A sign on Hollywood Posters declares the store’s impending closure. (Dave Burdick, The Denver Post)
, which has helped decorate countless Colorado dens and dorm rooms over the last 35 years, is closing this spring.
“We were really successful for a long long time, but three to four years ago when the economy started going south, people started only buying one poster instead of three,” said owner and founder John Caruso. “We got into framing ten years ago, which helped a lot, but there are just too many browsers and not enough buyers these days.”
Caruso opened the store in December of 1980 after a successful venture in book-selling came to an abrupt end. He had moved to Denver from Vail in 1973 and opened his first bookstore at 326 E. Colfax Ave., site of the current Hollywood Posters (“My current landlord is the grandson of my first landlord,” he said). It was a labor of love — so much so that Caruso slept in the back of the store at night.
That changed when the owner’s of Denver’s popular downtown newsstand Jerry’s News walked in one day and offered him a cut of his business.
“How would you like to have half a pie instead of your own cupcake?” Caruso remembers him asking. “And I was amazed because this was the biggest book-guy in the state, and he was offering me a space to sell books in his store.”
Jerry’s store sat on the corner of Colfax Avenue and Broadway, catty-corner from the state capitol. But it was forced to close to make room for a new RTD bus complex, which opened and still stands today.
Posters held promise for Caruso. He had seen success selling the original “Star Wars” posters, which he ordered from New York, for $5 a piece (current retail value: $200-$300). And six months before the city kicked Jerry’s News out of its Colfax and Broadway location, another poster seller had walked in promising Caruso easy money by selling posters of Farrah Fawcett.
“I thought, ‘We’re too classy for that,’ but he talked me into it,” said Caruso. “That planted the seed, and now we’ve sold a million of these things.”
Caruso was so successful, in fact, that at one point in the mid-1980s he ran Hollywood Posters locations On the Hill in Boulder and on Bijou Street in Colorado Springs. But declining sales eventually whittled them back down to the original location.
“I could continue and struggle along, but I’m 70 years old now,” said Caruso, who plans to join his brother in Petaluma, Calif., and sell some of his remaining 15,000 posters online. “It’s time for a change.”
Caruso’s biggest sellers have remained largely unchanged for much of the store’s history: “Back to the Future” (I, II and III), “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” anything “Star Wars” or “Star Trek”-related, “Jaws,” “The Godfather” and “The Goonies.” Nineties titles like “Pulp Fiction” have stayed strong, and newer properties like “The Hunger Games” see momentary bursts in popularity. But like all things trendy, they die out eventually.
“The vampire stuff, including ‘Twilight,’ has pretty much run its course,” Caruso said. “But stuff like Johnny Depp, especially Jack Sparrow (from ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’) always sells, along with tons of ‘The Hobbit’ and ‘Lord of the Rings.’ When a Broadway show like ‘Wicked,’ ‘Jersey Boys’ or ‘Phantom of the Opera’ comes to town, that sells a lot, too.”
Caruso’s most valuable posters are still fairly affordable. An Italian-language Beatles poster from a 1982 revival of “A Hard Day’s Night” retails for $29, as does a relatively rare “Spider-Man” poster in which the Twin Towers are reflected in the superhero’s eye (scenes depicting the towers were edited out of the 2002 film after the 9/11 attacks).
While you’re mourning, get in there for the liquidation sale: all posters are 40 to 50 percent off with a minimum purchase of $25.
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