It's easy to collect but.

Marilyn Monroe dress sells for $4.6M.

That was a Hollywood headline last week.

Worn by the legendary actress during the filming of Seven-Year Itch, the iconic piece of clothing is referred to as the subway dress. It is just part of a collection started by Debbie Reynolds more than 40 years ago after perpetually waiting for studio auctions that get rid of old costumes.

Immediately, well-meaning friends began nagging me to start collecting items that belong to local celebrities. I could make a fortune one day, they chorused.

To their disappointment, I had to shoot down their suggestion: It’s easy to begin a collection. But maintaining it is another story.

This is a job for well-funded institutions, but perhaps not for a single person or even a group that has no resources. I’m citing the following reasons why it is impractical for an individual to have a local showbiz memorabilia in this country:

• The tropical climes could be discouraging. I have no scientific basis for this, but I noticed that items in the Philippines don’t keep as well as they do if housed in America or Europe.

My favorite story will always be the one shared to me by Santi Santos, a US-based interior designer, who did my home in 2005. On a religious pilgrimage to Portugal a long time ago, he purchased two statues of the Virgin of Fatima. One he deposited in his home in San Francisco. The other he brought to his ancestral house in Pateros. Years later, he noticed that the statue that was on the altar of his San Francisco residence still looked as new as the day he bought it at the pilgrimage site. The one he kept in Pateros begged for cleaning. It looked old and grayish. Was it the Metro Manila pollution?

If there is any consolation about being natives from this side of the world, Orientals are better preserved. We don’t grow lines and wrinkles as fast as Caucasians do. Maybe Erap was right, after all: Weather-weather lang.

• Funds are necessary for the upkeep of the collection. Having a collection is like maintaining a harem of wives. Every item can be as demanding as any mistress, who always begs for attention and maintenance.

Even Debbie Reynolds gave up her collection (supposed to be housed in a museum that never materialized) and began selling because maintaining each piece would cost money. Obviously, she got drained in time.

Of course, having a collection can have its rewards  like when Fernando Poe Jr. decided to keep all his films in temperature-controlled storage, unlike what other producers did: they sold old reels that were turned into tooting horns or torotot.

Today, those Ronnie Poe movies still make money as networks continue to buy FPJ titles to show on TV. But you can imagine the effort and investment FPJ poured into that. Those were housed in an air-conditioned room and a staff was hired to constantly clean every reel.

Unfortunately, not every local movie star can command the same interest we have on FPJ, who is still adored by millions of fans six years after his death. And this brings me to the third reason why it is difficult to keep a collection in this country.

• There is no sustainable interest in these collections. Sure, we’d like to see that Marilyn Monroe dress once it is put up for exhibition. When we travel to the US, even a non-Marilyn fan like this writer would be curious to go see it in a museum where it is displayed. But would American fans do that for Filipino actors? Why, it is already an effort to get them interested to see our islands.

The market for local showbiz collection is truly limited. The LVN Pictures compound, before every structure in it was bulldozed to the ground, tried exhibiting the costumes worn by its stars from the ‘50s. Nah, nobody got interested, except for some old folks mostly connected to showbiz and were yearning to go down memory lane.

Mowelfund also has its own museum of showbiz artifacts. Sure, there are regular visitors there  like grade school children who have no idea who Leopoldo Salcedo was.

While I applaud Mowelfund for paving the way for youngsters to recognize the past and become familiar with the Great Profile (which was how Salcedo was called then), those kids actually would rather see Richard Gutierrez’s Captain Barbell outfit and Marian Rivera’s Amaya costume. I suspect those children flock there because it is a school requirement or part of the field trip (which I encourage educational institutions to do on a regular basis).

But let me state again that I take my hat off to Mowelfund for making such effort. While I recognize the fact that keeping a collection is far from practical, I still hope other film institutions would also be daring enough to do the same and help teach the young how to look back at the past and learn a sense of history in the process.

Such endeavor may not be profitable, but the memories such collection would evoke are priceless.

(Next: What every individual can do to preserve mementoes.)