Rudy Franchi, who during a kaleidoscopic life brought French films to New York City, indulged in trysts with Hollywood stars as a publicist, operated one of the country’s largest vintage movie poster businesses and appraised ephemera — including a lunch menu from the Titanic — on the television show “Antiques Roadshow,” died on Aug. 6 in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 85.
The cause of his death, at a nursing home, was lung cancer that had metastasized, his family said.
Mr. Franchi’s life was highbrow, lowbrow and sometimes surreal.
Along with movie posters, his store, the Nostalgia Factory, dealt in kitsch — Mickey Mouse watches, British cookie tins, StarKist “Charlie the Tuna” piggy banks. His résumé cited a stint at a tabloid newspaper fabricating stories, like one that claimed that President John F. Kennedy was living secretly (though comatose) on an island after his assassination.
“Rudy was definitely a character,” Grey Smith, a longtime vintage poster appraiser and dealer, said in an interview. “He was fascinating to be around because he had all of these crazy stories, and he could really talk about anything.”
Mr. Franchi was not a gadfly, per se, but he was the sort of person whose name was familiar in the letters-to-the-editor departments of newspapers, especially The New York Times. It published six of the many missives he sent in on topics that included the foreign exchange rates of American Express traveler’s checks, a critique of Playbill magazine and a brief history of neon signs.
In 2000, responding to a Times article about foreign films, he recounted managing the Bleecker Street Cinema, an art house in Greenwich Village, during the 1960s. Old movies like “Casablanca” weren’t being shown in theaters at the time. Neither were French and other European classics.
“Ownership of the rights was a quagmire, and getting screenable prints required scouring film exchanges and closed theaters as well as holding long and garbled trans-Atlantic telephone calls with foreign producers, distributors and filmmakers,” Mr. Franchi wrote. “Sometimes we would discover a print but have no lead on the rights. At that point we would screen the film, subscribing to the creed: It is easier to beg forgiveness than get permission.”
The theater’s backroom was a gathering place for critics, including Andrew Sarris and Jonas Mekas, as well as the novelist Ralph Ellison. Mr. Franchi also started The New York Film Bulletin, a mimeographed magazine that published articles by American critics alongside translated commentary by foreign writers on French cinema.
“It looked very cheap, but it was provocative,” Phillip Lopate, the essayist and film critic, said in an interview. “Instead of being respectful of the canon, it was much more about falling in love with a certain movie regardless of how it fit into the history.”
Mr. Franchi branched into Hollywood publicity work in 1965, hired by 20th Century Fox. At first, the move “turned out to be a disaster,” he told Collectors Weekly, “because as soon as I went to Fox, all my friends thought I had sold out and had nothing to do with me.”
But hanging out with Hollywood stars was exciting in a way that publishing a film journal was not. In “The King of Nostalgia,” a documentary about him by Mike Bliss, one of his former employees in the memorabilia business, Mr. Franchi recalled Ava Gardner calling him at 3 a.m. from her hotel room.
“Something terrible has happened,” she told him. “You have to come over here.”
Mr. Franchi was dashing, with slick, jet-black hair. At the time, he’d been seeing men and women romantically. He got dressed and went to her hotel.
“She was lonely,” Mr. Franchi said. “And so she seduced me.”
Another night, he shared a cab with Andy Warhol after a party. One thing led to another.
“My claim to fame,” Mr. Franchi said in the documentary, “is that I’m the only person who ever slept with both Andy Warhol and Ava Gardner.”
The life of a publicist in New York City — late nights, too much alcohol, unruly movie stars — got stale. In 1968, he married Barbara Frank, a teacher who had two young children They moved to Montreal, where Mr. Franchi continued working in film and wrote for the tabloid.
One day, he dropped by a used-book store that was going out of business and picked up an old magazine. The owner took him to the basement, which was filled with old issues of Life, National Geographic and other magazines.
“I bought the entire basement,” Mr. Franchi told Collectors Weekly.
He hired taxis to transport the magazines home. When his wife saw them, she said, “What is this?” Mr. Franchi replied, “This is what we’re going to do for the rest our lives.” And his wife said, “When do we start?”
They opened a store, initially cutting out advertisements from the magazines and selling them in frames. Then they began selling vintage movie posters. The store did well, and they decided to move it to the United States — first to Newport, R.I., and then to Boston.
In 1992, they heard about something called the internet.
“I said, ‘You know, it sounds like CB radio to me,’” Mr. Franchi recalled in the documentary.
His wife thought putting their catalog online was a good idea.
Nostalgia.com, as they called it, was a hit with collectors. By the mid-1990s, the site had more than 20,000 posters for sale. One, from “Charlie Chaplin: Lost and Found,” went for $325. “Star Wars” posters went for even more.
Mr. Franchi and his wife struggled to keep up with demand.
“It’s all these poor people in North Dakota who can’t get to a memorabilia store,” Mr. Franchi told The Boston Herald. “The number of orders we get from the boonies is unbelievable.”
Adolfo Franchi was born on April 21, 1939, in Manhattan. During World War II, his parents changed his given name to Rudolph. His father, also named Adolfo, was the headwaiter at the Plaza Hotel. His mother, Fortunee (Lacroix) Franchi, was a secretary at advertising agencies.
Mr. Franchi dropped out of Fordham College in the early 1960s to work in theaters and start The New York Film Bulletin.
The success of his movie poster business led to positions as an appraiser and a catalog organizer at major auction houses, including Christie’s in New York City.
And that expertise led him to “Antiques Roadshow,” where he appraised items for the PBS program’s first 17 years and was at the center of several evaluations that went viral online.
In 1998, at a taping in Houston, someone brought in a painting of the Titanic. Evaluating the piece off air, Mr. Franchi instantly knew it was a paint-by-numbers piece of schlock. Then he turned it over, revealing a lunch menu from the day the ship sank.
Mr. Franchi called over a producer and said that he had a whopper of an appraisal that should be taped.
“How long have you owned this really bad oil painting of the Titanic?” Mr. Franchi asked the owner.
“Since 1971,” the owner replied.
“It’s not bad enough to be interesting,” Mr. Franchi went on. “What is interesting is what was put on the reverse of this.”
He turned it over.
“This is the only known intact menu that I’ve heard of surviving,” he said.
Its value: between $75,000 and $100,000.
“Wow,” the owner said.
Mr. Franchi’s wife died in 2009. His companion, Grace Van Hulsteyn, died in 2015. He is survived by a son, Reg; a stepdaughter, Jill Frank; his brother, Richard; and a grandson. Another stepdaughter, Susan Frank, died this year.
Mr. Franchi told his grandson, Bennett Piscitelli, an aspiring filmmaker, that he wanted his ashes scattered on the sidewalk in front of the Thalia Theater in Manhattan, where he first saw “Citizen Kane” and the original “A Star Is Born.”
“On an icy cold day in New York, you know those really frigid days that are wet, damp, cold,” Mr. Franchi specified. “Smash the ashes into the sidewalk, mixed in with the dirty old snow and sand and salt.”
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