Who Owns Hollywood’s Past? 

May 20, 2026

By Center for Art Law Team

Maybe it’s you? 

This story does not begin with: “It was the kind of Saturday morning that makes Zurich weather bearable in early spring, and my morning stroll took me to an unexpected place, a flea.” This is a story about finding artifacts in a thrift store, in Brooklyn or Zurich, and anywhere in between and wondering about their value.

Remnants of Hollywood Past

What would you do if you came across a box of two dozen gelatin silver prints of Marion Davies? Marion who? One of the most dazzling, complicated, and underestimated figures of the Golden Age of Hollywood. The box contains unsigned and signed, trimmed and untrimmed prints, pristine and bent photos of a star: as an angel, as a diva, as a child, as a dog lover, as an aging yet glamorous woman. Some are blind-tooled with the names of Hollywood photo studios. Others bear handwritten notes in German, including one grim observation: “Here she already appears ravaged by the illness that would take her life within a few years.” 

At least one photograph shows her dedication and signature in blue fountain pen, with the ink that faded to brown at the edges but still legible, still authoritative. It addresses her dear friend, supposedly former owner of this trove, likely long deceased like the subject of the photos. On the surface of several prints, two different types of stamps pressed into the paper told a story of where in Hollywood she was photographed for her adoring fans: James Manatt and Elmer Fryer.

Some photographs show her alone in the half-staged intimacy of studio portraiture: sculptural lighting, neutral backdrops, expressions suspended somewhere between performance and privacy. Others pictured her with her dogs, accessible and playful. It was the photos which captured the beautiful actress with her dogs that clinched the sale. Soon, we began to understand what was thrifted was not merely a curious find. Thanks to curiosity and ingenuity of a curator, a lawyer, and the Center’s team, this bundle of thrifted photographs became a case study in one of the most basic questions in cultural property law: who owns Hollywood’s past? What does an art lawyer do with a bunch of photographs of Marion Davies, in faraway Switzerland? Just in time for our copyright law conference, let’s consider a few scenarios:

The woman in the portrait

Born in Brooklyn at the end of the 19th Century, Marion Cecilia Douras was the youngest of five children. By the time she was nineteen, Marion changed her name to Davies and was performing in New York with the Ziegfeld Follies of 1916. There she met William Randolph Hearst, one of the most powerful men in America, who was smitten immediately and became a looming presence in her life. While the two never married, Hearst supported her films, provided funding for their production and promoted Davies via his vast newspaper empire. By 1924, she had been crowned “Queen of the Screen” by theatre owners and was the number-one female box-office draw in Hollywood.

By most accounts of those who worked with her, Marion was a genuinely gifted comic actress. Directors like King Vidor saw the real thing: “She was the best comedienne in Hollywood,” Vidor reportedly said, “Better than Chaplin.” Charlie Chaplin, who was a frequent guest at Hearst’s San Simeon estate and Davies’s hundred-room beach house in Santa Monica, agreed. Her natural talents and instincts were suppressed by Hearst’s insistence that she play overwrought historical heroines. 

Marion did not have children of her own, but adored dogs, particularly dachshunds, with true passion and devotion. Hearst was also a dachshund enthusiast, and the couple maintained a small contingent of the breed at San Simeon and in Santa Monica. In January 1933, press photographs showed Davies posing with her red smooth dachshund Gandhi, a name that speaks to the affectionate irreverence she brought to everything.

The image is playful, slightly absurd, and entirely characteristic of Marion. Her dogs appear in a number of photographs from this period, sometimes formal, other times candid, and several of the prints in the thrifted bundle show her with exactly this kind of long-bodied companionship: the animals draped across her, or gazing up with the adoring expression that only dogs perfect. (Yes, the Center tends to hire only dog people).

The photographers of MGM

James Manatt was a major player in the MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) still photography department during the 1930s. He was born in Iowa in 1896 and later spent decades working at the MGM studio. He photographed Joan Crawford, Buster Keaton, and Greta Garbo, and he is credited with a number of surviving portraits of Davies, including a well-known image showing her holding a camera, shot in the early 1930s, which has been handled by the Staley-Wise Gallery in New York and sold through 1stDibs. 

