GUEST: I was in Los Angeles in the mid-'80s, and I went to an auction where Francis Coppola sold off his Zoetrope Studios. I saw this and it had that tag on it saying "Breakaway Headboard," and I bought it. And I was the only person who bid on it, and I took it home and rented all his movies, and it's in Godfather II.
APPRAISER: So you found it.
GUEST: I did.
APPRAISER: You found it in the movie. I'm actually really stunned that you, based on this tag-- all it says is "Breakaway Headboard"-- decided, "I need to have this."
GUEST: Well, my wife says the same thing.
APPRAISER: I was just going to say, if I were your wife, I would have said, "What did you bring home?"
GUEST: Right.
APPRAISER: Clearly, there's a lot going on here, and you were able to identify it from Godfather II because of the fact that the squibs have gone off, and this is from the scene when they try to shoot Michael Corleone. That's obviously what drew your attention when you were watching the film. You said, "Oh, that's my headboard!"
GUEST: That's right.
APPRAISER: So you paid what for it in the auction?
GUEST: I think $25. I was the only person who bid on it. I actually have two, two of them came because the shot was the bullet and then the bullet, so there's two of these.
APPRAISER: So the $25 you paid was for two.
GUEST: Yes, so $12.50 each.
APPRAISER: Well, it's funny. People who saw this, I overheard them here in the room saying, "Did an animal get to it?" Nobody could understand why it was we were talking about this. But the reason we're talking about it is because it's Godfather II. And normally, someone might say, "Doesn't condition play a role with props and things like that?" Obviously, this was intentionally shot up, it's intentionally distressed. It's super light, it's made of balsa wood so that these squibs would go off, which are the little explosives they used for special effects, so it'd make it look really dramatic with the wood flying all over the room, and it worked. There is virtually nothing from this film or the first film out there. There's only the things that probably Francis Ford Coppola and maybe some of the people who worked on the film have.
GUEST: Uh-huh.
APPRAISER: Very few items have come up for auction. We have a few costumes, hats. Costumes are easier, they seem to survive more, mainly because at the studios, they would put them back into the wardrobe rotation to be reused. With a prop like this, they blew it apart, you couldn't reuse this, so it probably would have been trash in any of the studios, but he kept it and then you bought it. So now we talk about value. Because there are so few things and because Godfather II was the first sequel to ever win Best Picture in addition to the first film-- it actually won six Oscars, and Godfather I only won three.
GUEST: I didn't know that.
APPRAISER: Over time, we often talk about, with collectibles, what's the enduring legacy of a film or what's the enduring legacy of a star. The enduring legacy of the Godfather movies are to the moon. Because of that, at auction, conservatively, I would put an estimate of probably $6,000 to $8,000 on it.
GUEST: Oh, cool! All right, well, thank you.
