What is the most expensive piece of movie memorabilia?
As recently as the 1990s, Hollywood thought that the only people interested in purchasing movie memorabilia from the countless beloved productions in its history were hardcore nerds with money to burn. After all, for decades, the buying and selling of items used onscreen was squarely the domain of a fairly small number of collectors who wanted to own their parts of movie history.
However, this all changed in 1996 when David Elkouby, the owner and proprietor of several memorabilia shops scattered around Hollywood, was arrested and accused of ringleading a series of movie prop thefts worth $150,000. He claimed that he never stole anything, instead buying all the props in his stores from collectors or in silent auctions, but he still wound up serving three nights in jail and 18 months at a halfway house.
Elkouby maintained that he wasn’t a criminal, but instead became the fall guy for a movie industry that finally realised there was serious money to be made in the memorabilia market. “For their first 80-something years, they didn’t care,” he told The Hollywood Reporter, “It was a very grey area”.
In the years since he has claimed he was made an example of, the money involved in memorabilia has ballooned in a truly staggering way. The market has inflated hugely since Hollywood started pushing memorabilia at auctions, events, and Comic Cons. A good example is the Shakespeare bust from the iconic Batman ’60s television show, which Elkouby bought for a paltry $800 many decades ago, yet is now worth at least $200,000.
Even that number is small potatoes compared to some of the other items sold in the 2000s and ’10s, though. In 2014, Aragorn’s sword, made by Peter Lyon and wielded by Viggo Mortensen in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, was bought for $437,000, and in 2019, Darth Vader’s fibreglass mask and helmet were purchased for a reported $1.1million.
Going even further, the piano played so beautifully by Dooley Wilson’s Sam in Casablanca fetched an eye-watering $3.4m in 2014, while the ornate Maltese Falcon from Humphrey Bogart’s other classic noir was bought by billionaire hotel owner Steve Wynn in 2013 for $4.085m, plus a hefty $585,000 buyer’s premium.
So, what is the most expensive piece of movie memorabilia in history?
Incredibly, the single most expensive piece of movie memorabilia eclipses any of these previous sales. In fact, you could throw Aragorn’s sword, Darth Vader’s helmet, Casablanca’s piano, and The Maltese Falcon’s, well, Maltese Falcon together, and they still wouldn’t come close to the staggering price paid for a pair of Judy Garland’s ruby red slippers from The Wizard of Oz. Those sparkly bad boys sold in December 2024 for a mind-boggling $28m, plus $4.5m in premiums and auction house fees.
Fascinatingly, this pair of slippers was one of four reportedly made for Garland to wear in the seminal 1939 musical, and one of the other pairs was previously sold to a pair of celebrity fans in 2012. Heartwarmingly, Leonardo DiCaprio and Steven Spielberg pooled their not-inconsiderable resources to buy this pair for $2m, on the proviso that they were the ones used by Garland when she clicked her heels in a close-up. The beloved star and director then donated the slippers to the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, where they can be viewed to this day.
So, this begs quite an important question: if that pair of slippers cost $2m, and they were supposedly used in a close-up, why did the pair sold in 2024 cost 14 times that amount? Well, Heritage Auctions, who ran the sale, didn’t even have an answer for that as its crack team of auctioneers predicted they’d sell for around $3m.
However, perhaps the unique selling point of this particular prop is that they were previously missing for 13 years after being stolen from Grand Rapids, Minnesota’s Judy Garland Museum in 2005. Incredibly, a 57-year-old crook named Terry Jon Martin, in search of “one last score”—his words, not ours—used a hammer to smash the museum’s door and the slippers’ display case, before making off with the shoes.
Martin believed the slippers were adorned with real rubies, which would have justified a mob connection paying him $1m for them. But, when he showed the shoes to his ‘fence’, Jerry Hal Saliterman, he revealed the rubies were made of glass. A disgruntled Martin discarded the slippers at that point until the FBI found them in 2018. Martin and Saliterman were subsequently indicted for the crime in 2023 when both were 77 years old, wheelchair-bound, and using oxygen tanks. You just can’t make this up.