Manatt’s work was institutional rather than celebrated: the stamp “Kindly Credit MANATT MGM” on the reverse of prints was not a signature of artistic pride but a utilitarian instruction to press outlets and publications. This was how Hollywood’s image machine operated. Photographs left the studio with directions for their use, and an implicit understanding that the studio retained control. Manatt worked within a photographic tradition at MGM that was, by any measure, extraordinary. 

Between 1925 and 1929 MGM’s portrait gallery was run by Ruth Harriet Louise (born Ruth Goldstein), who, at twenty-two, became the first and only woman to serve as head portrait photographer at a major Hollywood studio. She too at times photographed Marion Davies, among many others. 

George Hurrell arrived at the studio in 1930 and brought with him a more dramatic, sexually charged aesthetic with heavier shadows, extreme close-ups, and a retoucher’s hand at work on imperfections. Hurrell photographed Davies among his roster of MGM stars, contributing to the marketing of films including her 1934 production Operator 13, for which Gary Cooper was on loan from Paramount.

The Photos Found in Zurich

The studio’s November 1934 date on the photos found in Zurich places these prints squarely in this period, which marked the final years of Davies’s career at MGM before she moved to Warner Bros. in 1935 and retired from the screen altogether in 1937.

The stamps appear on fibre-based gelatin silver paper consistent with commercial photographic stock of the early 1930s. The “Kindly Credit” formulation was standard MGM press instruction language of the period, indicating photographs cleared for editorial reproduction with attribution.

The Legal Archaeology of an Old Photograph

Here is where a weekend find becomes a workweek issue-spotting exercise, for those of us who spend our professional lives at the intersection of art and law. Photographs produced by studios in the classical Hollywood era exist at the convergence of at least four distinct legal interests. 

The first is copyright in the photographic work itself. Is it with MGM as works made for hire, or with the photographers such as Manatt, who died in CA in 1989, and their heirs? Buying an old photograph does not transfer the copyright in the photograph to the new possessor. The previous owner of this trove bundle of prints owned the prints as physical property. That possession interest transferred to me for a few Swiss francs. What did not transfer is any right to reproduce, display commercially, or otherwise exploit the images, with a caveat of fair and de minimis use. Permissible uses under the copyright law include educational purposes. The separation of tangible and intangible property is one of the foundational principles of intellectual property law, and one of the most consistently misunderstood by collectors, dealers, and even some institutions. Just now during the 2026 New York Art Week we were asked about the rights of a collector in a piece they own in terms of IP. So if someone takes a photo of a sculpture a collector owns, can they sell it or is the IP with the collector? In most cases, IP is not with the collector.

The second is the right of publicity, but we know that Davies died in California in 1961 and the California post-mortem right of publicity law went into effect only in 1985. The third is the photographer’s moral rights and attribution interests. James Manatt stamped his name on these prints but did he retain IP in the work? And what happens when someone trims a large format photograph to fit into a small frame, are these works still attributable to Manatt? Law pertaining to collectibles is different from the law dealing with limited editions and unique works of art. The fourth is the one most immediately applicable to a flea market find, is ownership of the physical object versus ownership of the underlying intellectual property rights. These are distinct interests. 

Marion Davies Autograph on a Photograph

One piece in the bundle carries Davies’s signature in what appears to be a fountain pen. A signed photograph from a Golden Age star is a desirable object. It also raises questions, not only of authenticity of the signature but identity of the former collector. It would be interesting to learn who that Davies fan or friend was. 

There is one area in which the physical nature of these prints provides a significant advantage over their digital equivalents, and it is worth dwelling on because it illuminates something important about the broader challenge of authenticating and tracing cultural objects in an age of digital reproduction.

A gelatin silver print from 1934 carries its age in its chemistry. The paper substrate, the baryta layer, the silver salts in the gelatin emulsion… all of these have measurable properties that change predictably over time and can be dated with considerable precision using non-invasive and minimally invasive analytical techniques. X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy can identify the elemental composition of the photographic materials; Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy distinguishes between gelatin and collodion; analysis of paper fibre and the presence or absence of optical brightening agents (chemicals not used in photographic paper until the late 1950s) can establish definitively whether a print was made before or after a certain date.

