Memory marketplace

What’s hot today for hard-core collectors of movie and television memorabilia?

Not silent film stars, even such legends as Rudolph Valentino, Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton. Not Clark Gable, Gary Cooper or Tyrone Power.

But Marilyn Monroe retains her allure -- one of her outfits from “The Seven Year Itch” sold for $58,750 just last week -- along with Audrey Hepburn and James Dean.

Television memorabilia is where the most action is, according to Joseph M. Maddalena, president and chief executive of the Beverly Hills-based auction house Profiles in History.

“Nothing is hotter than ‘60s television,” says Maddalena, whose office is filled with goodies such as Gary Oldman’s Dracula armor costume from Francis Ford Coppola’s “Dracula,” art decorator Richard Day’s 1936 Oscar for “Dodsworth” and Will Ferrell’s elf costume from “Elf.” “Whether it be ‘Lost in Space,’ ‘Star Trek,’ ‘Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea,’ ‘I Dream of Jeannie,’ ‘Bewitched’ -- now it’s even ‘70s television. The people who collect this stuff tend to be 40, 50 or 60 years old. They are buying their childhood. They want Barbara Eden in that sexy costume. They want Bob Crane as ‘Hogan.’ They love that stuff that is their childhood. That’s why I think the silent stuff is vanishing, because the people who were around who knew about the silent era are dying off.”

Although Profiles in History does 60% of its business acquiring and selling historical documents, it holds about four Hollywood auctions a year -- “$7 million to $8 million a year in auctions, which with Hollywood collectibles is a lot in the scheme of things.”

Profiles in History’s latest auction will take place Friday at the Westin Hotel at LAX.

The biggest moneymaker in memorabilia is horror, Maddalena says. “Science fiction is No. 2,” he says. “The thing about Dracula is, every couple of years they crank out a new movie or a spinoff. People are infatuated with vampires. ‘Star Wars’ is forever. It created a whole new way of filmmaking. It will be here forever.”

And collectors are more interested in a character or a specific role than in actors themselves. “If you have Al Pacino from ‘The Godfather’ and Al Pacino from ‘Scarface’ and Al Pacino from another movie like ‘Heat,’ nobody cares about that one. If you have Tom Cruise in ‘Top Gun,’ it’s great. But Tom Cruise in ‘Mission: Impossible,’ it’s not so easy to sell. They don’t collect actors, they collect the motion picture and the television shows.”

Friday’s auction is filled with all kinds of stuff from every era; the collection can be perused through Thursday by appointment at Profiles in History. Among the offerings and their estimated values are:

* original production plans for Disneyland’s Main Street U.S.A. -- $10,000-$15,000

* a rare lobby card from the original “Dracula” -- $10,000-$12,000

* the black special effects costume from the 1933 “The Invisible Man” -- $30,000-$50,000

* a rare “Flash Gordon” one-sheet from the 1936 feature film -- $40,000-$50,000

* the full-size flying Spinner vehicle from “Blade Runner” -- $60,000-$80,000

* Arnold Schwarzenegger’s signature leather jacket from “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” -- $15,000-$25,000

* original Darth Vader helmet, mask and shoulder armor used in “The Empire Strikes Back,” with a signed letter of authenticity by George Lucas -- $40,000-$60,000

* the Black Beauty car from the ‘60s TV series “The Green Hornet” -- $200,000-$300,000

* William Shatner’s second-season command tunic from “Star Trek” -- $30,000-$40,000

Maddalena says he derives the estimated values of the material from “gut feeling and how much other things like that have sold for.”

In the case of the Black Beauty, which still runs, “the only other car that would be as famous or more famous would be the Adam West Batmobile. A real Batmobile would be $1 million. The second most famous television car would be the Black Beauty. That belongs in a museum. That is the kind of piece a museum would buy.”

Until about 10 years ago there was little market for this type of memorabilia. “People have always collected posters,” says Maddalena. “Great movies are always a collectible thing, but everything else was [considered] junk.”

He believes the founding of the Hard Rock Cafes and Planet Hollywood restaurants, which were decorated in movie and TV memorabilia, in the ‘80s and early ‘90s “really made this stuff accessible to the world. Planet Hollywood and the Hard Rock made people aware that you could hang pop culture on your walls. In the past five six or seven years, because prices have gone up, so much great material has come out.”

Maddalena had been buying this memorabilia for years and losing money when he tried to resell it. “I was getting killed,” he says. Because there was no market, he decided to create one.

“I took what I really loved and believed in and kept exposing it year in and year out to the world. For the first five or six years I lost money with every single sale. But I wasn’t going to give up. I believe that if you keep putting this stuff before people, eventually it’s going to kick in. It’s too cool. Five or six years ago it turned around. You are basically taking a market that doesn’t exist at all, and you make it accessible. So now we have thousands and thousands of collectors worldwide.”

The Internet has been a boon to his business. Collectors around the world will be able to bid on Friday’s auction through www.ebayliveauctions.com.

Maddalena obtains most of the memorabilia from people in the entertainment industry. “Studios don’t have stuff anymore. The studio archives have been depleted over the years. It is primarily people who work in the industry, the art directors, the writers, the set directors, the producers and directors themselves.”

More recently, he says, the studios “realized they missed the boat” and are selling props and costumes from their [newer] movies at auctions and on the Internet.”

Unlike other fields of collecting, Maddalena says, “I rarely see this stuff again.” By and large, “there are no speculators. No investors. For these people, this is their life, this is their passion.”

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Profiles in History Hollywood Auction

Where: The Westin Hotel at LAX, 5400 W. Century Blvd., Los Angeles; or over the Internet at www.ebayliveauctions.com

When: Friday at noon

Contact: (310) 859-7701 or e-mail info@profilesinhistory.com