Stolen Lamppost Is More Than a Light : Film Buffs’ 10-Foot-Tall Piece of Movie History Has Disappeared

For two weeks now, Bryan Goetzinger has been desperately seeking a lawn ornament--a 10-foot-tall, old-fashioned, green fiberglass lamppost stolen Sept. 16 from the front yard of his Hermosa Beach cottage.

The police say it isn’t a top priority. “It isn’t as if we’ve had a big rash of lamppost thefts lately,” Detective Bruce Phillips said.

But according to Goetzinger, this stolen lamppost is not just any old street light.

“That,” the 27-year-old movie crewman said, his eyes widening, “was the actual lamppost Gene Kelly swung on in ‘Singin’ in the Rain.’ It’s priceless. You can’t put a monetary value on it. It’s part of my industry’s history.”

Goetzinger, whose studio work included a stint on the labor crew at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Film Co., said he obtained the lamppost in 1986 when MGM ceded its Culver City lot to Lorimar Telepictures Corp. and moved across the street.

Goetzinger was on the crew “cleaning out the MGM vaults,” he said. “I separated what got saved from what got thrown out.” In the vaults, he said, he ran across the blueprints for the Spring Street set of “Singin’ in the Rain,” and from those plans, he deduced which lamppost was the one Kelly immortalized during his rendition of the film’s title song.

In MGM storage rooms, he said, he located the lamppost and asked his boss on the crew whether he could take it home.

“He gave it to me,” Goetzinger said. “It just would have been thrown out anyway, or left in the scene docks forever.”

Verifying such claims is difficult at best, according to memorabilia collectors and experts.

“(The authenticity of) movie memorabilia is the grayest of gray areas,” said Joshua Arfer, director of collectibles and animation art at Christie’s galleries in New York. “These things were, after all, part of an illusion, and a lot of them were just put together with spit and wishes.”

Officials at MGM said they no longer have any record of the props used in the 1952 musical, and, when contacted Friday, Turner Broadcasting in Atlanta, which now owns the rights to “Singin’ in the Rain,” was not able to locate the lamppost’s fate in the corporation’s archives.

Arfer speculated that if it had been among the many collectibles auctioned off in 1970 and 1989 by MGM, it probably would have been snapped up by actress Debbie Reynolds, who co-starred in the movie and who is known as one of the most dedicated collectors of Hollywood memorabilia. But Reynolds said Friday that she doesn’t have the lamppost, although she can identify with Goetzinger’s plight.

“I bought the benches from ‘Meet Me in St. Louis’ in 1970, and one of them was stolen and I never got it back,” Reynolds said. The Victorian bench, she said, was, like Goetzinger’s lamppost, “in a yard” and unsecured when the theft occurred several years ago.

“I put ads in the paper, everything, but I never got it back,” the actress said. “Once something is stolen like that, it’s hard to track it down, and it’s very upsetting because it’s not the value--it’s the fact that it was one of a kind, and that it’s also a loss to history.

“Now, of course, everything in my collection is in vaults and under lock and key.”

Goetzinger said he believes whoever ripped the lamppost from its spot behind the white picket fence of his 2nd Street home was probably unaware of the sentimental value he attached to it.

An avid movie buff, he and his wife, Teri, have crammed their cottage with dozens of Hollywood collectibles. The front hall features an Italian marble table made especially for the home of arch-seductress Alexis Carrington on TV’s “Dynasty.” His bedroom dressing table is a diner counter, and the two stools with it were used in the movie “Diner.” It is lighted by neon taken from the set of the science fiction film “Bladerunner.”

In the Goetzingers’ living room, there’s a neon ice cream cone used in a commercial with a dancing Dr. Pepper bottle and the sound mixer used in “The Wizard of Oz.” And in the garage, a strongbox holds the contracts from “How the West Was Won,” signed by Henry Morgan, Gregory Peck and others.

“We’ve got all kinds of magical stuff,” he said. “(But) we didn’t make (the lamppost’s significance) a public thing. We didn’t tell many people.”

That, he added, is why he and his wife suspect the thieves were youngsters who were simply attracted to the lamppost’s appearance.

And that is why Detective Phillips hopes the lamp will be returned.

“When these things happen,” he said, “usually it’s kids, and usually we get the stuff back. They used to steal the Bob’s Big Boy (statue) from the restaurant about every other graduation, and sooner or later, we’d hear about it, go get it and bolt it back down.”