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Veronica Lake was an actress from the 1930s to the 1970s. She is best remembered from the 1940s as the sexy girl in many film noirs. Some of her movies include: Sullivan's Travels, This Gun For Hire, So Proudly We Hail!, The Glass Key, Hold Back the Dawn, The Blue Dahlia, I Married a Witch, and Star Spangled Rhythm. Note that many people remember the story of her cutting her hair, but it is quite likely that they remember it "wrong". What was the story? It was that she cut her hair because women were working in factories, and the government did not want women to get their hair caught in machines, so they asked Miss Lake to be a role model and "cut hers first". While it is true that Veronica Lake was a gigantic star in 1942, and it is true that she cut her hair at that time, the above is not the correct story, but one of those "urban legends"! We auctioned a great still of her where it explained that she offered to cut her famous long hair as an inducement to get people to buy war bonds. After $180,000 was raised, she cut 1 inch of her hair, and she said that "for $5,000,000, she'll cut the whole thing off"! Of course, that money was raised, and she DID cut her hair, and sadly discovered that her wonderful hair was a major part of her appeal, and her stardom quickly diminished. Lake passed away in 1973 at the age of 50 from hepatitis.

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 an image of the negative that shows the "positive image" (in addition to a scan 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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