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Inspired by the What Celebrities Have You Sat With thread and, well, by my own experience last night, I thought I'd share this photo.
Last night I went to see Nellie McKay, a cabaret singer, and asked her to autograph my ukulele (she also plays uke). http://www.nelliemckay.com/videos
So what, besides the typical books and CDs and CD inserts and photos, have you gotten autographed? Anything? Anyone?
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One of my good friends, John Schanen, had the idea of bringing his old violin in to some composer signings to have the composers sign it. He left it in the car at one of them at Dark Delicacies until I insisted he bring it in and now it's covered with cool sigs.
I had the idea of bringing in a clap board to have, at least the composers at my Fans of Film Music to sign, but I keep forgetting.
I myself, don't really have anything too different signed. I'm boring, lol.
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Posted: |
Oct 15, 2013 - 4:15 AM
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By: |
manderley
(Member)
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Although it's not really out of the ordinary, I plucked a window card poster for SINGIN' IN THE RAIN out of a shop window on the day I first saw the film in 1952.
Over the years, whenever I worked with someone who had been involved in the film, I had them autograph it.
It is now autographed by the 3 principal actors, Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor, and Debbie Reynolds, as well as Cyd Charisse. The behind-the-scenes people who autographed it are the writers Adolph Green and Betty Comden, and director Stanley Donen. I can't imagine that it is not one-of-a-kind.
I have another interesting thing. Around the late 1800s-early 1900s, the most commercially successful artist of the period was a man named Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Though you may not know his name, you've likely all seen one of his paintings illustrated. They are very much of a period, usually very detailed paintings of people within the Greco-Roman period, lounging in their gowns and togas in massive and impeccably rendered buildings and rooms. In the early days of films, the work of Alma-Tadema was the movie art director's model for his sets and costumes of ancient period films. Early DeMille films like SIGN OF THE CROSS, THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, CLEOPATRA and others used Alma-Tadema as a reference point.
The Getty Museum has at least one of his paintings, called "Spring" which is quite beautiful---almost translucent in the glow of its colors. It depicts a huge group of Romans, children, women, and men, parading down a narrow Roman street in spring finery and strewing flowers and ribbons everywhere. Many years ago I saw a very large PhotoGravure B&W copy of this painting in an art gallery in Canada. It had been printed in Berlin about the turn-of-the-century as a very limited special edition, and was beautifully hand-colored, with every small detail picked out---the flowers in the garlands and bouquets, the marble patterns on the columns, etc. The gallery was asking around $1000 for this---which was too much for me, though I loved the handcrafted appearance of the work.
Several years later I was rummaging around an old used-furniture store in Toronto and came upon another copy of this work, from the same Berlin edition, and also beautifully hand-colored. It was back in a corner, in a quite large old broken frame, with dusty glass over it. I tried to contain my excitement, and casually asked the price of the "old print," trying to downplay the value. The shop owner looked at the sorry shape of the frame and said $80, so I bought it immediately, and later had it elegantly framed.
It now hangs on the wall of my living room. One day while dusting it off and admiring the work of the hand-coloring I happened to notice some very faint writing in pencil in an obscure place on the lower part of one of the roman columns. It seems to be Alma-Tadema's signature, signed in pencil, and numbering this copy as part of the limited-printed run.
Years later, I heard another part of the Alma-Tadema story. By the late 1940s-early 1950s, Alma-Tadema's paintings, once sought so highly, had become tremendously devalued, not because of the skill of the painter, but because of the subjects he painted which were, for the most part, very dated by this time. But he still had one admirer who had some money and an interest and who would snap up whatever Alma-Tadema's he could find for sale, often at pennies on the dollar. He built a large collection, becoming almost the ultimate Alma-Tadema private collector of the day. Unfortunately, some years later, this collector went through a divorce and had to sell his paintings at auction. But the market had changed again, and in this auction he changed his chancey investment in a "has-been" artist into a fortune because Alma-Tadema and his work had now been reassessed by the art world. That collector was Candid Camera's originator, Allan Funt!
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