Monday’s New York Times piece on television studios auctioning off old props and costumes got half the story, anyway.
Headline:
No ‘Lost’ Left to Unravel, Fans Buy It Piece by Piece
In Santa Monica last weekend ABC orchestrated an auction of “Lost”-abilia that included items such as these:
A copy of “Watership Down,” read by the actor Josh Holloway in several episodes, sold for $3,300 (including a 20 percent buyer’s fee) against an estimate of $300. A set of Oceanic Airlines-branded water bottles, seen in the pilot episode and estimated at $200, went for $1,680.
And then there was this:
Among the top sellers was a script signed by two of the program’s creators, J. J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof. The script, estimated at $300, brought a frenzy of bidding — over 100 people were vying for it in person, on the telephone and over the Internet — and it sold for $18,000.
The Times also noted that props and costumes used to be thrown away or recycled for new programs. But the growing collectors market and increasing financial pressures on studios have led them to auction show materials instead. ABC, however, set a new standard in promoting the “Lost” cast-offs:
It is unusual for a studio to participate as fully in a sale as did ABC, which helped organize the auction into an experience worthy of charging $42 for admission (the entrance fee was waived for registered bidders). An ABC spokeswoman said an undisclosed portion of the auction proceeds would go to charities in Hawaii, where the series was taped.
That would have been the perfect place in the Times piece to mention the other end of the TV show-and-sell spectrum: the “Mad Men” low-overhead charity auction on eBay (via New York).
Have you always wanted to hold Peggy’s diaphragm in your hands? Well, unfortunately you can’t do that, but what you can do is buy Betty and Joan’s dresses, conference-room abstract paintings, and a vast amount of Sterling Cooper office furniture. You could literally fill your (small) house with Mad Men chairs alone — 46 of them are available.
(Sorry – the auction ended Sunday.)
But the Times didn’t mention it.
Lost opportunity.
Campaign Outsider 
Off-topic (sorry, I looked for an email addr but didn’t find one):
On last night’s Keller-at-Large, in a bit of on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand-ism, you were quoted as saying “the Left spreads false information too, through their own preferred outlets”.
What you were referring to? Has there been any campaign in recent memory mounted by “the Left” that comes close to the efforts by Obama opponents to paint him as “the other” (from birthers, to “he’s a Muslim”, to “that one!”, and so on ad nauseum)? The lies of the Swift Boaters for Bush pale by comparison. It conjures second-hand memories of the 1950 Nixon-Douglas campaign, and the McCarty era.
Has the left done anything remotely comparable?
Jon’s quote was accurate, Steve, but only part of what I said. My point was that the left has its own parallel information universe that can be misleading and exaggerated, just like the right. But I never asserted any equivalence between the two. That’s a whole different issue from the two sides operating with their own set of facts.