"Clay and Susan Griffith's Vampire Empire is Transforming Genre Fiction" Paul Goat Allen, BN Explorations.

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Hollywood Treasures

This is a new show on Syfy. It's about a guy who owns a high-end Hollywood auction company who seeks out rare gizmos, props, and art associated with movies. It's sort of a geek version of Antiques Roadshow,  and it could be better than it is. Unlike Antiques Roadshow, it's more about the host finding good stuff for "his" auction house rather than surprising normal people with the value of their unknown treasures, which is the joy of AR. Most of the people he deals with are professional collectors who already know what they've got and are just hoping to make a killing. Plus, the buyers at the auctions don't generate much sympathy either. There's no tension or real vicarious thrill in watching some guy drop hundreds of thousands of dollars on a Lost In Space prop. Obviously that just means that guy has hundreds of thousands of dollars to waste anyway.

But they did a bit on one show with Stan Lee and original artwork from FF #12. Of course, like all reality tv, it could've been a complete stage job. Still...outside the argument about whether Jack or Stan did most of the work, I want to believe there was a little wistfulness in the aging Stan as he flipped those old pages with original margin notes that he and Kirby did SO many years ago in the Silver Age of Marvel.

Staged or not, for those of us who lived through the great Lee-Kirby years at Marvel, and who have been lucky enough to work in comics, it was a cool moment.

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