Million Dollar Film Sells for Handful on eBay
What have you bought lately for five bucks? For most, it barely crosses the impulse buy threshold. It’s a cup at Starbucks, enough gas to get to work the day before payday, not even enough for a pack of deadly cigarettes for the unfortunately addicted.
But for Morace Park, of Essex, England, $5.68 (£3.20 for him) has netted him well over a 300,000% return on his meager investment. It started with eBay, the world’s online marketplace, and a listing labelled “an old film” which was the inadequate description of the aged, olive green film canister he purchased for dirt cheap. Inside was a 35mm nitrate film with the title “Charlie Chaplin in Zepped.”
Charlie Chaplin films are always great collectors items, and one in this condition begs the question–did the seller even examine what he had listed? Adding to its value is the fact that the film is a World War I relic, as it’s a previously uncirculated (among collectors) propaganda film for the war effort. Initial reports from the Daily Mail (UK) last year estimated that the film “could be worth up to £40,000″ (~$57,348 USD), but this is a conservative estimate as experts continue to understand its rarity and historical significance.
It’s lucky for Mr. Park that his neighbor, John Dyer, is the former head of education for the British Board of Film Classification. Together, the two have embarked on a journey to understand this piece of history.
The film, which could easily be mistaken for a Monty Python sequence according to the Guardian (UK), is not even seven minutes long. It includes shots of Chaplin along with previously unseen footage of Zeppelin bombing attacks. The Guardian speculates that Chaplin’s position as a humorist could be juxtaposed with the powerful images of warfare in order to reduce the public fear of their destructive potential.
Chaplin, who was criticized for his own lack of military service in World War I, was embroiled in contract and salary disputes which led to a lot of patchwork films in an effort to blend new and old material to create new works. It’s uncertain how much of the film consists of previously unarchived footage of the man many consider the father of cinematic humor.
According to The Star (Canada), an academic film publication out of Russia reported that the film was likely destroyed. Another article posts that the film was en route to Egypt for exposition many years ago. How it ended up on eBay for a microfraction of its worth is completely unknown.
Filmmaker Hammad Khan is making a documentary out of the quest to investigate the film’s origin and worth and the purchaser and his neighbor had started a blog which describes the genesis of their journey: “We think we might have made THE cinematic find of the last 100 years. It’s something we feel compelled to get to the bottom of. And quick.” The blog, which may have moved or been abandoned, describes the difficulty of performing normal household tasks such as washing dishes with such a monumental mystery on their hands.
On May 23 of this year, the Mirror (UK) reported that the 46-year-old father of three from Henham, Essex was offered £900,000 (almost $1.3 million USD) by a private collector for the film, which he’s in “no rush” to sell. He describes his quest as “like the search for the Holy Grail.”
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