Words | Virginia Blackburn

Fans of the silver screen now have another reason to pursue their hobby – in some cases, that silver can be turned to gold

Film memorabilia has become big business. In December 2006, the black evening dress worn by Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s sold for £467,000 through Christie’s, while Bonhams sold the late Sir Alec Guinness’s Obi- Wan Kenobi’s cloak (the Jedi guru of Star Wars) for £54,000 last March. (Before anyone realised what it was worth, the agency that owned it had even hired it out as fancy dress.) In that same sale, one of Tom Baker’s Doctor Who costumes went for £24,600, and a Batman and Robin outfit worn in Only Fools and Horses fetched £10,200 – not bad for a get-up that must have cost way less to make.

It’s an area that has rocketed over the last 20 years. Previously, many props and costumes were destroyed after the film had been made, but all this changed in the late 1970s with the advent of Star Wars. This was the first film to utilise merchandising on a massive scale in the way almost all blockbusters do today.

Within a few years the auction houses had got in on the act and specialist dealers began to appear. Interest in the field is intense and prices mirror this. For example, whereas two decades ago a dinner jacket worn by Humphrey Bogart would have cost about £300, these days it would more likely be £300,000, although actual sales figures are almost impossible to predict. Anything associated with truly iconic figures, such as Bogart, Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn, almost make their own prices these days, such is the huge interest they command.

Carey Wallace, who set up the Film and Memorabilia department for Christie’s, still acts as their consultant. “The first general film sale I did was in May 1988,” she recalls. “The phenomenal publicity we received from the sale of Marilyn Monroe’s Some Like It Hot dress in particular, which sold for £18,000, meant that we were able to concentrate on specialist film auctions from then on. Previously, the [Charlie] Chaplin sale, held in 1987, came about as a result of getting two Chaplin collections in. One comprised all types of Chaplin memorabilia, from toys, advertising goods and posters, and so on the back of this I got the Chaplin hat and cane, which sold for £75,000 and boots, which went for £35,000.”

But these really massive prices apply only to the very top end of the market – to ultra-famous figures and films. There is a considerably cheaper side to this area of collecting, whereby you can buy authentic film props for less than £100, although these are exceedingly unlikely to see price rises on a similar scale.

“Collectors are most interested in original props and costumes,” explains Dave Farthing, who runs the film memorabilia website Movie Bits. “Anything from a Stars Wars film will sell, and Indiana Jones is also extremely popular. However, you can get much cheaper, authenticated goods. Some studios sell the props on through auction houses and eBay – this is a practice that was virtually unheard of as recently as 10 years ago.”

Obviously these are not the items that will be worth big bucks. A prop held by a minor figure in, for example, an Indiana Jones film will be worth nothing like as much as anything carted about by Harrison Ford himself. But they can be fun to own and not massively expensive, either. On the Movie Bits website there is, among other items, a pygmy skull from The Mummy Returns for £249 and a selection of swords starting at only £89.

Stephen Lane runs the Prop Store of London, another specialist dealership, which has a website, gallery and warehouses open to visitors, as well as an outlet in California. Among his recent items were a clapperboard from the 2006 remake of Casino Royale and a witch’s knife from Stardust. “A lot of collectors go into the area after watching a specific film and realising they want to own the object on the screen,” he says. “It’s not unusual for them to have a home entertainment system and get a real buzz from freeze-framing the DVD at the exact moment it shows the hero holding the object they have in their hand or framed on the wall.”

Other popular film franchises for collectors are, he says, the Bond films – one of Sean Connery’s dinner jackets from Thunderball sold in the 2007 Bonhams sale for £33,600 – and Batman and Robin.

And while it is usually the items associated with the stars that fetch the highest prices, that is not always the case. “I sometimes sell Storm Trooper helmets from the Star Wars films which go for about £20,000,” says Lane. “They might have been background characters, but they are instantly recognisable, with a locked-in association to the films. And while there might have seemed to be thousands of them on screen, in reality, probably only 50 to 100 were actually made, at least half of which would have been lost or thrown away. So they are very rare now and worth a great deal.” Another iconic figure is Superman – Lane currently has a costume worn by Christopher Reeve for sale at £60,000. He also sold a Keanu Reeves costume from The Matrix, the buyer of which does not wish the price to be known, but we do know it was for “tens of thousands” of pounds.