Charities Cash in with Online Auctions

July 12 -- How much would someone pay for a prop sword from a defunct TV show, or for Mariah Carey’s bra?

A lot, apparently.

Tech-savvy nonprofit organizations are jumping into online auctions of everything from autographed celebrity photos to famous movie trinkets, as a fast way to raise cash for their causes.

Tonight, cable TV channel American Movie Classics will break new auction ground when it hosts its annual fund-raiser for The Film Foundation. AMC will host and televise a live auction from a theater in Los Angeles that can also be accessed via a Web site called ibidlive.tv.

Registered users can submit bids as they watch the auctioneer call up items such as the Cowardly Lion costume from the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz. An attendant at a computer updates the bid status as both real and virtual bidders make offers and counter-offers for each item.

Dina White, a spokeswoman for AMC, says that the simultaneously on- and off-line auction is the first time the movie channel has experimented with Net auctions. And while she says that AMC has no idea what the total donation amount will be to the Film Foundation — an organization headed by Martin Scorcese to preserve film negatives of classic films — it could potentially be much more than the $200,000 raised last year.

If I Only Had the Dough

According to Win Pescosolido, chief operating officer for ibidlive, several hundred online bidders have already pre-registered to take part in the AMC auction. Some have even applied for individual credit approvals that will allow for online bids of hundreds of thousands of dollars. In fact, Pescosolido notes that one undisclosed online bidder has enough credit to easily win the Oz lion suit if the bidding goes beyond the costume’s estimated $430,000 value.

The chances of the Cowardly Lion or a “micro-jet airplane” that flew in the James Bond flick Octopussy going for such online highs may be pretty good, considering how more recent online auctions for quirky celebrity items have fared.