|
|
 |
|
| Passion Investments: Collectibles |
Forever Young
Debra Ryono
03/01/2008
|
On Thursday mornings in 1966,
schoolchildren across the country excitedly hashed over the plot of the
high-camp TV show Batman, anticipating how that night’s
episode would resolve the Wednesday-evening cliffhanger. In New Jersey,
6-year-old John Azarian, who couldn’t read yet, begged his mom to read the
pop-up "pow"s and "zowie"s. Thirty years later he acquired at auction the
costumes worn by Adam West as Batman and Burt Ward as Robin. That purchase was
the first of many to come; his growing collection of entertainment memorabilia
is now one of the largest in the country.
 | COLLECTORS ARE ready to pay star prices for memorabilia from
classic films and television shows. A Chewbacca head from Star Wars. (Photograph by Profiles In History.) |
"That was my favorite show when I was a kid," Azarian says. "I
was looking at a catalog for an auction and said, ‘I can’t believe those are the
costumes. I have to have these!’ It took a while to convince my wife, but I got
them and thought it was so cool."
In the past 15 years, Azarian, now a broker for the Azarian
Group, his family’s commercial real estate management and development firm in
New York and northern New Jersey, has acquired more than 300 costumes and
assorted props. Many of the items are from superhero movies and television
shows, but among his other possessions are the shoe phone from Get Smart; the
heart necklace always worn by Elizabeth Montgomery in Bewitched; hats
worn by Bob Denver in Gilligan’s
Island and Sally Field in the The Flying Nun;
uniforms for every member of the Star
Trek flight deck; and one of two leather
jackets worn by Henry Winkler as Fonzie in Happy Days (the other is in the
Smithsonian).
Baby boomers such as Azarian drive a growing demand for icons
from the films and TV shows of their youth. Last August, Profiles in History, an
auction house in the Los Angeles suburb of Calabasas, sold a Star Wars
Chewbacca head for $115,000 and a laser gun from the Lost in Space TV
show for $92,000. Some of the firm’s other sales in the past five years have
included a Cowardly Lion costume from The Wizard of Oz for $805,000, the
command chair and platform from Star
Trek’s USS Enterprise for
$305,750, and Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber from Star Wars for
$195,500.
VALUE JUDGMENT
TV and movie memorabilia might not have the cachet of traditional
art, but col-lectors insist that displaying items from their collec-tions is no
different from putting up a Warhol or Lichtenstein. In the case of memorabilia,
they say an added bonus is nostalgia, and they are willing to pay hefty prices
to relive happy childhood memories. |
Joe Maddalena, the founder and president of Profiles in
History, grew up in New Jersey as the son of antique dealers. When he moved to
Southern California to attend college, he began collecting rare books. Then he
had an epiphany that great movies were made from great novels, and he began
frequenting Hollywood bookstores where old scripts were sold. "If I was
interested in William Faulkner and what he did at Warner Bros., I started
collecting that. There’s a natural connection between the two."
Although today Maddalena’s business focuses primarily on
historical documents, it also offers entertainment memorabilia. Display cases
hold such items as the 31-inch submarine miniature from the movie
Fantastic Voyage. Maddalena’s favorite item in his personal collection is a
B-9 robot from Lost in
Space.
Get Smart
Values of entertainment memorabilia, while generally rising,
fluctuate as collector demographics change. Interest in cars from the 1920s and
’30s waned when people who grew up with them aged and stopped buying them,
explains Arlan Ettinger, the president and founder of the New York auction
house Guernsey’s. Muscle cars then became hot as those who grew up in the ’60s
sought out the cars of their youth. So it goes with entertainment memorabilia.
Azarian admits that his four children have little interest in the icons that
were so important to him growing up; he has bought a few more-current items for
them, like a Power Rangers villain, in an effort to encourage their interest in
the field. "People tend to buy childhood memories," Maddalena says. "They
buy sentimentality and nostalgia."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
