1. The Morris Everett, Jr. Collection. Fifty-three years ago a young man walks into a movie memorabilia store, and is so overwhelmed by genuine vintage movie posters and ephemera, he decides to collect something on every movie ever made… No, it’s not the introduction to a stand-up comedy routine, it’s the true story of Morris Everett, Jr., arguably the most deliberate and methodical collector of historic vintage movie posters, lobby cards, photos, and other original film publicity material that this specialized hobby has ever seen. The many and varied original vintage display items comprising his collection range from the largest poster size, 24-sheet outdoor “Billboard” at 9 x 20 ft., all the way down to “Midget Window-Cards” at 8 x 14 in., with an emphasis on 11 x 14 in. “Lobby Cards”, though certainly including many thousands of poster-sized examples which are for the most part 27 x 41 in. “One-Sheets”, 22 x 28 in. “Half-Sheets”, 14 x 36 in. “Inserts”, 41 x 80 in. “Three-Sheets”, and 80 x 80 in. “Six-Sheets”.
As an introduction to the Morris Everett, Jr. collection of approx. 196,000 vintage original film lobby cards, posters, midget window cards, and other rare ephemera which covers over 44,000 titles, virtually every English-language film ever made between 1907 and the present (and many important foreign ones as well), there are three different levels of separation to facilitate helping you understand not just the vast extent of coverage, but much more important, the true unique quality and value contained within. From the approx. 8000 best treasures, which Mr. Everett had deemed “truly precious” and therefore requiring bank-vault storage, Profiles has scanned or photographed approx. 1300 “holy grails” as a first-look assessment of the spectacular nature of this unsurpassed, in fact not even remotely equaled collection, followed by scans or photographs of the remainder of approx. 6700 vault items (both groups easily viewable online, or physically here, by appointment, in the Calabasas offices) with the final level being the vast bulk of the collection housed in approx. 32 title-separated alphabetically organized file cabinets which are stored in Cleveland, Ohio.
Many of these historic titles will be immediately obvious to experienced collectors for rarity, quality and value, like Metropolis, The Golem, Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Wolf Man, The Black Cat, (and virtually every other Universal horror title), Battleship Potemkin, Napoleon, Gone With the Wind, Citizen Kane, Casablanca, City Lights, Sunrise, 20th Century, Canary Murder Case, Cocoanuts, Animal Crackers, Duck Soup, Grand Hotel, Stagecoach, The Searchers, Wizard of Oz, Tabu, Sunset Blvd., It’s a Wonderful Life, The Grapes of Wrath, Double Indemnity, All About Eve, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Seven Year Itch, The Philadelphia Story, Vertigo, Rear Window, The 39 Steps, etc. Further, at a deeper level of comprehensive scope, this incomparable collection contains near-complete coverage from the beginning of their careers on all the obvious stars like Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Jean Harlow, Barbara Stanwyck, Louise Brooks, Clara Bow, Marlene Dietrich, Carole Lombard, Rita Hayworth, Judy Garland, Lauren Bacall, Vivien Leigh, Ingrid Bergman, Marilyn Monroe, Katharine Hepburn, Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Sophia Loren, Elizabeth Taylor, Clark Gable, John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Gary Cooper, Errol Flynn, Cary Grant, Steve McQueen, etc., each of whom bear their own significant historic and monetary value. And delving even deeper into the rarest of the rare, perhaps the most essential and unique value of