When Mike Kaplan started working in the film industry in the 1960s, he began collecting movie posters and now The Mike Kaplan Collection of rare movie posters will be sold by Heritage Auctions on March 21, 2020.

His credits included producing The Whales of August, directing the documentary Never Apologize, and being the marketing strategist behind 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange. The foundation of his collection was based on design, featuring such titles as Stagecoach, Dodsworth, and The Maltese Falcon. Some of the groundbreaking concepts on less famous films include Bette Davis’ Bordertown, Noel Coward’s Bitter Sweet, and Greta Garbo’s Romance.

At the time Kaplan started collecting, posters from the 1960s tended to share similarities and were based more on photography than painted art, a trend that Kaplan found disappointing.

“The ideal movie poster is a microcosm of the movie itself, capturing with graphic inventiveness the feeling one has after leaving the cinema,” Kaplan said. “It should be both a work of art and a souvenir of your movie experience.” 

Once Kaplan learned that vintage movie posters could be found through collectors and memorabilia shops, he began procuring golden age examples from the 1920s to 1950s. His efforts to find the best poster for each film and to have movie posters recognized as unique art forms was acknowledged when The Los Angeles County Museum Of Art exhibited key posters from his collection in its 2019 “Art Of The Movie Poster” exhibit.

This auction of 171 posters from his collection includes international examples like Argentinean Angels with Dirty Faces, Austrian Death Takes a Holiday, Australian Mother Goose Goes Hollywood, Belgian Dead End, French The Grapes of Wrath, German Underworld, Italian The Prisoner of Zenda, Polish Sunset Boulevard, Spanish Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and the United Kingdom Get Carter.

Examples from different categories include The Big House, Lost Horizon, Fox Stone litho Ramona, Chained, John Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels, and Annie Oakley.

Some of the traditionally collected posters include The Mark of Zorro, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Bringing Up Baby, The Great Ziegfeld, Romeo and Juliet (1936 version), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Out of the Past, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion.  

There are 52 posters that are either one of a kind or have never been auctioned. They include Gloria Swanson and Billy Wilder’s first collaboration in Music in the Air, Laurel & Hardy’s Going Bye-Bye, Mae West’s first screen appearance in Night After Night, Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell in Delicious, the Marx Brothers in Horse Feathers, and Mary Pickford in Little Annie Rooney.

There are also plenty of rarities and sought after posters outside of Kaplan’s collection. One that’ll likely disappear into a new collection fast is The Invisible Man one-sheet for the 1933 Universal Monster classic.

“This beautiful poster is an outstanding example of the horror artwork by artist Karoly Grosz, which made the Universal monster genre such a success,” said Grey Smith, Director of Posters at Heritage. “One of only a small handful of this style B poster are known to exist so this is a rare first offering at Heritage.”

Another Universal monster favorite is a title lobby card for Frankenstein is a very fine example which rarely comes to auction. The title card offered is one of only a few known to exist, and of those, its condition certainly is among the best. 

An Italian 1953 rerelease Casablanca locandina is yet another piece to make its auction debut at Heritage. Acclaimed Italian poster artist Luigi Martinati provided a stunning depiction of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.

An early poster for The Jazz Singer is a billboard-size masterpiece and one of only two copies known. A poster of this size from the 1920s is an amazing find, as 24-sheet posters from this period are exceptionally scarce with only a few having survived. A six-sheet poster from the same film is the only known poster of its kind to survive today.  

Heritage’s March 21-22 Movie Poster Auction offers 814 lots and is now open for bidding.