Fans Want the Maltese Falcon Statue Even More than Kasper Gutman Did

Posted on February 27, 2016 at 8:00 am

Seventy-five years ago, The Maltese Falcon was first released, the very first film from director John Huston (with his father, the distinguished actor Walter Huston, in a small non-speaking part for good luck). It was the third version of the story by Dashiell Hammett, and the second version, with Bette Davis in the second, Satan Met a Lady. So if you ever want proof of the difference a director can make, you won’t get a better example than this one.

The title object is a priceless sculpture, encrusted with jewels, and the characters in the film are willing to lie, cheat, and murder to get the statue. The prop in the film (which — spoiler alert — turns out to be a fake) has inspired only slightly less passion from collectors. An entertaining article by Bryan Burrough in Vanity Fair tells the story of the fans who sought to own the “real” Maltese Falcon.

Lost to history for decades, it resurfaced in the 1980s in the hands of a Beverly Hills oral surgeon, and beginning in 1991 traveled the world as part of a Warner Bros. retrospective, with stops at the Centre Pompidou, in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, and elsewhere. In 2013 it was offered for sale by Bonhams auction house. There was talk it might go for $1 million or more. But at the auction in Bonhams’s Madison Avenue showroom on November 25, 2013, the bidding quickly passed $1 million, then $2 million, then $3 million. Spectators gasped as a bidder in the audience dueled with one on the telephone, driving the price higher and higher.

Only when the bidding reached $3.5 million did the bidder in the crowd surrender, sending the Falcon to the man on the phone, who was later revealed to represent Steve Wynn, the Las Vegas hotel and casino billionaire. With the buyer’s premium, the total price came to a stunning $4.1 million. The crowd burst into applause. The auctioneers wheeled out a tub of champagne bottles to celebrate.

And with good reason. It was one of the highest prices ever paid for a piece of movie memorabilia, and two of the others were for cars: the original Batmobile, which had sold for $4.6 million earlier that year, and the Aston Martin Sean Connery drives in Goldfinger. News of the Falcon sale was carried on the network news and in newspapers around the world. Today it sits, along with a pair of Picassos, a Matisse, and a Giacometti sculpture, in a meeting room in Wynn’s Las Vegas villa.

That is the official version of what happened to the Maltese Falcon. But it is just one chapter in a complex tale. It turns out there is another, far stranger version, and another Falcon, several more in fact. And this version, which draws in characters as diverse as Leonardo DiCaprio and the woman butchered in one of Hollywood’s greatest unsolved murders, constitutes a real-life mystery every bit as bizarre as the one Sam Spade confronted on film.

The story deserves a movie of its own, and if it gets a director as talented as John Huston, it just might be a classic.

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Behind the Scenes Film History

Every British Actor Appears in Vanity Fair’s Adorable Videos

Posted on February 5, 2015 at 9:37 am

Vanity Fair has cajoled all of the top British actors into re-creating classic American movie lines, featuring everyone from Dame Judi Dench to Benedict Cumberbatch, in this adorable video series. Here’s a sample.

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Shorts

Vanity Fair’s Whites Only Hollywood Cover

Posted on February 17, 2010 at 9:33 am

I look forward to Vanity Fair’s annual Hollywood issue every year. It always has fabulous photos of today’s top talent, often in salutes to some of the classic movie stars of the past. And it always has a selection of articles that are surprising and inventive, going way past the usual profiles of the usual subjects.
This year’s issue has some great material, including the article on the women behind the early Disney animation classics, as I have already reported. But I was terribly disappointed with its selection of the most promising newcomers to feature on the cover. It isn’t that any one of them is not impressive. Each of the young women has shown extraordinary talent and star quality. But how, in 2010, is it possible to have a collection of today’s top young female stars and have every one of them be white? How is it possible to overlook some of the most stunning, accomplished, and mesmerizingly watchable actresses on screen?
A young woman no one had ever heard of a year ago has been nominated for an Oscar for best actress for her very first film. We do see Gabourey Sidibe inside the magazine, with her co-star and director. But why isn’t she on the cover? In my opinion, the most dazzling breakthrough performance of last year was Nicole Beharie in “American Violet.” Why isn’t she on the cover? Where is Kerry Washington? Taraji P. Henson? Paula Patton? Meagan Goode? Sanaa Lathan? Keke Palmer? Gabrielle Union? Nia Long? Sophie Okonedo? Anika Noni Rose, star of “The Princess and the Frog” and “Number 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency?”
What 2009 movie became the biggest box office movie of all time? “Avatar.” And who was the female lead? Zoe Saldana. She was in another enormous box office and critical hit in 2009: “Star Trek.” Why isn’t she on the cover?
And why aren’t they starring in more studio films?

The Women At Disney Studios

Posted on February 13, 2010 at 8:00 am

Vanity Fair’s annual Hollywood issue has an article by Patricia Zohn about the “ink and paint” women who worked on Disney’s classic animated films.

Much has been written about the prodigiously talented men who brought Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, and Dumbo to the screen. But if behind every good man stands a good woman, behind Walt Disney and his “boys”–the all-male assembly line–once stood 100. Walt was the impresario of a troop of young women, most under 25–a casting director’s dream of all-American acolytes–who made the screen light up, not with feathered swan dives or the perfect tip-tap of a patent-leather heel, but by making water shimmer or a tail wag just so. It was a job complicated by his unrelenting perfectionism–Jiminy Cricket required 27 different colors–but reducible to a simple imperative of the time: ever nimble but never showy, their job was to make what the men did look good.

She tells a related story in a great Huffington Post piece about another woman who worked behind the scenes — and later went on to appear in movie musicals.

I could not resist the opportunity to interview one other treasured behind-the-scenes woman, Marge Belcher Champion, famous as half of the dancing Champions of screen and stage, but known to Disney aficionados world wide as the real-live model for Snow White.

Champion was only 14 and still in school when she received $10 a day to act the part of Snow White for the Disney animators to use as their model. She later went on to partner with her husband Gower Champion in films like “Show Boat” and “Jupiter’s Darling.” But here she is helping the first Disney feature film come to life.