More disastrous financial news for Hollywood

So, apparently, the original Hollywood sign sold for around half a million dollars last week in this eBay auction. The beneficiary of this isn’t the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, which sold the sign for $10,000 in 1978 to a nightclub owner. And it isn’t the nightclub owner either. It’s a businessman named Dan Bliss, who bought it in 2001. From the Independent:

For the last few years, Bliss has been selling small pieces of the sign – from a 5-by-3 foot piece of the H that he sold to the Hollywood History Museum for $11,766, to smaller 1-inch framed scraps, which go for $59.99.

Discouraged by a lack of sales -and time-in his small business, Bliss first put the sign up for grabs over Thanksgiving weekend, where he set an initial asking price of $300,000 for both the original sign and ownership rights to his company, AuthenticHollywood.com.

After not getting any bids for over a week, however, Bliss reset the bidding at a penny and got a total of 200 bids.

“It’s only prove that my initial asking price was definitely in the ball park,” said Bliss. “It;s very fulfilling, and hopefully the winner will do something nice with it.”

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No word as to the identity of the winner, ‘deh4908′, but the last item s/he purchased on ebay was a $9 leather Nextel cell phone case. Before that, a military flashlight. Guess deh4908 decided to splurge.

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