TRYON – Have you ever wondered what happened to all those orphaned movie posters once their films left town?

Movie posters are used outside the theatre as advertisements for what the venue is currently showing in addition to upcoming features. The movie posters that once hung on display at the Tryon Theatre, which have been sitting in a storage room under the balcony in cardboard tubes for as long as owner Barry Flood operated the theatre, will be brought out Saturday for a sale to the public.

Flood, a former high school science teacher who wanted to own his own business, operated the theatre since 1991 after buying it from Bill Crowell, who had operated the theatre since 1985. Flood sold the theatre, which was built in 1932, to Scott and Gayle Lane in 2016.

Scott said the posters in the storage room are for movies everyone has grown up with. Flood said he has posters for iconic films like “Indiana Jones” and “Star Wars,” posters for films shown before his ownership of the theatre, in addition to posters for little known films like “Bride and Prejudice,” the Bollywood version of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.”

“These posters are for pictures we’ve all grown up with over the last 26 years,” Scott explained. “It’s amazing how much history is in there.”

The Lanes get films for screenings shipped in from Deluxe/Technicolor by calling an 800 number on hard drives. These hard drives contain the films that are then “ingested,” or downloaded, by the projector in the balcony of the theatre. Scott said the company sends posters upon request.

In some cases, Flood said he would receive posters for films that he did not end up showing, placing them in one of the many tubes in the storage room instead.

“They are basically roughly from 1990 on. I can’t really tell you how many are in there but there might be hundreds or thousands of them,” Flood explained. “They are all rolled up in tubes, and each tube contains five or six posters. There are even posters in there for films no one has heard about and posters for films I didn’t show.”

Flood said he would sell the posters by the tube, and he added he did not want people to look through every tube to find the one poster they are looking for.

The sale will go from 9 a.m. until Flood either “gets tired or they are all sold out” on Saturday, Feb. 25. He added he does not know all of the movie posters he currently has in the storage room.

“It’s a grab bag and if someone says they want three tubes, I’ll hand them three tubes,” Flood explained. “It’s going to be fun unearthing some of those posters I didn’t know I still had. There might be some good ones and there might be some bad ones. It will be a mix.”