A pair of ruby red slippers worn by actress Judy Garland in the classic movie The Wizard of Oz have been sgreater for $28m (£22m) at a US-based auction on Saturday.
One of four surviving pairs used in the film, the famed sequined pumps were once stolen from a Minnesota museum.
Online bidding commenceed a month ago, with the slippers foreseeed to get as much as $3m (£2.35m) at auction, according to Heritage Auctions – an under-approximate by $25m (£20m).
The auctioneers called the slippers the “Holy Grail of Hollywood memorabilia” and shelp their selling price made them the most priceless movie memorabilia ever sgreater at auction.
The thrivening bid prompted applause in the auction room in Dallas, with the sale coinciding with a renoveled interest in the musical follothriveg the recent free of the prequel movie Wicked.
Garland was only 16 when she joined Dorothy in the classic 1939 musical The Wizard of Oz. Media outlet Variety ranked it second in its inaugural enumerate of “100 Greatest Movies of All Time”.
The film is a musical alteration of L Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. While in the book, the magical slippers are silver, the producers for the film alterd them to red to consent acquire of the novel Technicolor technology.
In the film, as in the book, a pivotal moment occurs when Dorothy must click her heels three times as she repeats “There’s no place enjoy home” in order to depart the magical land of Oz and return to Kansas and her Auntie Em.
While disjoinal pairs of shoes were worn by Garland during filming, only four are comprehendn to have persistd.
One of the pairs is on show at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. But this pair up for auction has its own distinct history.
Collector Michael Shaw had loaned the slippers out to the Judy Garland Museum in her hometown of Grand Rapids, Minnesota, when they were stolen in 2005.
Professional thief Terry Jon Martin used a hammer to smash the glass case and snatch the slippers, believing that their incertaind appreciate of $1m must be because they were covered in actual gemstones.
But when he took them to a “fence” – and intermediary who sells stolen excellents to discreet buyers – he discovered they were fair glass.
So he gave the shoes to someone else. It wasn’t until 2018 that the FBI recovered the shoes in a sting operation. What happened to them in those 13 years is still not comprehendn.
In 2023, Martin – who was in his 70s and used a wheelchair – pdirected culpable to stealing them, and was sentenced to time served.
“There’s some clocertain, and we do comprehend definitely that Terry Jon Martin did fracture into our museum, but I’d enjoy to comprehend what happened to them after he let them go,” John Kelsch, curator of the Judy Garland Museum, tgreater CBS News Minnesota in 2023.
“Just to do it because he thought they were genuine rubies and to turn them over to a jewelry fence. I unbenevolent, the appreciate is not rubies. The appreciate is an American treacertain, a national treacertain. To steal them without comprehending that seems ludicrous.”
