DALLAS, TX.- Mike Kaplan often felt he was born with a poster gene.

As a child in Providence, Rhode Island, he would remove the full-page black-and-white theater ads from the Sunday New York Times for a new play or musical, color them in and then compare his choices with the final results when he visited New York. Becoming part of the film industry in the 1960s allowed his film poster collecting to begin, and now his collection is crossing the auction block in a special presentation of The Mike Kaplan Collection, March 21 at Heritage Auctions.

As a noted producer of The Whales of August, the documentary director of Never Apologize and the marketing strategist behind 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange, the foundation of Kaplan's collection is built around design, rather than a film's importance. Many significant titles are graphically stunning, such as the posters for Stagecoach (United Artists, 1939), Dodsworth (United Artists, 1936) and The Maltese Falcon (Warner Bros., 1941). Sharing equal prominence are groundbreaking concepts from less famous films, such as Bette Davis' Bordertown (Warner Bros., 1935), Noel Coward's Bitter Sweet (United Artists, 1933) and Greta Garbo's Romance (MGM, 1930).

When Kaplan started collecting, with few exceptions, most posters from the 1960s looked alike, with little imagination and a preponderance of photography. The days of painted and illustrated film posters faded from view – a disappointing turn, Kaplan said, because historic posters elevate a film and entice the public like nothing else.

“The ideal movie poster is a microcosm of the movie itself, capturing with graphic inventiveness the feeling one has after leaving the cinema,” Kaplan said. “It should be both a work of art and a souvenir of your movie experience.”

When he discovered the availability of vintage domestic and foreign movie posters through collectors and funky memorabilia shops, a new world of lush and striking poster art was revealed from the “Golden Age” of movie poster design, spanning the 1920s through the 1950s.

His quest was to find the best poster for a film, regardless of country of origin, and to have the movie poster recognized as a unique art form, not just a sidebar of popular culture. His efforts were acknowledged when The Los Angeles County Museum Of Art exhibited key posters from his collection in its 2019 “Art Of The Movie Poster” exhibit, which was extended due to its popularity.

In this auction of 171 treasures from his collection, masterful examples of poster design are found from Argentina: Angels with Dirty Faces (Warner Bros., 1938); Austria: Death Takes a Holiday (Paramount, 1934); Australia: Mother Goose Goes Hollywood (RKO, 1938); Belgium: Dead End (United Artists, 1937); France: The Grapes of Wrath (20th Century Fox, 1947); Germany: Underworld (Paramount, 1928); Italy: The Prisoner of Zenda (Variety Film, 1937); Poland: Sunset Boulevard (Paramount, 1957); Spain: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Columbia, 1949) and the United Kingdom: Get Carter (MGM-EMI, 1971).

Grouped together are images representing 15 different categories, with introductory essays covering the unexpected:

• Firsts: The Big House (MGM, 1930)
• Flights: Lost Horizon (Columbia, 1937)
• Fox Stone Lithos: Ramona (20th Century Fox, 1936)
• The Early 1930s Chained (MGM, 1934)
• John Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (RKO, 1951)
• Preston Sturges’ Sullivan's Travels (Paramount, 1941)
• Legendary Ladies: Annie Oakley (RKO, 1935)

As well the traditional:

• Adventure: The Mark of Zorro (20th Century Fox, 1940),
• The Adventures of Robin Hood (Warner Bros., 1938)
• Comedy: Bringing Up Baby (RKO, 1938)
• Drama: The Great Ziegfeld (MGM, 1936)
• Romance: Romeo and Juliet (MGM, 1936)
• Horror: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Paramount, 1931)
• Crime to Noir: Out of the Past (RKO, 1947)
• Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion (RKO, 1941)

Of the large collection, 52 posters are either one-of-a-kind or have never been auctioned before. Included among them are Music in the Air (Fox, 1934), the first collaboration between Gloria Swanson and Billy Wilder; Laurel & Hardy at their peak in Going Bye-Bye (MGM, 1934); Night After Night (Paramount, 1932), Mae West's first screen appearance that eventually saved Paramount from bankruptcy; Delicious (Fox, 1931), with “America's Sweethearts” Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell in George Gershwin’s immigration-themed musical; Groucho Marx's signature on Horse Feathers (Paramount, 1932) with his three brothers; Mary Pickford retaining her adolescent appeal as Little Annie Rooney (United Artists, 1925); Ronald Colman's debut as the first and best Bulldog Drummond (United Artists, 1929); George Raft dominating the 1935 version of Dashiell Hammet's The Glass Key (Paramount, 1935), and the pastel intensity of stone lithography for the poster for Tail Spin (20th Century Fox, 1938), in which fellow aviatrix' Alice Faye and Nancy Kelly can almost smell the powder on Constance Bennett's powder puff.

Every genre makes an appearance. When going through the Heritage catalog, Kaplan said he discovered a new appreciation for some posters he has not admired in 30 years.

“It makes me feel a little like Clara Bow imagining the partying at the other end of her phone call in The Saturday Night Kid (Paramount, 1929)," he said. “That word will now be spreading about this auction's rare visual feast.”