Thursday 20 March 2008

Oddjob’s hat from Goldfinger makes $134,200 at auction.


The gun that shot Lee Harvey Oswald, and Marilyn Monroe's purse, were among items at an auction last week.

The man behind a 41,000-acre "green, eco-sustainable community" in south Osceola County decided to do a little housecleaning this weekend - by unloading the Wicked Witch's hat from The Wizard of Oz, the whip that Harrison Ford used as Indiana Jones and the gun that Jack Ruby used to shoot Harvey Oswald.

Those pieces, along with more than 800 other relics of 20th-century history, went on the auction block in Las Vegas on Saturday because their owner, eccentric South Florida developer Anthony Pugliese, decided to unload much of his pop-culture collection and focus on his new community.

More than 50 bidders gathered at the Palms Casino to bid on about 450 pieces of movie-related memorabilia, while most of the approximately 200 bidders joined the auction by telephone or on the Internet.

Though the crowd was small, the prices were high. Bidders drove up the price of the Wicked Witch's hat to $197,400. The holy grail that Ford sought in the film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade sold for $42,700, and bidders ran the price on Indiana Jones' bullwhip up to $70,150. Remember Odd Job from the James Bond movie Goldfinger? His famous bowler hat that could slice a statue in half sold for $134,200, said Arlan Ettinger of Guernsey's Auction House, the firm handling the auction.

The Jack Ruby gun failed to sell.

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