Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
Scott Ford (scottfordsdriveingraphics.com) faces the dilemma of the obsessed collector who’s also a dealer: What to keep, what to sell? His vast collection of Hollywood memorabilia, featuring props, posters, and autographs—from Johnny Depp to Don Knotts—is a captivating look at film history. His specialty, though, is the bygone subgenre of the drive-in movie.
• In 1993, I was given some free movie posters in the back of a Suncoast video store in a mall, and that started it all. It was harder to collect movie memorabilia then—there was no eBay.
• I used to write to a lot of celebrities, and they would write back. As soon as eBay got big, they didn’t write you back.
• Collecting is like a disease. I just purchased 16 items related to the actor Christopher Lee—I had to.
• I’ve sold props to a bunch of Hollywood people, including Quentin Tarentino. He has a real thing for posters from vintage hillbilly exploitation films.
• I have a photo album full of photos of me with 270 different celebrities. Many years ago, I hung out with one of the industry’s top autograph dealers, and I learned a lot: It adds a lot of credibility to the autograph to have the photo accompanying it.
• The autograph I would love to own is Bela Lugosi’s. It goes for $750 to $1,100. Another is Orson Welles’. And one fantastic autograph I did own but managed to lose in a divorce was Andy Warhol’s.
• Everyone has three distinct characteristics to their handwriting—like the way they make their J’s, for instance. Even if it’s signed in haste, those things don’t change. The way Orson Welles make his “O.” The way Chuck Berry signs his “C.” Those are distinctive, and they help you authenticate the autograph.
• The key to a good movie prop that people will want to buy is the length of time the camera lingers on it during the movie. If it’s visible in the trailer, even better. If it’s in the movie poster, or what we call the “box art,” that’s a grand slam.
• There is no such thing as a bad movie. Every movie is somebody’s favorite movie. I have seen Night of the Living Dead almost 300 times.
• My wife and I were married by drive-in movie aficionado Joe Bob Briggs at a movie-memorabilia convention. We placed our hands together over a drive-in speaker.
• “My only tattoo is of a speaker from a drive-in.”
• It used to be conventions where you got most of your stuff. You had to figure out which T-shirt you were gonna wear, which hotel you were gonna stay in, and you’d go to the convention and meet your idols and get their autographs.
• The Shining is one of my absolute favorite films. I’ve actually stayed in room 217 of the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, where Stephen King stayed in 1974 and got the inspiration for the book. He supposedly saw the ghost of a small child that haunts the hotel.
• One of my favorite items is a brush that was part of Boris Karloff’s make-up kit.
• The weirdest autograph I have is from the kid who played the banjo in Deliverance.
• How can I sell so many of the things that I love? I go through phases. Eventually, I do have less of an emotional attachment to some things, and I’m willing to sell them.
• I’m a huge eBayer. I’ve been at it since 1999. Today, I sold Carly Simon’s autograph, a prop from the movie Outlander, a movie poster for Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, and some old flight-attendant buttons from Ozark Airlines. I sell about four items a day.
• I like to have a costumed mannequin near my table when I sell posters and props at movie-memorabilia conventions. For the next one, it’ll be a werewolf in a 1940s tuxedo. It’s an attention-getter; people will want to get their photo taken with him.
• My business plan changed about seven years ago, when I started to think about how really, today’s movie theaters are inside each of our homes. I want to bring movie memorabilia to the common man, for his home-theater space. I want to be the Neiman Marcus of B-movie, trash, cult, exploitation memorabilia.
