Rare movie posters worth thousands on display at Fort Lee exhibit. How to see them

A poster is meant to ballyhoo the next big attraction.

It's not meant to be the next big attraction.

Or is it? Konstantino Spanoudis, a Fort Lee collector who has lent 70 of his prize movie posters and lobby cards to the Barrymore Film Center in Fort Lee, thinks that the best of them are events in themselves.

"Each one of these posters has a story for me," said Spanoudis, who provided the material for "Coming Attractions: Classic Film Posters from the Konstantino Spanoudis IKON Collection," an exhibit running through December.

Movie posters are iconic. Remember the lady and the shark from "Jaws"? Remember the marionette logo from "Godfather"? They're almost as famous as the films themselves.

Designers like Saul Bass used to create top-to-bottom promotions for an Alfred Hitchcock or Otto Preminger film: several of his posters, featured in this exhibit, are classic. One producer, Samuel Z. Arkoff, creator of B-picture classics like "The Beast With a Million Eyes" and "I Was a Teenage Werewolf," took the process to its logical conclusion. He came up with the poster first. Then his screenwriter and director would make a movie based on it.

For more than 100 years, posters have been a key part of the moviegoing experience.

"What makes a poster attractive to me is the image, number one," he said. "Because after all, it's all about the image."

Famous faces

Images — faces — are arrayed around the gallery at the Fort Lee museum and revival house on Main Street. And what faces! Theda Bara. Claudette Colbert. Marilyn Monroe. Charlie Chaplin. Robert De Niro. Rita Hayworth. Betty Grable. Anita Ekberg. Sean Connery. Abbott & Costello.

Some posters are crudely comic. Some are sensational. Some are clever. Some are real works of art — with soft lines, subtle facial expressions, and skin tones worthy of Watteau.

"There was an argument, in the advertising and promotion departments," said film historian Richard Koszarski, curator of the exhibit. "Is the artistic type of poster what you want, or is something vulgar and grabby what you want?"

Some 19 of the pieces relate to Fort Lee: films made in this part of New Jersey during the brief period, from about 1910 to 1917, when Bergen County was the center of American film production. That's of particular interest to the Barrymore Center, and to Koszarski, who has written several books on the subject.

"Movies started in Fort Lee and then went to Hollywood, though there was some overlap," Koszarski said.

Among the specimens on show: an image of "vamp" star Theda Bara in her own "Carmen," made at Fort Lee's Fox Studio in 1915, and a poster of Benjamin Chapin's forgotten multi-part Lincoln epic, "Son of Democracy," made in Ridgefield Park in 1917.

Fort Lee film is one of several areas of interest for Spanoudis, who has amassed a collection of well over 6,000 movie posters since he began collecting in the late 1980s.

His favorite things

Other favorite subjects: westerns, Abbott & Costello comedies, sports films (before closed-circuit television, movie houses were where you went to see the Dempsey fight). Also so-called "race" films — the movies made against daunting odds by Black filmmakers for segregated movie houses.

"While Thousands Cheer" starring football great Kenny Washington and comic Mantan Moreland, is one example here. Another is "The Bull-Dogger," a colorful and much-reproduced poster featuring Black rodeo star Bill Pickett. Spanoudis owns one of the original prints.

"You have to admire him," he said. "When you read the story of Bill Pickett, it's just an amazing story and life. I love that image of him. I just wish I would see that film, or any film with him." (All seem to be lost).

Another pet subject is silent film. Greeting visitors when they come into the gallery is the prize of his collection: a huge 41-by-81 inch image, from 1912, of Sarah Bernhardt as Queen Elizabeth. "I outbid a billionaire for this," Spanoudis said. "It's one of my proudest moments."

It was a poster, he said, that he came up on eBay some 20 years ago. There were a lot of "snipes" on it — the trade word for the strips of paper, pasted across the poster, with messages like "Final Week!" on them. The image underneath was obscured, but Spanoudis sensed value. While his rival balked, he acquired the poster for around $6,000, then sent it out to have the "snipes" removed and the image restored.

The gorgeous poster that was revealed is probably worth $25,000 or more. Spanoudis has no intention of selling. But he did take great pleasure in showing it to his eBay competitor.

"The look on his face was just priceless to me," Spanoudis said. "His eyes rolled back in his head, and he said, 'Oh my god, we would have wanted that.' I was just lucky enough to recognize what he didn't."

Now playing

"Queen Elizabeth" is significant. This prestigious 1912 import, featuring the great French stage star, played "legitimate" Broadway houses (as opposed to the storefront "nickelodeons" of the day) and helped make the movies respectable. This poster was one of the first to promote a specific movie — as opposed to simply "the movies."

"If you look at the first movie posters, they'll just say 'Lumière Cinématographe' or 'Edison Vitascope is here,' " Koszarski said. "The attraction was a movie show. Something projected on a screen. And they didn't care whether it was Niagara Falls or a train. That was fine for about 10 years. Then people said, 'I've seen that, do you have anything different?' "

And so the movie poster — as we know it today — was born.

Lithographers, people who did circus billboards, were the ones who created the first movie posters. Before TV, before the internet, posters were almost the sole means of film promotion.

"This was point-of-sale advertising," Koszarski said. "You walked down the street and there was a sign of what was being shown. But it had to grab you. And it had to compete with the nickelodeon across the street."

Exhibitors were responsible for promoting their own films. They would acquire posters and lobby cards from industry exchanges; such material was never intended for public sale. Much of it ended up in warehouses, or the storerooms of movie theaters — or was pulped during the paper drives of World War II. By the time collectors like Spanoudis came onto the scene, they had become rare and much sought-after.

"I just became addicted and started collecting," said Spanoudis, originally from Northern Greece, who came here in 1970.

Pay to play

He had come to love movies in his childhood: Hollywood westerns and Italian sword-and-sandal epics were his favorites. "I guess it was the connection to ancient Greece and ancient Rome," he said.

When he had the wherewithal — poster collecting, as he points out, is a rich person's game — he began to bid, with money he'd made from his marble and granite countertop business. Some of his posters are worth as much as $40,000 to $50,000.

In quest of movie art, he haunts auctions, scents out estate sales, and partners with experts like Koszarski to track down the best and rarest. He's spread out his acquisitions between a private Fort Lee gallery and his home.

Even so, he has hard time keeping afloat in a sea of movie art. At home, he only has room to hang a fraction of his "finds." He has to change them up regularly.

"I rotate them, I don't have a choice," he said. "I rotate 10 or 15 at a time."

How to see the exhibit

"Coming Attractions: Classic Film Posters from the Konstantino Spanoudis IKON Collection": Barrymore Film Center, 153 Main St, Fort Lee., through December 31. 201 585-0601 or barrymorefilmcenter.com

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Vintage movie poster exhibit now at Barrymore Center Fort Lee NJ