this collection (only this collection and absolutely no other known to exist) is its inclusion of virtually every vital and incredibly obscure early appearance for icons like Lon Chaney Sr. (The Penalty, Outside the Law, Oliver Twist, Shadows, A Blind Bargain, The Black Bird, He Who Gets Slapped, Road to Mandalay, While the City Sleeps, Phantom of the Opera, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Monster, etc.), Boris Karloff (The Last of the Mohicans, The Cave Girl, The Altar Stairs, Charlie Chan at the Opera, The Ghoul, The Infidel, Omar the Tentmaker, The Criminal Code, etc.), Bela Lugosi (The Black Camel, Chandu on Magic Island, The Death Kiss, The Deerslayer, Murders in the Rue Morgue, White Zombie, Murder by Television, etc.), Buster Keaton (Back Stage and The Bell Boy both with Fatty Arbuckle, Battling Butler, The Blacksmith, The Boat, College, Convict 13, The Cook, Cops, The Cameraman, The Electric House, The General, The Balloonatic, Hollywood Revue, Hard Luck, The Hayseed, High Sign, etc.), Laurel and Hardy (Any Old Port, Beau Hunks, Big Business, Double Whoopee with Jean Harlow, Early to Bed, The Fixer-Uppers, Dirty Work, Hollywood Party, Habeus Corpus, Liberty, etc.), The Three Stooges with Curly (All the World’s a Stooge, Busy Buddies, Cactus Makes Perfect, Dizzy Doctors, Dancing Lady with Ted Healy, Even as IOU, From Nurse to Worse, Goofs and Saddles, Horse Collars, I’ll Never Heil Again, I Can Hardly Wait, Idiot’s Deluxe, Idle Roomers, etc.), The Marx Brothers (Cocoanuts, Animal Crackers, Horse Feathers, Monkey Business, Duck Soup, A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races, At the Circus, The Big Store, etc.), Rudolph Valentino (Stolen Moments, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The Conquering Power, Camille, The Sheik, Moran of the Lady Letty, Beyond the Rocks, Blood and Sand, The Young Rajah, Monsieur Beaucaire, A Sainted Devil, The Eagle, Cobra, The Son of the Sheik), Harry Houdini (The Master Mystery, The Grim Game, Terror Island, The Man from Beyond, Haldane of the Secret Service), Babe Ruth (Headin’ Home, Babe Comes Home, Speedy, Just Pals), Jack Dempsey (Daredevil Jack, Winning His Way, Fight and Win, West of the Water Bucket, All’s Swell on the Ocean, Bring Him In, K.O. For Cupid, Manhattan Madness, No Picnic, The Prizefighter and the Lady, etc.) plus incredibly important early films by directors like D.W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille, Erich von Stroheim, Joseph von Sternberg, John Ford, William Wellman, Howard Hawks, Billy Wilder, Oscar Micheaux (and every other important African-American contributor), Victor Seastrom, F.W. Murnau, etc. It is often the case for early “character” appearances of great-stars-to-be that only one (if even that) lobby card from a usual set of eight will include Chaney, Karloff, Lugosi, Bogart or other such luminaries, and Mr. Everett has gone to enormous lengths to hunt down and acquire the one or two key cards, rather than settle for a less important scene just to cover a title in the vast panorama of film history. A great many of these “obscurities” can safely be considered the only known surviving examples, and quite a number of them have passed through a variety of old-school collectors’ hands to make their way into the Everett collection, as every serious dealer and collector going back over 50 years has been aware of Mr. Everett and his stated mission (from the very beginning in 1961) to build the one and only most comprehensive collection possible within his lifetime, and without question he has done exactly that, single-handedly mounting an incomparable historical archive on 107 years of cinema for which no institutional holdings currently compare.
