writer
Group of 2019 License Plates From Blade Runner
The biggest fans of the 1982 feature film Blade Runner love to refer to the fact that the movie’s art department had plenty of time to work on the sets and overall look of the film due to a screen actors strike that delayed the shoot for months. And Blade Runner is, to this day, one of the best-looking movies of all time, being one of the last major productions to make full use of in-camera, non-CGI techniques to nail its iconic visuals – relying on matte paintings and models, multi-pass exposures, meticulous camera movement and lighting tricks, and the kind of old-school resourcefulness and man-powered know-how that would evaporate under the incoming era of George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic.
Four telling pieces of that original Blade Runner in Heritage’s Planet Hollywood auction are emblematic of the movie and its staggering visual legacy. Presented as one lot, they are something one could point to while saying about filmmaking (or certainly this film), “God is in the details.”
The movie’s dystopian 2019 Los Angeles buzzes with vehicles – “spinners” – that make their way along perpetually wet and claustrophobic streets and through the darkly soaring airways of urban canyons, and their strange metal skins are punctuated with license plates created by Tom Southwell, who, along with his fellow Blade Runner art directors, often referred to Heavy Metal magazine and the artist Jean “Moebius” Giraud as inspiration for their work on the film. These four original plates, distressed for filming, are wonderfully graphic and stand as discrete pieces of Blade Runner’s dark heart: The authoritarian font of the alphanumeric tag, the emphatic Japanese seal, the ominous bar code and the sinister letter “Z” set on a black ground speak volumes about both state and corporate omniscience in a future haunted by hunted and desperate replicants. Philip K. Dick and Ridley Scott painted a specific and prescient picture: Wherever we’re headed, we can run, but we can’t hide. Not on or off-world. –Christina Rees, staff writer
Rhinestone Contact Sheet Photo Binders, Publicity Transparencies and Revised Draft Script
Rhinestone isn’t a perfect movie. In fact, if you believe the haters at the Razzie Awards – who gave the 1984 musical comedy eight nominations, including one for Worst Picture – it’s not even a good movie. But do I still love this film? Oh, I so do. My fondness for it is so well known that one friend gave me the soundtrack on vinyl a couple of Christmases ago, and another has me listed in his phone contacts as “Rhinestone Rhonda.” If you haven’t seen Rhinestone – and based on its disappointing box-office results, I’m betting a lot of you haven’t – the plot is a gender-flipping riff on My Fair Lady, in which Dolly Parton’s Jake Farris (a way-too-talented performer for the tacky New York City nightclub where she sings for her supper) has two weeks to turn Sylvester Stallone’s Nick Martinelli (a tone-deaf taxi driver) into a country and western singer. To that end, Jake takes Nick to her Tennessee hometown for a kind of country music boot camp, where hillbilly jokes, high jinks and a somewhat implausible love connection ensue. There’s also a glorious scene where Nick rides a galloping white horse through a glittering Times Square and a big, flashy finale where Nick and Jake don rhinestone- and sequin-studded duds for a rousing duet that wins over a tough NYC crowd.
That final spectacle is captured in some of the 400-plus color transparencies offered in this lot, alongside a revised draft script and a slew of black-and-white contact sheets featuring behind-the-scenes images from the film and special portraits of its two stars, many of them shot by Bruce Talamon. Incidentally, before Talamon was a Hollywood stills photographer, he had a successful career photographing the hottest soul, funk and R&B musicians of the 1970s and early ’80s – work that received some renewed attention a few years ago when Taschen released a fantastic book of his portraits and concert photos. It’s also worth noting that the director of Rhinestone was none other than Bob Clark, who, one year earlier, directed the widely beloved A Christmas Story.
But even though you won’t find Rhinestone listed as a resume highlight for many of the folks involved in its making, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a certain kind of beauty in it. Some might find the movie a corny piece of mid-’80s fluff, but it still delights me a full 40 years later, as does every single thing captured in this grouping of images, from the oversize hairstyles and sparkly costumes to the down-home Tennessee bar scenes and the floor-to-ceiling neon cowboy that graces the titular New York club.
