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Uncivl Warriors 1935 one Sheet... Just 40,000!

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xraffle

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Anyone with a spare $40,000...Nows your chance to get a 30's Curly 1 sheet.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=7538299051&rd=1&sspagename=STRK%3AMEWA%3AIT&rd=1

I'm interested in getting that poster, but $40,000 is just insane. What person on their right mind is going to bid that much on a poster?



Offline alwaysastooge

Dang 40 grand!  I'd love that poster, but I don't have a spare $40,000 to spend.
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Curley91

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"Uncivil Warriors" happens to be my all-time favorite stooges' short. I wish I had 40,000 dollars!


Offline Billybagobagels

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Interesting to see Curly listed as Jerry Howard on the poster.

Come to think of it, when did Columbia change the spelling of Jerry's nickname from "Curly" to "Curley" ?


xraffle

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Interesting to see Curly listed as Jerry Howard on the poster.

Come to think of it, when did Columbia change the spelling of Jerry's nickname from "Curly" to "Curley" ?

The first short where Columbia spelled it as 'Curly' was in "Disorder In The Court." So, Columbia changed it in 1936.



Pilsner Panther

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"Uncivil Warriors" happens to be my all-time favorite stooges' short. I wish I had 40,000 dollars!

Long-time members here will recall that about three years ago, one of Curly's derbies (from the collection of veteran TV host and showbiz historian Joe Franklin, with documentation that it was the real thing) went up for sale on eBay. It sold for— if I remember right— around $25,000.

It's hard to believe that a one-sheet would be worth more than a genuine Stooges artifact that belonged to Curly himself, but there you have it. This is a very handsome poster in the classic 1930's Art Deco style (that's a great hand-lettering job on the title, and most of the other graphics on it look hand-drawn, too). But still, $40,000? Some people do have a lot of discretionary income to spend on whatever they might want... especially around here in the S.F. Bay Area, but unfortunately, I'm not one of them.

I tried printing my own money, until I found out it was illegal...  :'(

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« Last Edit: August 15, 2005, 11:47:45 PM by Pilsner Panther »


Offline garystooge

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That Franklin derby was highly suspect, but this poster is not....I think $40,000 is a fair price and may even be a bargain.
Gary


Pilsner Panther

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That Franklin derby was highly suspect, but this poster is not....I think $40,000 is a fair price and may even be a bargain.
Gary

How is it that the derby is suspect? I don't remember all the details, but there was some kind of documentation that went with it, that supposedly proved it was genuine.

 ???


Offline garystooge

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     The only documentation on the hat was Franklin's say-so.  Let's backtrack a bit. A few months earlier Franklin had auctioned what he claimed was Larry's violin. The violin auction was suspicious to me because I was present in the late 1980's when Larry's granddaughter sold Larry's violin to a collector named Richard Cohen (Richard still has that violin).  Here are the comments I posted (in 2001) at the time the Franklin violin was being auctioned:

     As promised, here are my long-winded thoughts about the violin that Joe
Franklin is selling. First off, it's possible that this violin COULD have
belonged to Larry. He COULD have had more than 1 violin, in addition to the
one that Richard Cohen bought from Larry's granddaughter. But the only
evidence of authenticity presented by Mr. Franklin is Mr. Franklin's say-so.
No independent corroboration is presented. No photo of Larry with Franklin
and the violin, no letter from Larry to Franklin about the violin etc.There
is no corroborating evidence that Larry and Franklin were good friends or
even that they knew each other. Again, no photos of them together, no
letters to Franklin from Larry. Franklin's show did not air on the West
coast to my knowledge, and Larry made only infrequent trips to the East
coast so there's no natural connection on the surface.
     Plus there are many unanswered questions. Here are some of them. Why would Larry give this priceless heirloom to Joe Franklin instead of to his
brother, sister, daughter or grandchildren?
     The violin is missing 2 strings, which is the way Larry supposedly
presented it to Franklin. Since it wasn't playable, why did Larry have it
with him on his trip from LA to NY? He couldn't practice on it so did he
bring it along with the specific intent of giving it to Joe Franklin?
According to Franklin, Larry was in NY at the time on a publicity tour to
promote the film "Mad Mad World". Why would the Stooges have done a
publicity tour for that film? Their appearance in the film lasts only a
nano-second. And this was a big budget film with plenty of other publicity
and plenty of other higher profile stars to make appearances.
According to Franklin, Larry scratched his initials "LF" and the year
"20" into the violin. In 1920 Larry was only 18 years old and didn't have
much money. It's quite possible that his violin was the most valuable
possession he had. Why would he have marred the instrument by scratching his
initials and date into it?
     Why is this piece being sold on Ebay and not thru Sotheby's or Christies?
Ebay has a lot of "nickle-and-dimers" who up the current high bid by a
dollar or two. Sotheby's and Christies clientele are used to spending
hundreds of thousands and/or millions of dollars on jewelery, artwork, etc.
Even after paying their higher commissions, items fetch much more there than
on Ebay. Perhaps it's because those auction houses check into or are not
convinced about the authenticity of the piece?
     Why was it a private bid auction where identities are kept secret?
According to Franklin it's because the high-profile people likely to bid on
it want to preserve their anonymity. But on Ebay most everyone has a fake
bidder ID anyway which protects anonymity, so that doesnt quite add up.
Plus the private bid feature makes it easier for shill bids. The bidding
pattern in fact did seem quite unusual. Not only were there an unusually
high number of bids, but instead of the usual pattern (little action during
the week followed by a big flurry and run-up at the end), this item had a
lot of run-up during the week and no flurry at the end. For those of you who
frequent Ebay, doesn't this seem a bit unusual?
     Larry's sister Lyla Budnick has never heard about this violin before nor about Larry's deep friendship withJoe Franklin. Also, the self-serving braggadocio contained in the Ebay description(Franklin claims he was the first to coin the term "memorabilia",that he interviewed over 300,000 guests etc) really reduce his credibility in my opinion.
    Anyway, lots of questions and not many answers.

