When Kyle Hall was 10 years old, he saw the MGM movie, The Long, Long Trailer, starring Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. Now, 31 years later, Hall collects The Long, Long Trailer movie posters from around the world. “The posters are big, colorful and cheerful, and they’re a major part of my décor,” says Hall. “People flip when they see them, and they’re fascinated by how the foreign posters are different from the American originals.”
Hall began collecting movie posters in 1999, when he was living in New York. He had a new apartment with empty walls, so he visited a shop that sold original posters for films, foreign travel, and advertising. The store displayed its inventory in notebooks that held snapshots of all the posters by category, and one of those notebooks contained a large 47” x 63” French poster for The Long, Long Trailer. Hall thought it was colorful and beautiful, but he just admired the snapshot for a minute and kept looking; he had something different in mind for his apartment. After returning home empty-handed, Hall couldn’t stop thinking about the poster for the next week-and-a-half. Finally, he asked the shop to hold it for him until he could return and view it. Once he saw the actual poster, Hall knew he had to have it. The salesmen in the poster shop, who apparently had business acumen, said, “Fan of that movie, huh? Why aren’t you interested in the Italian poster, too?” And that’s how it all began.
