 Starring: Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard, Buddy Ebsen, Mickey Rooney
Director: Blake Edwards
Year Of Release: 1961
Plot: Holly Golightly is a free-spirited socialite who makes her living getting money from rich men and plotting to find an even wealthier one to marry. She strikes up a friendship with her new neighbour, Paul Varjak, who’s more down-to-earth than she is, but who is similar in the sense that he funds his life by relying on a rich woman to keep him. Paul slowly falls for Holly, learning that she hasn’t always been the extroverted party girl she is now, however no matter how much he loves her, will Holly ever be able to get over her feeling that to be in love is like being put in a cage? |
I love Breakfast At Tiffany’s, although it is a somewhat peculiar film. Seeing The A-Team’s George Peppard as a young romantic lead is just strange, and even in 1961, you’d have thought someone might have realised that having Mickey Rooney in yellowface as a caricatured Japanese, buck-toothed photographer was just a tad insensitive. Indeed, everyone from the producer to the director has since profusely apologised for the jarring racism of Mr Yunioshi, and some Asian American groups still protest public showings of the movie because of the character.
However what I think is most strange about Breakfast At Tiffany’s isn’t the film itself, but the value of objects attached to it because of Audrey Hepburn and the movie’s iconic pop culture status. In December 2006, someone paid £467,200 at auction in London for a Givenchy black cocktail dress made for Audrey Hepburn for the film. It would have been the most ever paid for a piece of clothing from a movie (although less than half what the dress worn by Marilyn Monroe to sing Happy Birthday to President Kennedy fetched in 1999, when it went for $1.15 million), except for the fact that it was never in the film.
Givenchy made three of the black dresses for Hepburn, but the one sold wasn’t the one she wore during the iconic opening sequence or in the classic images of her holding a long cigarette holder (the other two are in the Givenchy archives in Paris, and the Museum Of Costume in Madrid). So basically someone paid nearly half a million pounds for a dress that looked like the one Audrey Hepburn wore, even though she didn’t. Now is that mental, or what?
Presumably the winning bidder thought it was worth it because it was so close to the actual thing, being one of only three made for Hepburn. It also pushes the price up that Hepburn is both a movie and fashion icon, ensuring there’s a large group of collectors who want her things, particularly from Breakfast At Tiffany’s, which is renowned for its style. However if things Audrey Hepburn didn’t wear in films are so valuable, does anyone want to pay thousands for some of my clothes, as I can guarantee Audrey has never been near any of them?
In May 2007, a pink cocktail dress Hepburn did wear in the film went for $192,000 at auction in New York. However it just goes to show the bizarre the economics are that dictate the value of film props. Because the black dress is so iconic, one Hepburn didn’t wear made five times as much as a pink dress that did feature in the movie (the pink outfit features in the scene where Holly Golightly learns of her brother’s death). In some respects it’s a good thing Hepburn’s clothes are so valuable, as the funds from the sale of the black cocktail dress went to charity and paid to set up 15 schools in India. However the fact something could be so valuable, just because it nearly appeared in a movie, is incredible.
Of course, Audrey Hepburn’s Breakfast At Tiffany’s dresses aren’t the only ridiculously expensive movie props out there. One of the four pairs of ruby slippers used in The Wizard Of Oz sold for $666,000 in 2000, while the Maltese Falcon from the Humphrey Bogart movie of the same name went for $389,500 in 1994 (it’s now believed to be insured for $3 million). These are ridiculous prices. It’s not even odd because the things themselves have no intrinsic value. After all a painting isn’t worth much in terms of materials, but at least there it is the painting itself that creates the value, whereas with film props, it’s purely what it’s allied to that turns some old rhinestone shoes into priceless artefacts. The value is in the film’s status and that gets transferred to objects from it.
Perhaps the best example of how utterly arbitrary and bizarre the value of film props are, is with Alec Guinness’ Obi-Wan Kenobi cloak from Star Wars, which sold for £54,000 at auction in 2007. While it is an iconic piece of cinema clothing, the fact is that for the 25 years before its sale, it was simply an unheralded part of the collection of costume makers, Angels. They’d hired it out to other movies, including The Mummy, and even loaned it to people for fancy dress. As no one had realised what this nondescript item was, it was treated as relatively valueless, but when Angels sold off costumes to clear warehouse space, they went through the records and discovered that Guinness has worn it in Star Wars. That research turned something that had spent quarter of a decade as a random tatty cloak that probably wouldn’t have fetched £5 in a charity shop, into something worth over £50,000.
At least with the Hepburn black cocktail dress it was only one of three made by one of the 20th Century’s leading designers, Hubert De Givenchy, but with the Star Wars cloak, it was literally just a generic scrap of brown cloth. It is undoubtedly nuts.
However while the prices of these thing are insane, film props and memorabilia are undoubtedly cool and the market has ballooned massively over the past couple of decades. Most major auction houses now hold sales of film props, and even things like rare original posters for classic movies now fetch tens of thousands of pounds. However perhaps the most prized of all movie possessions are Oscars.
There are a couple of reasons for this. The first is the rarity of such a prestigious object. The fact there are so few available isn’t just because the Academy only give out a limited amount, but that since 1950, in order to actually be able to take your Oscar away with you, you have to sign a legal document saying that neither you nor your heirs can try to sell the statuette without first offering it to AMPAS for a dollar. As a result, if one comes up for sale, it is incredibly unusual (and only happens with pre-1950 statuettes), and if it is a particularly well known award for a classic film, it can go for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The highest price ever paid for any piece of movie memorabilia was Michael Jackson forking out $1,542,500 in 1999 for David O’Selznick’s Best Picture Oscar for Gone With The Wind. Vivien Leigh’s Oscar for the same movie also went for $550,000 when it was sold. Steven Spielberg meanwhile, paid hundreds of thousands for Clark Gable’s Best Actor Oscar for It Happened One Night and Bette Davis’ Academy Awards for Jezebel and Dangerous. However rather than keeping them, he returned them to the Academy, as he believes in their policy that Oscars shouldn’t be seen as commercial objects (he does own one of the original Rosebud sleds from Citizen Kane though, so he doesn’t object to all movie memorabilia).
These are undoubtedly insane prices, but it just goes to show how important film has become to popular culture, and that objects that are essentially worth nothing can command ridiculous prices, simply because of their attachment to movies that have become iconic. These objects are undoubtedly very cool, and their desirability is what has driven the prices up, but it does seem to have got to the point where some bits of film memorabilia are selling for prices that defy all rationale. After all, it’d be tough to get more stupid than paying nearly half a million pounds for a dress Audrey Hepburn didn’t wear in Breakfast At Tiffany’s.
TIM ISAAC
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