    That's what I wrote at the time. Again, this is merely my opinion. SInce that time, Brent (Beastooge) discovered a quote from Franklin's book "Up Late with Joe Franklin" (1995).On page 62, when asked about the Three Stooges, Franklin says "I never met them, no...." .  After the violin sale took place, it turns out that Franklin also had Moe's derby ( it was supposedly Moe's derby, Pils, not Curly's)  Now you can imagine, after my skepticism about the violin, that I would be a bit skeptical about the hat. Again, the only documentation is Franklin's say-so. I can't prove the violin wasn't Larry's. I can't prove the hat wasn't Moe's.  Maybe they are legit, we'll never know for sure. But based on the above I have legitimate reasons for being a tad skeptical.

   

   


« Last Edit: August 16, 2005, 04:35:18 PM by garystooge »


Offline Bruckman

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I remember that about the same time as the derby was offered on Ebay, the same seller also offered a straw hat allegedly belonging to Harold Lloyd, also acquired through Joe Franklin. This looked fishy to me because while Lloyd often wore a straw hat "in character", the hat didn't correspond to any seen in any of his films which I'd seen, and it's unlikely Lloyd would've saved a hat from a time preceding his years of greater fame (i.e. pre-1919 or so). And in his private life Lloyd preferred to wear a cap. I've never seen a photo of him wearing a straw hat out of character, possibly because that style hat was so identified w/his character. Don't remember whether it sold. It also looked too small to be Lloyd's. And if Lloyd was giving out souvenirs (unlikely given his habits anyways) why wouldn't he provide something more readily identifiable, such as a set of his lensless hornrims?

40 grand for a one-sheet is steep (I bet Gary's considering taking out a second mortgage now), but not unheard-of, especially for stars as iconic as the Stooges, and from relatively early in their film careers.
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Pilsner Panther

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Gary, are you a trial lawyer? If not, you should be— I wouldn't want to be a defendant on the stand with you cross-examining me! Yikes!

I didn't know a thing about the purported "Larry Fine" violin, but it sure sounds like it was a put-up job on the part of Joe Franklin. Oh, well, another one of my childhood heroes turns out to have feet of clay. Not that Mr. Franklin hasn't done anything to preserve some very important Jewish-American and Borscht Belt popular culture that otherwise would have been lost:

http://www.yiddishradioproject.org/

Almost all of the sound recordings on this site came from 16" transcription discs in the Joe Franklin archives, and without his obsessive collecting, every bit of it would have been thoughtlessly thrown in the trash can. Which would have been a terrible shame, since you haven't lived until you've heard the late Seymour Rexite sing a medley from "Oklahoma" in Yiddish.

 ;D

You can actually learn some Yiddish by following along with the "Yid-O-Matic Translator." I don't like RealPlayer because it installs unwanted programs on your PC, but the folks at the Yiddish Radio Project have put it to good use. Just remember to delete "tkbell.exe" after you've used RealPlayer for anything. I don't know what it does, exactly, but it appears to be spyware.

Still, Franklin statements like his having interviewed 300,000 guests— if he'd said 30,000, that would have been believable, but 300,000 sounds like Wilt Chamberlain boasting about how many women he'd had. In other words, completely over the top, and preposterous! And then, Mr. Franklin claims that he knew Larry, but he contradicts himself in print... that's just weird.

Besides, anyone knows what really happened to Larry's violin: "Oh, my Stradivarius! My beautiful Stradivarius!!!"

[stooges]


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« Last Edit: August 17, 2005, 04:51:21 AM by Pilsner Panther »


Offline garystooge

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Believe me, Pils, I wanted to believe that violin was legit in the worst way.  As a Stooges collector, having Larry's violin in your collection would be about as good as it gets. So I really dug into this one, searching for some scintilla of evidence that it was real, to justify bidding on it.

As for Franklin's claim that he interviewed 300,000+ guests on his show, it's funny you should mention Wilt because that's the first thing I thought of as well.  If you do some quick math, the 300,000 claim doesn't even pass the ha-ha test. Franklin was on the air for about 50 years. If you do the division, that would work out to about 6,000 guests per year. Assuming he worked 365 days a year (ha-ha), that works out to about 16 guests per day, each and every day for 50 years! I doubt he ever interviewed 16 different guests in even one single show.

I don't know about you, but to me, when I hear someone make an outrageous claim, it reduces the credibility of any other claims they might make, even if those other claims are really true.