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    Ferris Bueller’s Vest Hits the Auction Block. ‘Anyone, Anyone?’

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    Worn by Matthew Broderick in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” the vest could fetch several hundred thousand dollars, according to Sotheby’s.There might be a temptation to play hooky when wearing it — stealing away in a Ferrari GT to catch a matinee game at Wrigley Field.Alas, no one is likely to confuse the person donning it with Abe Froman, the “sausage king of Chicago.”But for a six-figure sum, you could still channel Ferris Bueller, whose patterned sweater vest from “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” the 1986 John Hughes comedy about a suburban Chicago teenager ditching school, hit the auction block this week.The vest worn by the actor Matthew Broderick in the movie could fetch several hundred thousand dollars, according to Sotheby’s, which is handling the garment’s sale.The auction began on Thursday, the 40th anniversary of Ferris’s high jinks, and runs through June 24, with the bidding taking place online.As Ferris’s monotone economics teacher, played by Ben Stein, would say: “Anyone, anyone?”The vest is reminiscent of a cheetah print and made from acrylic yarn. It is expected to fetch an estimated $300,000 to $600,000, far outpacing the rate of inflation. And then some.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Rare Beatles Audition Tape Surfaces in a Vancouver Record Shop

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      The recording appears to be from the band’s 1962 audition for Decca Records, which notably rejected the group.The tape sat unremarkably on a shelf behind the counter, collecting dust for five, maybe 10 years — so much time that Rob Frith says he lost track.Frith, 69, could not seem to recall how it had found its way to Neptoon Records, his store in Vancouver, British Columbia, which in its 44 years has become a repository for tens of thousands of vinyl records and other musical relics.The label on the cardboard box said it was a Beatles demo tape, but, having heard enough bootleg recordings over the decades, Frith was skeptical until he enlisted a disc jockey friend, Larry Hennessey, to load it onto his vintage tape player a few weeks ago.It was just before midnight on March 11 when they pushed play on the mystery tape. From the opening guitar riff and the intonation of a 21-year-old John Lennon, Frith said he could not believe his ears as he listened to the Beatles performing a cover of the Motown hit “Money (That’s What I Want).”“Right away, we’re all kind of looking at each other,” Frith said. “It seems like the Beatles are in the room. That’s how clear it is.”Frith said the tape appeared to be a professionally edited recording of the Beatles’ New Year’s Day 1962 audition for Decca Records in London, a session that notably ended with the band’s rejection.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Larry Bell’s Vast Collection of 12-String Acoustic Guitars

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      The artist Larry Bell has amassed a vast collection of acoustic instruments, carefully stored in a climate-controlled room.In My Obsession, one creative person reveals their most prized collection.The artist Larry Bell, 85, was born with severe undiagnosed hearing loss. “I didn’t know it, and neither did my parents,” he said. Unsurprisingly, music lessons were a struggle but, when he was about 17, he saw a strange guitar hanging in a pawnshop window in Downtown Los Angeles. “I had never seen anything quite like it because it had 12 strings instead of six,” he said. “I asked the man behind the counter if I could see it. I just dragged the back of my nails across the strings, and it was a complete epiphany. I heard it. And not only did I hear it, I could feel it.” Bell, who is best known for minimalist glass sculptures that explore the properties of light and color, has been collecting 12-string guitars ever since. Hundreds hang in their own climate-controlled room in his studio in Taos, N.M. Twelve-strings are more sensitive than six-strings: They’re difficult to tune and hard to play, and that’s what Bell appreciates. “My collection is about my passion for improbable things,” he said.The collection: Acoustic 12-string guitars.Number of pieces in the collection: “Roughly 300.”Recent purchase: “I had some spare time [during the run of the retrospective ‘Larry Bell: Improvisations’ at the Phoenix Art Museum], and one of the curators drove me around to see some guitar shops. I came across a fantastic instrument made in Vietnam. The sound’s sort of a cross between a harpsichord and an organ.”Weirdest: “In my mind, they’re all unusual because 12-strings aren’t a popular kind of guitar. Years ago, I commissioned a fantastic musician to make me a 12-string guitar that was small enough to slip under the seat of an airplane.”Most expensive: “Ten thousand dollars for a McPherson [a guitar handmade in Sparta, Wis.].”Most precious: “A little Mexican instrument that was made [about 50 years ago] in a town called Paracho, Michoacán. I paid about $600 [for it] at a store in L.A. It probably cost someone $12 when it was new. As it turned out, it was absolutely extraordinary in terms of its playability. How much a guitar costs is not necessarily what determines how good it is.”One previously owned by somebody famous: “Actually, it’s just the opposite. A few musicians borrowed them and never gave them back.”One that was damaged: “They crack all the time. It’s very dry here. I have four humidifiers that run around the clock to feed these guys water so they don’t turn to dust.”Plans for the collection: “I wonder how many people’s guitars burned up in the terrible situation in Los Angeles. I’m thinking of giving the whole collection to somebody who can put the instruments in the hands of those who might need them.”This interview has been edited and condensed. More

