When a collector is looking for posters for a particular genre, it is inevitable that they will come across material from other films. While I was searching for Hitchcock material I would often stumble across posters that obviously had value so I snapped them up hoping that I might be able to use them to trade for posters that I wanted. I met some passionate and sometimes quite eccentric collectors in the course of my travels and soon developed an extensive collection of memorabilia.
During the time I spent in Hollywood, I had access to various celebrities and movie stars. I was able to acquire a large collection of autographs, props and documents relating to films and was offered the opportunity to supply Warner Brothers Movie World with original Movie Memorabilia in the 1990s. This lasted for a number of years until I decided to focus on Original Movie posters rather than autographed material. The increased interest in internet auctions led to a proliferation of fake and misrepresented autographed material that flooded the market and I felt that the time had come to concentrate on original movie posters.
In the course of my travels, I was fortunate to hear on the grapevine that three major collections were being offered for sale. I spent a couple of years attempting to acquire a huge collection of posters that was to be sold by a distributor in New Zealand. When I was finally given the approval to submit an offer, I flew to New Zealand and viewed the collection. It consisted of a warehouse full of original movie posters, many of which were highly sought after. My offer was accepted and the posters were shipped back to Australia.
Coincidentally, I also became aware of another huge collection of movie posters that was for sale on the Gold Coast and another in Melbourne. Although the prospect of collating and sorting a mountain of material was daunting, I felt that the opportunity was too valuable to pass up. I now had a warehouse literally full of movie posters.
In the late 1990s I started trading on eBay in the very early days of the auction site. I was not computer literate at the time but had a lot of success with my auctions despite the fact that I didn’t include photographs! Since then I have maintained an eBay store and have completed over 20,000 sales on the site.
In 2002 I set up www.moviemem.com I now have more than 10,000 items listed on the site along with Exhibitions of Movie Posters and information about the origins and authenticity of posters.
In 2005, I decided to create a specialist area on my site for movie posters from Australian films and now have what must be the world’s largest retail collection of original Australian movie posters for locally made films. I work closely with some of the major government organisations in providing an historical record of Australian Movie Posters.
My business has been featured on Channel Nine’s Business Sunday programme and there have been a number of newspaper features including The Gold Coast Bulletin and The Age which reported …
“And movie poster collecting is, it seems, a very serious business. A quick trawl of the internet reveals a variety of movie poster-selling sites – most notably that of the Queensland-based memorabilia king, John Reid (www.moviemem.com), where posters from every imaginable local and international movie can be found at prices that vary from the affordable to the extravagant.”
I presented a daily radio programme – Drive Time on Jazz Radio on the Gold Coast for five years and interviewed many Australian musicians and movie stars. Some of the interviews appear on my YouTube channel
http://www.youtube.com/user/moviememorabilia?feature=CBQQwRs%3D
I have had retail outlets at Antique Centers on the Gold Coast and Brisbane over the years but now concentrate solely on the website for the sale of movie posters. I have also presented a number exhibitions at various venues throughout the country.