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The Great Escape, the classic 1963 John Sturges World War II (WWII) military prison escape crime adventure thriller ("The great adventure! The great entertainment!"; "1:06 AM What went into these few secon1963 ds... 1:07 AM The hell... the heroism... the high adventure... 1:08 AM Make for the screen's great entertainment!"; with a superb "Screenplay by James Clavell & W.R. Burnett", "Based upon the book by Paul Brickhill"; note that this was largely a true story, but it was of course "enlarged" to make it even more dramatic, and some American prisoners, who were not at the actual prison camp, were added, so that the movie could include American actors James Garner and Steve McQueen) starring Steve McQueen (as Hilts "The Cooler King"), James Garner (as Hendley "The Scrounger"), Richard Attenborough (as Roger Bartlett, "Big X"), James Donald (as Group Capt. Ramsey "The SBO"), Charles Bronson (as Danny Velinski "Tunnel King"), Donald Pleasence (as Colin Blythe "The Forger"), James Coburn (as Sedgwick "Manufacturer"), Hannes Messemer (as Col. Von Luger "The Kommandant"), David McCallum (as Eric Ashley-Pitt "Dispersal"), Gordon Jackson (as Sandy "Mac" MacDonald "Intelligence"), John Leyton (as Willie Dickes "The Tunneler"), Angus Lennie (as Archibald "Archie" Ives "The Mole"), Nigel Stock (as Denys Cavendish "The Surveyor"), Robert Graf (as Werner "The Ferret"), William Russell (as Sorren), Lawrence Montaigne (as Haynes "Diversions"), Robert Desmond (as "Griff" Griffith "Tailor"), and Bud Ekins (Steve McQueen's friend, who performed the motorcycle jump at the film's climax, but he was uncredited, and almost everyone thought McQueen had done the jump himself!)
NOTE: Click on linked names to see a biography.

Important Added Info: Note that this is a "studio-issued" negative. What is it? It was produced by the studio but is not the camera original. It is very high quality and was created in quantity by the studios and sent to media outlets or other places that had need of the very highest quality image for reproduction purposes (in newspapers, magazines, or elsewhere). We have put a scan of the negative that shows the "positive image" (in addition to an image of the negative image). REMEMBER THAT WHAT YOU RECEIVE WILL BE A PHOTOGRAPHIC NEGATIVE, NOT A POSITIVE IMAGE LIKE YOU ARE SEEING (however, the archive that owned this made an 8x10 positive print from it that will be included with the negative). However, we will provide the winning bidder of this auction that positive image scan that is both high quality and not watermarked (on request to the winning bidder, and only the winning bidder). The negative is in a plastic sleeve (but we removed it and scanned it, so that bidders could see just how high quality it is). It will be sent to the winner of the auction in its sleeve.

Note that this negative (and 96 others we are currently auctioning, in 97 separate auctions) has a wonderful provenance! From 1938 through the 1960s, movie fans would purchase photos of their favorite movie stars from a company in Brooklyn, New York, called "Movie Star News". This company, owned by Irving Klaw, sold a massive number of repro photos, because it became widely known to have some of the highest quality movie star images there were, as good or better than what the studios themselves produced. It turns out that Klaw had obtained the negatives that he made his photos from directly from the major studios, who apparently did not want to store negatives due to the fear of them being a fire hazard. He amassed an unmatched collection of over 20,000 negatives of all the top Hollywood stars, and over half of them were "camera originals", meaning they were the ones in the camera when the photographer took the image, and were hand retouched by the photographer (if retouching was necessary).

Irving Klaw died in 1966, and his nephew continued his business for many years, but he closed the business in 2012, and the archive of negatives passed through several hands before being acquired by a company that hired a professional archivist to spend over a year cataloging the negatives. The 97 negatives we are currently auctioning are from this amazing archive, and approximately half of them are camera originals, and half are "studio negatives" (created by the studio directly from the camera original). See above for which type of negative the one in this auction is. These include wonderful images of top Hollywood stars! This is an amazing opportunity to not only purchase ultra rare negatives, but also to obtain ones from one of the most legendary archives ever assembled!

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Bruce Hershenson,
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