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Meet the Collector: Dwight Cleveland On Turning Hollywood Ephemera into Museum-Worthy History

Last year, highlights from his legendary collection spanning more than 115 years of film history realized over $1.45 million at Heritage Auctions’ Cinema on Paper sale.

Chicago-based collector Dwight M. Cleveland’s fascination with collecting began in 1977, when, as a high school senior, a teacher showed him a set of vintage lobby cards, including one particular card from the 1928 Paramount film Wolf Song. He was smitten. “This thing just called out to me, ‘take me home,’” he told Observer. He didn’t know it at the time, but that encounter would kick off a lifelong obsession with rare movie marketing memorabilia.

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As collecting categories go, this is a nichey one. Lobby cards—small posters displayed in theaters to promote films—date back to the early silent era and were still part of studio marketing packages in the 1980s. Typically issued in sets of eight, with one title card featuring the film’s title, stars and artwork and seven featuring scene stills, they’re relatively rare because they were intended to be disposable. Once a film’s run was over, most ended up in the trash. Those that are still around have found an eager, if small, audience of collectors like Cleveland. Trades were once common; now, in-demand lobby cards sell for six-figure sums.

Over five decades, Cleveland amassed a vast trove of tens of thousands of movie posters, lobby cards and other cinematic ephemera, with a focus on classic Hollywood stars and the Art Deco era. He has owned about 70 percent of the known silent film lobby cards—though not all at the same time—and his archive has included materials related to every Academy Awards Best Picture winner and the top 100 films of all time as rated by the American Film Institute and IMDB. Today, he has winnowed down his collection—once the world’s largest fully curated archive of vintage film ephemera— to about 14,000 items after a series of donations and notable auctions. Last year, highlights from his legendary collection spanning more than 115 years of film history realized over $1.45 million at Heritage Auctions’ Cinema on Paper sale.

What remains can be loosely categorized into two distinct collections. The “Remarkable Women Behind the Camera” collection encompasses more than 10,000 lobby cards from the silent film era when women were producers, directors, screenwriters and more. Because the nitrate film used was inherently unstable, these cards are, in many cases, the only evidence we have of women’s contributions to early film history. There’s also his “Completist” collection of lobby cards from films of the 1920s and ‘30s starring Golden Age greats like Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, Marlene Dietrich, Mae West, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, William Powell, Cary Grant, Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart.

For Cleveland, the hunt for rare, one-of-a-kind pieces and the thrill of discovery are only part of the appeal. He’s kept at it as........

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