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warshawlawI once saw the original art for the Gone With The Wind movie lobby cards and posters. Many years ago I dealt in Hollywood memorabilia. I was approached at a show by a somewhat eccentric man who said he had inherited a collection of memorabilia from a MGM executive and wanted to know if I wanted to buy some Academy Awards (my specialty) materials. I did, so I made arrangements to visit him.
I visited him in the house in West Hollywood (just next to Beverly Hills) he inherited. It was the home of the former production head of MGM, Isadore "Dory" Schary, who, it turns out, was an inveterate pack rat (I know it was his house because I ended up buying several of his old Academy membership cards among the other stuff I purchased). He had thousands and thousands of incredible MGM-related artifacts throughout the house that this lucky bastard was only beginning to catalogue. Literally millions of dollars worth of stuff, from which he was privately selling the mass-produced stuff, like publications. The house was a museum. Each corner you rounded ran you smack into something else incredible: A life-sized signed portrait of Joan Crawford, a gigantic signed B&W photo of Fred Astaire dancing, costumes, etc. The attic was filled with dozens of boxes of candid personal photos from the studio, including glass negatives going all the way back in MGM history. About the only thing not there were the Ruby Slippers from The Wizard Of Oz.
The highlight of the visit was when the guy led me into yet another room crammed with memorabilia and pulled from the closet an artists' portfolio case, about 2 x 3 across. He unzipped it and pulled out sheet after sheet of stunning handpainted images that were the actual images used to create the GWTW lobby cards. They looked like 11x 14 color portraits that had been enhanced with paints. They were stunning.
If you've ever been fortunate enough to have a non-collector turn up at your show table and lay down a stellar collection, imagine that feeling raised about 1000x. GWTW memorabilia is very popular and very expensive. The posters created with these items sold for thousands. These images literally were museum-quality pieces that I would guess would have sold for tens of thousands each. The house, which was a really nice one just outside Beverly Hills, was worth far less than the stuff inside.
Obviously, I could not even offer on the collection, which is just as well since the guy was working with a film historian to document it all before trying to sell it. I have looked since then for news of the collection being sold, but have seen nothing.
The funny thing of it was that I bought a bunch of publications for a relative song and went home to go through them. Out of one fell two unused tickets for the Oscars in 1972.