Critical categories and subjects not already covered above for which Mr. Everett’s collection contains near-complete coverage include, but are not limited to: Pre-Code titles (Bitter Tea of General Yen, Bird of Paradise, Baby Face, Cabin in the Cotton, Design for Living, Divorcee, Ex-Lady, 42nd Street, Follies of 1929, Flying Down to Rio, Gold Diggers of 1933, Glorifying the American Girl, Applause, The Gay Divorcee, Bad Sister, Hot Saturday, Hard to Handle, Illicit, Iron Man, Red Dust, One Way Passage, Ladies They Talk About, Ladies of Leisure, The Lost Squadron, Letty Lynton, Susan Lenox, The Great Gabbo, The Story of Temple Drake, etc.); Film Noir (The Blue Dahlia, This Gun for Hire, Stranger on the Third Floor, The Letter, Among the Living, Double Indemnity, Detour, Fury, Gun Crazy, The Glass Key, Lady From Shanghai, The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Dark Passage, Sunset Blvd., I Wake Up Screaming, The Seventh Victim, Out of the Past, Shadow of a Doubt, Laura, Gaslight, Murder My Sweet, The Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street, Gilda, The Killers, Notorious, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Born to Kill, Brute Force, Kiss of Death, Lady in the Lake, Nightmare Alley, Force of Evil, Raw Deal, Sorry Wrong Number, White Heat, The Asphalt Jungle, D.O.A., In a Lonely Place, Ace in the Hole, The Narrow Margin, The Big Heat, Pickup on South Street, The Big Combo, Killer’s Kiss, Kiss Me Deadly, Night of the Hunter, The Killing, Sweet Smell of Success, Touch of Evil, Odds Against Tomorrow, etc.); Westerns (virtually every John Wayne, Tim McCoy, Buck Jones, William S. Hart, Tom Mix, Roy Rogers, Art Acord, Charles Starrett, Fred Thomson, Gene Autry, Harry Carey, Hoot Gibson, Joel McCrea, Johnny Mack Brown, Ken Maynard, Randolph Scott, Tex Ritter, William Boyd, etc.); 1950s Science-Fiction (Day the Earth Stood Still, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing from Another World, Forbidden Planet, The Incredible Shrinking Man, It Came from Outer Space, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, This Island Earth, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Invaders from Mars, Destination Moon, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, When Worlds Collide, War of the Worlds, Plan 9 from Outer Space, The Man from Planet X, The Blob, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Godzilla, 20 Million Miles to Earth, Attack of the Crab Monsters, Invasion of the Saucer-Men, The Deadly Mantis, The Mole People, etc.) and dozens of other key topics covered by tens of thousands of vintage posters and lobby cards.
The extreme and unique rarity of multiple thousands of pieces in the Everett collection cannot be challenged, though it is equally important to put the collection’s monetary value into perspective. In 2008 a lifetime collection of just 8462 lobby cards (plus other lesser ephemera) methodically collected by screenwriter Leonard Schrader, which covered only his personal favorite directors, not a cross-section of film history by any description, was sold privately for a reported $3.2 million, and did not remotely compare overall in depth and quality with even the 7200 highlights in the Everett collection, let alone the entire collection when properly evaluated. Though officially being offered at auction with an estimate of $6,000,000- $8,000,000, not only is it impossible to place such a limit as to the collection’s intellectual and historical value, equally important is the fact that a thorough appraisal at current fair-market values should easily meet or even far exceed a more appropriate evaluation of double to triple that range, when examined carefully and methodically on an individual item and title basis, with proper attention placed where it is due. It is important to note that while Mr. Everett’s collection contains many thousands of items whose condition remains fresh and unabused from decades of storage and potential handling, and that many of the most significant individual items that required cleaning or other professional conservation and refreshing have received it, the majority of items in the collection saw normal use and wear during their service in the trade of motion picture publicity, and should be expected to display a wide range of surviving condition, with the vast majority in normal average used condition, still perfectly displayable, which is the generally accepted standard for this field of historic collecting.
The aforementioned approx. 8000 highlights are physically present in the vault at the offices of Profiles in History in Calabasas for viewing by appointment, and the approximately 1300 “holy grails” are physically separated out should one care to view just them. The remaining approx. 188,000 posters, lobby cards, and other ephemera are archived in Cleveland, Ohio as stated above, and are also available for examination by appointment. As extensive as possible an examination and preview is heavily encouraged for any prospective bidders, as the ability of this mere outline of a description plus the images offered herein are truly just the tiniest tip of the iceberg when it comes to illustrating the vast unprecedented range, rarity, depth and quality of this, the Morris Everett, Jr. Collection, without question the world’s greatest and most unique privately-held movie poster collection. $6,000,000 - $8,000,000