The wood panel Kate Winslet used to stay afloat in the 1997 film Titanic as she said her heart-wrenching farewell to Leonardo DiCaprio is up for sale alongside a range of other iconic movie memorabilia.
On Monday, Dallas-based Heritage Auctions announced that it’s teaming up with Planet Hollywood to auction off more than 1,600 props and costumes from the restaurant’s holdings. Online bidding has started and will culminate in a five-day live event in March. Collectors will be able to own a piece of history by bidding on items from some of the biggest films in movie history, including Titanic, Pulp Fiction, Star Wars, and the Indiana Jones series.
The carved wooden plank from Titanic is among the star lots and has a US$40,000 opening bid.
Other highlights of the sale include the Harley-Davidson chopper Bruce Willis rode in 1994’s Pulp Fiction; it has a US$10,500 current bid, according to the auction website. The biggest-ticket item at the moment is the blaster Princess Leia carried across the forest moon of Endor in 1983’s Return of the Jedi, which has a US$75,000 opening bid.
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Fans also have the chance to own the whip Indiana Jones carried into the Temple of Doom in the 1984 Harrison Ford classic (starting bid: US$30,000) or the Ten Commandment tablets Charlton Heston carried down from Mount Sinai in the The Ten Commandments (1956).
Planet Hollywood’s curators spent multiple decades assembling the collection of big-screen ephemera. Some of the lots are larger than life, including the bus stop bench from Forrest Gump, the time-machine phone booth from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and a sprawling section of Blade Runner’s Los Angeles hellscape.
Many items were made available with starting bids in the low hundreds, a move that was intentional, according to Joe Maddalena, Heritage Auctions’ EVP.
“We decided to open the lots at very modest estimates to encourage fans from around the world to participate in this extraordinary opportunity to own a piece of Planet Hollywood and movie history,” he says.
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Response to the sale has taken the auction house by surprise, Maddalena says Collectively, online bidding already stood at more than US$600,000 as of Tuesday afternoon.
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for collectors and fans to get pieces virtually locked up for decades; no one knew many of these pieces would ever become available again, and we’re thrilled and honored to partner with Planet Hollywood to bring them to auction,” says Maddalena.
Planet Hollywood was once poised to become the global counterpart to the Hard Rock Cafe, serving burgers and cocktails to tourists surrounded by a glitzy assortment of movie memorabilia. (At one point, Planet Hollywood offered more than 100 locations, from Beverly Hills and Riyadh to Dallas and Disneyland Paris.) While the chain, which made its debut in 1991 on 57th Street in New York City, ultimately failed to catch on, it managed to amass an unparalleled collection of entertainment memorabilia, fueled in part by its starry set of initial shareholders: Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Sylvester Stallone.
But it’s Robert Earl, Planet Hollywood’s 72-year-old founder and CEO, who remains the driving force behind the brand as well as this auction.
“He has an excellent eye for buying real time-capsule pieces from many memorable films and Hollywood movies,” says Maddalena.
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The event, which will be held online and live at Heritage’s Dallas headquarters from March 20-24, comes at an important time for Planet Hollywood, which still operates restaurants in Orlando, Los Angeles, and Qatar, and has several new locations planned for the coming year, including interactive memorabilia experiences, said Robert Earl, chairman and co-founder of Planet Hollywood, in a news release announcing the sale.
“We are excited to present a taste of our collection and look forward to sharing it with film lovers everywhere who will delight in bringing home a piece of Hollywood history,” he said in the release.
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