Lost for decades, Dorothy’s dress from ‘Oz’ up for sale | National News

For many years, one of the versions of the costume Garland wore in the movie was assumed shed at Catholic College of The us, the place it experienced been given to a person in the drama section in the early 1970s. But the clearing out of some business office clutter previous calendar year led to the locating of the costume in an aged shoebox, and now it is really headed for the auction block.

When she initially noticed it, “all I could imagine about was observing the film when I was a youngster and growing up with” it, reported Jacqueline Leary-Warsaw, dean of the school of audio, drama and art at Catholic University, in Washington, D.C. “In a way it was like I was searching at my past childhood.”

She and other folks are hopeful that nostalgia issue will arrive into enjoy when the costume goes up for sale at Bonhams “Classic Hollywood: Film and Television” auction on May 24 in Los Angeles, the place it has a presale estimate of $800,000 to $1.2 million. Bonhams has the dress on display screen this week at the auction house’s New York location prior to it is despatched to California for public check out and then auction.

Helen Corridor, director of well-liked lifestyle for Bonhams, claimed that the sector for memorabilia, and film costumes in unique, is potent, and that “The Wizard of Oz” is a cultural touchstone.

People “very a lot keep in mind the to start with time they observed the movie, the impact it experienced on their life,” she said. The film is renowned for its new music, its dialogue and its visuals, especially when Dorothy goes from drab, sepia-colored Kansas to gloriously multicolored Oz.

There was additional than just one of the costume produced for Garland although filming. Hall claimed that four are recognised to exist and that only two, including the one particular discovered at Catholic University, are with the blouse she wore beneath. Bonhams marketed the other a person with a shirt at an auction in 2015 for extra than $1.5 million.

(There are also some surviving pairs of the ruby slippers Garland wore, with one particular pair in the collection at the Smithsonian.)

The rediscovered gown experienced at first been specified to Father Gilbert Hartke, who was then head of the university’s drama division, in 1973 by actress Mercedes McCambridge, Leary-Warsaw mentioned, although it can be not obvious how McCambridge arrived to have it.

Somehow, in the yrs that followed, the office shed track of the costume right until it turned “something that people today experienced assumed was just a fantasy,” she reported. Previous yr, in the course of preparations for a renovation, a bag containing the shoebox was opened, and there it was — even though how it got to exactly where it finished up remains a secret, Leary-Warsaw stated.

The gown was in fantastic condition, aside from a piece that had been lower away, while the blouse was more fragile.

In looking into the gown, it was decided that Garland wore it in the movie in the scene exactly where she is confronted in a castle by a threatening Wicked Witch of the West.

The university made the decision to auction it off alternatively of holding it, and strategies to use the proceeds from the auction sale to create a entire-fledged film system in the drama department.