Yes, I know there are doubters out there, such as the Variety critic who called the film “as artificial and synthetic a concoction as has ever made its way to the screen.” But, as a counter, I’ll leave you with the words of Dolly herself: “A rhinestone shines just as good as a diamond.” –Rhonda Reinhart, editor
Patrick Swayze “Bodhi” Ronald Reagan Bank Robbery Mask From Point Break
“Utah, get me two.” That’s probably a line I’ve said every other day since 1991. Point Break was a film I didn’t know I needed in my life, but it was. I was a freshman in high school when it came out, too young to buy a ticket for a screening. I can’t remember the movie I did buy a ticket for that Saturday, but I snuck into Point Break and stayed and watched it three times. Everything about it seemed perfect, and it still does. I recently watched a 35mm print of Point Break at the Texas Theatre in Dallas and realized Kathryn Bigelow had made a masterpiece film about surfers. When I see this Ronald Reagan mask, the psychotic Zen mentality of Patrick Swayze’s Bodhi still sits with me: “If you want the ultimate, you’ve got to be willing to pay the ultimate price. It’s not tragic to die doing what you love.” In my newest film there is a lot about the ocean, and I’m just now thinking maybe Point Break had much to do with that. Years ago, I had the chance to be on the TV show Scrubs and acted with John C. McGinley. Instead of talking with him about Platoon or Se7en or all the other great things he’s been in, I beat him down with questions about Point Break. I could go on and on about this film and all my favorite quotes, but in this mask, we saw the eyes of an actor in his prime. “You got the kamikaze look, Johnny. I’ve seen it. Bodhi can smell it a mile away. He’ll take you to the edge. Past it.” This is a piece of cinematic history that maybe I go to the edge for. –Josh David Jordan, filmmaker/photographer
The Blues Brothers Paste-up Artwork Composite for Prop Window Card
I fell in love with The Blues Brothers over one summer in my childhood. My mother drove me to the town library, and I picked out a random mix of movies to play to pass the time while she was at work. The over-the-top antics and energetic musical moments made the movie an instant hit for me. I’ll preface all this by saying I was born in 1994, so watching The Blues Brothers movie was my first real introduction to Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi. It took me awhile to even realize it had all started out as a skit on Saturday Night Live! Regardless, this poster represents a special part of my youth and what started a lasting love of movies and comedy. –Jordan Dreasher, social media production assistant
Phone Booth Time Machine From Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure
Who wouldn’t want a vehicle that allows you to travel anywhere at any time? That’s what I’m banking on with the phone booth time machine from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, in which Rufus (played by comedy legend George Carlin) leads Bill and Ted back through time to meet the most fascinating people in history. (Full disclosure: Anything that had anything to do with the always excellent Carlin – I want it.) Since Sigmund Freud, Socrates, Abraham Lincoln and Beethoven are among those who already hitched a ride with Bill and Ted, maybe I’ll go the other direction and see what happens in the years ahead and who I can meet – I’m sure my new friends and I will be excellent to each other. –Steve Lansdale, staff writer
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom Signature Bullwhip
Most of my favorite movies are ones that I saw growing up: The Lord of the Rings, Braveheart, every James Bond film, The Great Escape, Saving Private Ryan. I guess you could say I had a thing for adventure movies, which is a conversation that requires the mention of Indiana Jones. They wouldn’t have made five movies if they weren’t awesome! When I think of that franchise, I immediately think of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. It was packed with moments that were sure to leave an impression on a young mind: the monkey head “brain bowl” (also in the auction), the heart-stopping (literally) sacrifice scene – the list goes on. So, if I could choose one item from this auction, it would be Indiana Jones’ signature weapon from that movie, his bullwhip. Think about it – in a way, you’d also have Han Solo’s whip. *Cue Indiana Jones theme.* –Brandon Rottler, social media production assistant
Bram Stoker’s Dracula Gary Oldman “Vlad the Impaler” Red Armor Display Figure
A bit of a sleeper, but the opening scenes of Bram Stoker’s Dracula must be one of the most epic openers of a movie, and the armor Gary Oldman wears in battle as Prince Vlad is stunning and terrifying at the same time. Instead of the typical dull steel armor we see in practically every battle scene, we have this iconic work of blood-red art. The design, the color, the shape! Imagine running into battle and being faced with a raging prince in scarlet animal-like armor that looks like sinewy muscles? Yeah, hard pass. But wouldn’t it be great on your doorstep to ward off unwanted guests? –Mina Vasquez Hudgins, social media content manager
Macaulay Culkin “Kevin McCallister” Knit Snow Cap From Home Alone
Picture it: Thanksgiving weekend, 1990. I was 10 years old and on my way to see one of my favorite Christmas movies of all time. (Yes, I have to say “one of” as A Christmas Story will always be my favorite.) It was the second weekend of Home Alone in theaters. I was just a couple of years older than Kevin McCallister, so the movie definitely resonated with me. I love Christmas (you basically have to when your last name is Noel), and I loved the comedy and emotion. That Thanksgiving weekend I never would have guessed I’d still be watching Home Alone 34 years later.
So, if I got to choose one thing in the Planet Hollywood auction, it would have to be the knit cap worn by Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone. The hat’s beige background with red moose and trees takes me right back to the theater. As I left the movie that day, I remember being sad that I still had to wait a whole month until Christmas. Time sure goes slow as a kid. Now the span between Thanksgiving and Christmas (with shopping, parties, work, family meals, trips to the post office, etc.) feels like three days. Oh, to be a kid like Kevin McCallister again – minus the larceny and violence. –Tommy Noel, video production specialist
Go here for the full list of lots in Heritage’s March 20-24 Treasures from Planet Hollywood Signature® Auction.