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      in Music

      How Do You Preserve a Vanishing Music Scene?

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      Five recent books collect photographs, memories and ephemera from the hardcore band Agnostic Front, the mysterious dance artist Aphex Twin, the rap collective Odd Future and more.Memories fade. Documentation disappears. Scenes vanish.When you’re busy creating a world, you don’t always think about how to preserve it for history. So old fliers and magazines get brittle and crumble, photos get lost, publications go out of business and websites get deleted. It falls to archivists — sometimes from a scene itself, and sometimes an avid follower — to fight that slipperiness. Each of these worthy and memorable books is the product of such work. What’s most startling is that the worlds they rescue are of the surprisingly recent past. Which means that even in this age of hyperdocumentation and rapid technological advancement, evanescence is always a threat.Roger Miret with Todd Huber, ‘Agnostic Front — With Time: The Roger Miret Archives’Roger Miret and Todd Huber; via American Made KustomThe early years of Agnostic Front, the scene-shaping New York hardcore band, were chaos incarnate: a Lower East Side life of ramshackle apartments, rumbles on the street and birthing an explosive, aggravated, pugnacious new sound. Somehow, amid all this, the frontman Roger Miret — who was picked to join the band thanks to his ferocious behavior in the pit — managed to hold on to everything. “Agnostic Front — With Time: The Roger Miret Archives” is part photo essay, and part documentation of ephemera primarily from the band’s tumultuous breakout period from 1982-86.There are oodles of fliers from bills shared with Reagan Youth, Murphy’s Law, Suicidal Tendencies, Youth of Today and more. Some were scrawled by hand and some pasted pastiche-style; some featured illustrated skinheads in suspenders, tight pants and stomper boots; and some memorably gory ones were mailed in from an Oxnard, Calif., illustrator named Chuy.Miret’s collection also includes margarine-yellow T-shirts, test presses of the band’s earliest recordings and show announcements from the Village Voice listings pages. And brief personal recollections from Miret and his bandmates capture the mayhem of the time: getting shows shut down by the police, then slapping stickers on their cars; and assembling copies of the debut Agnostic Front EP by hand, cutting covers from a large roll one by one and gluing them to order after shows.‘Liquid Sky’via Emperor Go!We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Meet the New Owner of the Bathtub Used by Jacob Elordi in “Saltburn”

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      Anyone who has watched “Saltburn” probably remembers the scene, and some who have not seen the dark coming-of-age thriller about two Oxford students may remember it, too: The part when middle-class Oliver (Barry Keoghan), while visiting the country estate of his wealthy friend Felix (Jacob Elordi), surreptitiously watches him take a bath and then slurps up the leftover water as it streams down the drain.After the film’s release in late 2023, the scene spread widely online — and became the inspiration for candles, cocktails, bath bombs and thousands of discussion threads.And the bathtub featured in it? It’s now on display in Massillon, Ohio, at the home of Kyle Harvey, 36, who bought the tub for $4,375 in an online auction last September. Mr. Harvey, who owns a local car dealership with some relatives, drove 18 hours round-trip to get it, he said.“It’s a piece of history,” said Mr. Harvey, adding that he won the prop after a bidding war. “That bathtub had TikTok going for days.”The fiberglass bathtub is in a room adjoining Mr. Harvey’s at-home movie theater. Other “Saltburn” memorabilia he bought in the auction are also on display there, including a framed photo of Mr. Elordi and Mr. Keoghan and ensembles that the actors wore in the film, which earned awards for both is costume and production design.The tub, center, came complete with stains around its drain. Mr. Harvey bought it at auction, along with costumes from the film.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      An Early Bob Dylan Recording Hits the Auction Block