Physical photographs, in other words, can be interrogated by science. The object retains evidence of its own making. 

Digital images carry no such inherent testimony. A digital file can be copied perfectly, infinitely, and instantaneously, with no degradation and no material trace of reproduction. Metadata can be altered or stripped. Timestamps can be falsified. 

These findings, whatever their future legal status, are tangible property. We can hold Hollywood artifacts. A conservator can examine each sheet. A materials scientist can sample a fibre from its edge. The truth of the object is, to a meaningful extent, available.

The Question of Display 

Let us suppose, for a moment, that the copyright in these photographs has in fact expired — that MGM’s publicity department failed to renew the registration of routine press prints sent out to journalists in November 1934, as was common practice with ephemeral promotional material, and that these images have been in the public domain for decades. That would resolve some of the reproduction questions. What would it mean for the display of the physical prints? They are certainly collectible and attractive for interior design or other collectors’ purposes. Design Week certainly sports vintage photographs, and creative eyes could find a novel use for Davies’ studio portraits in their vision.

An Invitation: Silent Auction 

After some deliberation about what to do with these black and white remnants of Hollywood glamour since the moment of purchase, the conclusion is simple: the most appropriate use for a selection of the photographs is to put them in service of the institution dedicated to working through questions of ownership, authorship, attribution, and the legal complexity of cultural objects.

Selected photographs from the Marion Davies bundle will be offered at a silent auction on May 27, 2026. The auction will be hosted by the Center for Art Law as part of its annual conference dedicated, fittingly, to the topic of copyright and fundraising efforts.

All proceeds support the Center for Art Law’s educational programming, scholarship, and public access to art law resources. Further provenance and IP due diligence documentation will be made available to interested bidders upon request.

The conference, dedicated to copyright in the arts and cultural heritage, bringing together lawyers, artists, curators, archivists, and scholars, is exactly the right context for these objects to find their next home. The person or institution that acquires these prints will do so with full transparency about the legal landscape, the chain of ownership as we know it, and the questions that remain open. That is, we would argue, how cultural property should change hands: with honesty about what is known and what is not, with due diligence made available rather than concealed, and with an awareness that the object carries legal interests beyond the price tag.

This is an experiment in transparency, a model for how the secondary market in historical photographic material might operate more responsibly.

Hollywood’s past, and ours

Marion Davies retired from the screen in 1937, devoting herself to Hearst’s care until his death in 1951 and to the philanthropies that were, perhaps, her most durable legacy. She established a children’s clinic at UCLA that remains in operation, though it was renamed the Mattel Children’s Hospital in 1998. She died in September 1961, leaving an estate valued at approximately twenty million dollars. Hollywood, characteristically, remembered her more for whom she loved than for what she accomplished.

The photographs show a woman who was the most famous actress in America a century ago, with her dogs, in the studio of a photographer whose name most people have never heard, in a month when she was making one of her last films at a studio that no longer exists in its original form, for a press apparatus whose legal successors are still, theoretically, in a position to send a licensing demand.

Who owns this? Everyone and no one. The physical paper is mine. The image may be free to reproduce (or not). The likeness is too. The photographer’s name stamped on the back is no longer advertising services and stating authorship but demonstrating pedigree and the object’s affiliation.

Writing in German on the backs of the photographs reminds the beholder that the photos traveled from English-speaking California to German-speaking Zurich into possession of someone who was on a first-name basis with Davies. It is not clear whether she visited Switzerland or not. The past does not simplify as it ages. It accumulates interests, claims, questions, and gaps. That is what makes it so endlessly, productively difficult, and why the work of art law, at its best, is not a matter of finding the right answer but of asking the right questions with sufficient rigour and honesty that whatever answer we can reach will hold.

Final Act (for May)

Center for Art Law has offices in Brooklyn and Zurich. We are hosting our annual conference this year in Brooklyn Law School and we are examining the assets that are IP and the mystery that is copyright law in the 21st century. The Center for Art Law’s annual copyright conference takes place on 27 May 2026. The silent auction of selected Marion Davies prints will be held in conjunction with the conference.