CULVER CITY, UNITED STATES • Feel like slipping between the floral bedsheets on which Don Draper had a threesome? Fancy taking a spin in his convertible or popping the question with Betty's "silver-coloured" engagement ring?
From Wednesday to June 15, fans can buy more than 1,500 authenticated props from the hit TV show Mad Men via an online auction that is drawing interest in the United States, Europe, Australia and South America.
The show ended last year and the sale gives avid fans a little slice of history. The lots - with items used by beloved Man Men characters known for their advertising prowess, serial infidelities and drunken excesses - are curated by the show's property manager, Ms Ellen Freund.
It is the first auction curated by someone from the show. ScreenBid, the auction organiser, said each lot comes with a certificate of authenticity.
There is the banker box in which Peggy Olson, cigarette dangling from her lips, carried her most prized possessions out of the office in the final episode. There are the yellow and green sheets on which Don romped with wife Megan and a friend in season seven; the ring he gave first wife Betty and the 1964 Chrysler Imperial that he drove to visit the real Don Draper's wife in California.
Hundreds of the lots come from exhibitions last year at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York and Palm Springs' Modernism Week.
Ms Freund said she would receive a script eight days before filming and a budget of US$12,000 an episode to shop for hundreds of props.
They all had to be "authentically vintage" and in pristine condition. Ms Freund would trawl eBay and other online shopping sites. Some came from her mother, friends of her parents or crew members.
She is particularly proud of a cream and orange lamp from Ted Chaough's office that was also in the 1961 movie The Parent Trap - a nice touch, given it was filmed in the same era that Mad Men sought to recreate.
Wine and cocktail glasses are another favourite. "It just got wild in the late 1960s and I think it's so exciting," she said.
Some items were sourced from abroad, such as a briefcase from France used by Megan's father, although she said shipping could sometimes be a problem when working to such a tight schedule.
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