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      The reel-to-reel tape is from a Gaslight Cafe show in Greenwich Village in 1961, when Dylan was playing to audiences you could count in a glance or two.On Sept. 6, 1961, a little-known 20-year-old calling himself Bob Dylan took the stage at the Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village and played a six-song set. More than 60 years later, a reel-to-reel tape of those songs has gone up for auction.Only about 20 people were at the short performance, but it is well known to folk-history fans and Dylanologists partly because it was preserved on tape. Terri Thal, Dylan’s manager at the time, brought a bulky Ampex recorder in a leather case to the show and set it up on a table at stage left.Dylan knew she was going to record, Thal said: “He programmed his set as an audition.”That set, performed more than three decades before the birth of Timothée Chalamet — up for an Oscar this Sunday for his portrayal of Dylan — included “Talkin’ Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues,” “He Was a Friend of Mine” and “Song to Woody,” a reference to Woody Guthrie.The recording became a tool that Thal used to try to persuade out-of-town clubs to book Dylan, who had acquired something of a reputation among the cognoscenti in the Village but wasn’t well known elsewhere.Now, the tape, described by RR Auction in Boston as “Dylan’s earliest demo recording,” is being offered for sale along with other Dylan-related ephemera, including a sequined suit from his 1975 Rolling Thunder tour and a Martin D-41 acoustic guitar he gave to Bob Neuwirth, a musician who was instrumental in assembling the band for that tour.The recording is significant, said Mark Davidson, the senior director of archives and exhibitions at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Okla., because it documents a performance by someone on the cusp of fame and before he fully developed his own inimitable style.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      The Actor Fred Savage’s New Role Is as a Watch Entrepreneur

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      The actor, who spent his childhood in “The Wonder Years,” has established a watch assessment service.Fred Savage, the actor best known for his childhood role in the television comedy “The Wonder Years,” has taken on a new part in real life: watch collector and entrepreneur.In the past six months or so, he attended Geneva Watch Days, WatchTime New York and the Dec. 6 Important Watches auction at Sotheby’s New York. He also is a member of Classic Watch Club, a collectors’ group in Manhattan, and owns about 50 watches.“Watch collecting started as a hobby, because I was really interested in these mechanical objects that still worked and looked so great a hundred years after they were manufactured,” Mr. Savage, 48, said during a phone interview (wearing, he noted, a Jaeger-LeCoultre Memovox GT). “The deeper I’ve gotten into watches, my knowledge has grown. It has really enriched my life — almost every aspect of my life — because of the people that it has introduced me to.”And late last month Mr. Savage officially introduced Timepiece Grading Specialists, or TGS, a business that rates a watch’s condition for authentication or valuation purposes. Fees start at $250 per watch, which would include a detailed report with photos; appraisals, servicing and storage are available at additional cost. The business began accepting watches for evaluation last fall in a kind of soft launch, and three of the watches sold at the Sotheby’s sale in December had TGS assessments.Timepiece Grading Specialists is headquartered in Dayton, Ohio, in the offices of Stoll & Company, which handles the horological work.Brian Kaiser for The New York TimesMr. Savage said his company was meant to fill a void in the watch community. “I realized that, with the huge marketplace that’s like the Wild West, nobody’s looking out for the collector,” he said. “I looked at all these other collectible verticals: Whether it’s comic books or coins or baseball cards or sports cards or shoes or video games, every one of these collectibles has one, if not multiple, third-party authentication and grading services.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Ruby Slippers From ‘Wizard of Oz’ Sell for $28 Million at Auction

