Movie Star News
Movie Star News was a NYC landmark and is a collection of vintage pin-up, bondage, and Hollywood publicity photos amassed over the course of 73 years by Irving Klaw, his sister Paula Klaw and nephew Ira Kramer– nearly 3 million images and 250,000 negatives, including 1,500 prints of Bettie Page, known as the queen of pin-ups.
The bulk of the film collection covers the years 1938 to 1979 with many photos dating back to 1915; 11,500 movies and 5,000 actors are represented.
The family business, which eventually became Movie Star News, began in 1938 when he and his sister Paula opened a struggling used bookstore at 209 East 14th Street in Manhattan.
After he observed teenagers frequently tearing out photos from his movie magazines, he saw an opportunity and started selling movie star stills and lobby photo cards. He set up a small box of used movie stills. When these quickly sold, he contacted the studios for more stills. Irving approached the studios directly back when most Hollywood studio publicity departments lined Manhattan's 11th Ave and discovered they were in the habit of throwing away their publicity materials after a film had had its run. Irving bought as much as he wanted for almost nothing, convincing publicity departments he was doing them a favor. Irving would take these originals and negatives meant for magazine and newspaper art departments and reproduce 8×10 glossies of them directly for the purchasing public. The customers could order by item number from catalogs of sample photos. These sold so well that he stopped selling books and moved the store from the basement to the street-level storefront and renamed it Irving Klaw Pin Ups. Business thrived, and the self-named "Pin-Up King" moved to 212 East 14th Street and took on the name "Movie Star News".
In later years the studios, having thrown away their publicity archives would often have to rent their own photos back from Irving. Around the time that Klaw started his bookstore, he also began a mail-order magic trick business, the Nutrix Novelty Library. Like book sales, magic novelties were a financial bust. However, Klaw soon realized that mail order could enhance his movie-still business. He placed advertisements in magazines and shipped catalogs. Before long, mail order was the mainstay of Movie Star News. During World War Two, Movie Star News sold pin-ups of movie stars to the troops with a mailing list of 100,000 names.
By the late 1940s, he was receiving frequent requests for "Damsel-in-distress" photos of actresses being bound and gagged, spanked, and flogged. Sometime between 1947 and 1950, Irving Klaw was approached by a prominent lawyer with some "special needs." He offered to pay all the costs if Klaw would produce original bondage pictures for him. Klaw would retain the rights. His first bondage model was Lili Dawn. She was photographed in midtown studios by various freelance photographers. Eventually, Klaw rented the third floor over Movie Star News and turned it into a shooting studio. By 1955, Irving Klaw was allegedly grossing $1.5 million a year, primarily through mail order of his fetish pics.
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