Chicago’s love affair with the movies has long been documented — from having the largest number of production companies pre-Hollywood to becoming an epicenter of modern big budget productions to the home of one of the greatest film critics of our time, Roger Ebert.
But we also have one of the most impressive movie poster collectors in our midst courtesy of Lincoln Park resident Dwight Cleveland. He is highly regarded as having the world’s most significant privately owned collection of vintage silver screen posters, lobby cards and glass slides spanning 116 years of cinema, from “Casablanca” to “Barbarella,” “Wizard Of Oz” to “King Kong” and then some.
At one point, the Dwight M. Cleveland Collection topped 45,000 items (stored in a temperature-controlled art warehouse). Though, after several donations to marquee institutes like the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences, the Library of Congress and the Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Cleveland has pared his personal archives down to 4,500 while still continuing his almost daily search for rarities and must-haves.
“Movie posters have been my hobby since I graduated from high school in the late ‘70s,” says Cleveland, who grew up in a suburb of New York City and moved to the Midwest to study at the University of Chicago. By day, he’s a successful real estate developer focusing on historic preservation, much like his passion for accumulating relics from the Golden Age of Cinema. Cleveland’s collection is heavy on items from the 1920s and 1930s when stone lithography was the way most posters were produced before technological advancements and anti-trust lawsuits were waged against movie houses.
The keen vintage preservation has led to much public interest in Cleveland’s collection. This year in particular was a major milestone as he staged his first organized exhibition at the Norton Museum Of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida. “Coming Soon: Film Posters From The Dwight M. Cleveland Collection” ran from July to October and was the largest exhibition to date of classic film artwork, with 200 posters on display from the turn of the 20th century to the late 1980s.
As well, Cleveland released his first book in September, “Cinema On Paper: The Graphic Genius Of Movie Posters.” Published by Assouline, Cleveland says, “The book features 100 of my favorite posters that are incredibly beautiful and graphic and meant to jump off every page. I wanted it to be a graphic art book that shows movie posters as art unto themselves.”
Cleveland is quick to admit he’s not really a movie buff. “I fell in love with the artwork on the posters first,” he says. In fact, his knack for collecting the memorabilia came from his like-minded high school art professor.
“All the students made fun of this guy for being such a fanatic over his movie posters; he had them up on the walls, in the art studio and in his office and around the school gallery,” he recalls. “I never paid too much attention to it, but one day he came back from a buying opportunity and had this group of lobby cards [a smaller version of a movie poster, measuring 11 x 14 inches and in sets of 8] and I saw a card from ‘Wolf Song,’ the 1929 film starring Gary Cooper and Lupe Velez. I fell in love with this thing at first sight, and I knew I had to get it from him.”
It was the moment that pushed Cleveland into the art of poster trading, which was a popular transaction at the time (and still is), before eBay and online marketplaces became more standard and made the practice more expensive, though also more practical.
“Before the internet I used to send sellers disposable cameras and have them take pictures of their items and send the camera back to me so I could develop the film and make a determination,” he says of the “cumbersome” process he used to utilize.
But there were two key moments in the budding collector’s early days, he says, that helped him start to amass items. After graduating high school, Cleveland took a gap year living in the movie studio capital of the world, Los Angeles, and was a self-admitted “Hollywood Boulevard rat” haunting several area shops with a long “want list” of items. Before starting grad school in Chicago in 1985, he also bought a round-the-world airline ticket from TWA for $3,500, traveling to Egypt, Italy and Thailand and shipping new acquisitions home.
“My parents never knew what might show up,” he says, laughing.
He still frequents places like Japan for his collection, and in the ‘90s went to Cuba on a sanctioned trip with the Art Institute of Chicago where he acquired pieces from the country’s pre-eminent movie poster maker.
“The fun for me is really the acquisition. There are so many great stories of negotiation and cajoling,” he said. During a book signing this summer for “Cinema On Paper,” a homeless man showed up with a note that he had posters to sell. “And sure enough he had great stuff that I bought from him.”
Cleveland estimates he scans about 2 million images a year and buys around 200 items annually from dealer catalogs, auction sites, conventions and meeting private sellers. In terms of what he purchases, Cleveland says he can be a completest but always goes back to the advice his high school professor gave him: “Always buy what you love.”
“Everything is picked because I find it beautiful,” he says. “Film in itself is really about the human condition. It’s easily the most influential art form of the 20th century and probably still in the 21st century. And so when you look at my collection, there’s this evolution of American culture and society, and it becomes this interesting panorama of who we really are.”
Selena Fragassi is a local freelance writer.