He can belly up to the original Cheers bar and owns a galaxy of Star Trek costumes. Now James Comisar wants to boldly go build a museum for his $100 million collection of TV memorabilia
A severed human head sits in a box on the floor of James Comisar’s office in Santa Monica, California. There is a bloody gash across the man’s neck, and the pale, goateed face stares back blankly as Comisar presents it, Hamlet-like. “This is the head of a biker from Sons of Anarchy,” he explains. “It ended up in a pot of chili in the episode. It’s a piece of art—it’s fantastic.”
He packs up the head and heads down the hall in his windowless warehouse. Past two sets of bulletproof doors, a table partly obscures a hallway. On it sits a 3-foot brass rail, half gleaming, half rusted. It’s a restoration in progress and an undeniable holy relic—part of the original Cheers bar. And the 50-year-old Comisar, a one-man Smithsonian of TV memorabilia, owns it. Over the past three decades, he has cultivated such a sufficiently expert reputation that CBS, which owned the rights, donated the bar to him in August 2014 in the hope he would restore the piece and publicly display it one day.
Comisar’s firm authority on all matters related to the small screen comes from 26 years of amassing more than 10,000 artifacts of television history. He possesses a nebbishy pedantry on the subject—stopping mid-conversation to spell out a Star Trek gadget as t-r-i-c-o-r-d-e-r, not triquarter—and dresses with the casualness of a sitcom extra.
Comisar grew up in Los Angeles wanting to become a comedy writer and earned a living for a few years writing jokes for performers like Joan Rivers. But as it happens in Hollywood, he found fame less attainable than illusory and so plowed his earnings into accumulating TV memorabilia. He has not only cornered the market (“There are few iconic TV pieces out there,” sighs an auction house president. “James has them all!”), he also sometimes sets it, given the strength of his collection.
(This story appears in the 07 August, 2015 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)