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      The slippers worn by Judy Garland in “The Wizard of Oz” were stolen from the museum that bears her name in 2005 before investigators recovered them in 2018.The ruby slippers that Judy Garland wore as Dorothy in the 1939 production of “The Wizard of Oz” were sold for a record-breaking $28 million on Saturday during an auction in the latest turn for one of the most recognizable and storied artifacts in film history.Heritage Auctions sold the slippers on behalf of a collector, Michael Shaw, who owned them. The slippers are one of only four known surviving pairs worn by Ms. Garland in the movie.The auction house did not immediately disclose the identity of the buyer.The final bid of $28 million was the largest sum spent at an auction for a piece of entertainment memorabilia, the auction house said. It exceeded the previous record-holder, Marilyn Monroe’s subway dress from the 1955 film “The Seven Year Itch,” which sold in 2011 for $5.52 million with fees, the auction house said. Including taxes and fees, the slippers sold for $32.5 million.During the auction, which was peppered with “Wicked” and “Wizard of Oz” references and puns, the auctioneer excitedly held a crouching position — like the Wicked Witch of the West in the story — as he pointed to people around the room, who called out bids in $100,000 increments. At times, a bidder, often on the phone with a client, would elevate the top bid by $800,000 or more, which garnered some stifled “ooohs” and “ahhhs” from attendees.In addition to being featured in some of the most famous scenes in one of the most popular movies in film history, the slippers have an intriguing story that have added to their lore.Mr. Shaw had lent the slippers to the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minn., where they were stolen on Aug. 27, 2005. F.B.I. agents set up a sting operation and recovered the slippers in Minneapolis in July 2018. A Minnesota man, Terry Martin, was later indicted and pleaded guilty to the theft.The authorities believed Mr. Martin was under the impression that the slippers were made with real rubies, which he planned to sell. The rubies, however, were made of glass.During the film’s production, the costume team made at least four pairs of the slippers for Ms. Garland to wear in case one of the slippers was ruined, according to Rhys Thomas, who wrote “The Ruby Slippers of Oz,” a book about their history.Although the slippers looked nearly identical, a consultant for the Smithsonian analyzed slight differences in the pairs and determined that the ones that were sold on Saturday were in many of the most famous scenes of the movie.Large portions of the famous “We’re Off the See the Wizard” song feature Ms. Garland skipping in the bright red, $28 million shoes.This is a developing story. More

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      in Theater

      Don’t Say ‘Macbeth’ and Other Strange Rituals of the Theater World

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      Pulling back the curtain on the peculiar customs and enduring superstitions that help define life backstage.You may not have realized it, but there’s little chance you’ve heard anyone whistle inside a theater. In the old days, sailors often worked the ropes backstage, bringing to show business codes like command whistles. So a whistle meant as a compliment, or to get a person’s attention, might have landed a piece of scenery on someone’s head.Theater is full of these customs — many arising, like most rituals, from hazy origins. Still, show people hold on to them. In an industry that hopes to conjure the same wonder every night (with wildly different results), there’s comfort in tradition, especially if it reaches back decades or even centuries. Some, as the 56-year-old Broadway wardrobe supervisor and costume designer Patrick Bevilacqua says, are “rituals of consistency” — the private fist bumps or helpful Listerine sprays during a backstage quick change, which must be “choreographed within an inch of its life” to keep the show running smoothly. Others are spiritual; according to the actress Lea Salonga, 53, “any practice where everyone can see each other as human” is necessarily grounding.Some are individual: The actor Hugh Jackman, 56, last seen as the lead in “The Music Man” on Broadway in 2023, buys scratch-off lottery tickets for each production member every Friday; occasionally, someone wins a few hundred dollars. Some are secretive, like stealing costumes after a show closes, while others are blared through the house, as when stage managers announce on loudspeakers before a performance, “It’s Saturday night on Broadway,” a reminder that the wearying workweek is almost over.The curio cabinet that the actress Patti LuPone keeps at her Connecticut home filled with gifts from her shows over the years, including an “Evita” (1979) doll, an egg made by an “Anything Goes” (1987) crew member on top of a music box and a Mrs. Lovett bobblehead from when she appeared in “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” (2005).Daniel TernaLength dictates quantity: Longer-running productions are more likely to develop more idiosyncratic traditions. This means that in New York, Broadway is more ritualistic than Off, and musicals outmatch straight plays for the same reason. The 64-year-old actress Amra-Faye Wright, for example, has for about a decade been painting murals each season backstage for “Chicago,” the second-longest-running musical in Broadway history, which opened in 1975 and has been up since its 1996 revival. All agree that London is more laid-back, despite having some quirks, such as everyone in the cast and crew banging on the windows facing the National Theatre’s interior courtyard on opening night; or the Baddeley cake, an intricately decorated and frosted dessert that varies from show to show but has been served with punch at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, every Jan. 6 since 1795. It’s named after Robert Baddeley, an actor who played minor roles there and who in his will bequeathed funds for the annual festivity.As the 43-year-old British director Michael Longhurst says, most are “a mix of the practical and superstitious.” Actors tell one another to break a leg — maybe because “good luck” is gauche; maybe because they’re an understudy wishing a principal would just bow out; maybe because a theater’s “legs” are the thin drapes that frame the stage, which you’d cross if receiving an ovation; or maybe just because they know it’s a phrase they ought to keep alive.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More