Poster collector deals in Zeitgeist

WHEN HE WAS a student, Daniel Strebin would rather go hungry than do without a movie poster.

Today he is one of the few people who make a living collecting and dealing in fllm posters. His posters of Marlene Dietrich, Audrey Hepburn and Frank Sinatra decorate the dressing rooms of the stars and grace the corridors of Hollywood film companies.

At his home in Santa Monica, however, it is his German wife Alexandra who decides what is hung on the walls.

Collecting famous, original film posters that once were plastered on advertising pillars in Paris, Berlin or New York is very much in vogue in Hollywood.

Strebin, 42, has sold some of his treasures to Sharon Stone and Tom Cruise. While Stone prefers images with a dash of sex-appeal, Cruise hoards posters of Oscar-winning films, says Strebin, whose dry sense of humour is reminiscent of David Niven.

His passion for the movies, whose essence he feels is captured in the advertising posters, began with a Marilyn Monroe calendar. At the time he was eight years old and it was his first intimation that there was something more to life than farming in provincial Oregon.

Since then he has seen some 9000 films and collected about half as many posters.

However, Strebin, a tall, handsome man, never wanted to become an actor himself. "I am too shy and I don't think the world needs more bad movies," Strebin says.

He avoids posters of movies that were deliberately aimed at the mass market and those which he considers poor.

Instead, he spends his time going to auctions, flea markets and second hand stores in search of advertisements for Fassbinder or Fellini films. But Strebin also buys wild Tarzan paintings or Elvis Presley posters of questionable taste on his forays in the United States and Europe.

"When I look for movie posters I feel like I'm treasure hunting," Strebin says. "I look for something that's valuable to me."

It's pointless to ask him which poster is his favourite. Daniel Strebin likes them all. Because he can never make up his mind, his wife Alexandra went through his collection to choose which to hang up at home.

Now Catherine Deneuve, in an embrace with the Devil, winks down at people in their bedroom. And an Art Deco poster of two rainforest Indians hangs above their living room sofa.

"I don't have a clue what those movies were -- but I really like the design of the posters," laughs Alexandra Strebin, who met Daniel at a party in Hamburg, Germany, in 1996. Instead of returning from that trip with more film posters he brought back a wife.

As a matter of fact, "Dan the Posterman" sees himself as a poor man's art collector. "Very few people have the money for art. But everyone has a favourite movie and most people would love to take a piece of that movie home with them, to be reminded of it," Strebin says. Most of the posters in his collection sell for between 100 and 1000 dollars.

He once sold a picture -- an ad for the Marlene Dietrich movie Shanghai Express -- for 11000 dollars to pay a very sick friend's medical bills.

Currently one of the most popular posters is the one advertising Frank Sinatra's movie Ocean's Eleven, while three years ago everyone was after posters of Breakfast at Tiffany's, Strebin says.