A more detailed description of this “collection” follows, but despite the hype and the half-page colour illustration, what we are looking at in this lot from a December 5 sale of film and pop memorabilia held by Christie’s East are three rather tatty film books of the 1930s – Stars of Photoplay (open to show portraits of Margaret Livingston and Harold Lloyd) and How I Broke into the Movies, containing portraits and mini-biographies of ‘Sixty Famous Movie Stars’, both of which dated from 1930, and a 1937 Picture Show Annual. Together they sold for $350 (£240).
Illustrated below is a spoof or prop playbill used in the1968 Mel Brooks film The Producers, in which a cynical attempt to produce a theatrical disaster, Springtime for Hitler, becomes an improbable hit. The prop was made by simply superimposing the show title on an actual playbill for a 1967 Broadway production of Sing Israel Sing. Taken home by an extra as a souvenir, it sold in New York for $1000 (£690).
Buyer’s premium: 17.5/10 per cent
Hype raises bidding on Tinseltown and Broadway’s movers, shakers and spoofers
US: ILLUSTRATED right we have “three great old hardcover books about the early ‘movers and shakers’ of Hollywood’s Silent and Golden Years. Out of print since the years they were published...”
