There were no buyers Sunday at the auction¹ of a 1940s stag film that an events promoter claims shows an underage Marilyn Monroe having sex before she became a movie star.

上周日，上世纪40年代的一部性爱影片公开拍卖，活动发起人声称这是未成年的玛丽莲·梦露成名前所拍的性爱影片，然而此项拍卖未能成交。

An employee of Butterfields auction house displays a copy of a model release signed by Marilyn Monroe in front of one of the photographs of Monroe during a Hollywood photo shoot in 1949, in Los Angeles, March 22, 2001.
The auction was a flop²（失败） . Nobody came forward willing to pay Mikel Barsa's starting price of 2 million Argentine pesos, about $480,000.

Barsa said it didn't help matters that a spokeswoman for Monroe's estate was quoted in an interview calling the whole thing a fraud.

"It doesn't surprise me. The latest statements of Nancy Carlson didn't do anything good for all this," Barsa said, referring to the spokeswoman for a company in charge of protecting Monroe's image and estate.

Barsa said he was still negotiating with an unidentified buyer from Denver whom he said was offering much less than a fair price. But he also said his lawyers were reviewing the matter now that Monroe's protectors warned they would sue him if the sale went through.

Barsa claimed before the auction that the scratchy（潦草的，刺痒的） , black-and-white, six-minute 8-mm film shows the young actress, known then as Norma Jeane Baker³, around 1946 or 1947 when she was poor and desperate to break into show business.

Experts on Monroe's life, however, said it's highly unlikely that the smiling young blonde in the film is her.

Comparing the film with known Monroe images leaves ample（丰富的） room for doubt. And several documents Barsa said proved his argument — a letter from the American Film Institute and what looks like a declassified⁴ FBI file that mentions a 1965 attempt to sell an alleged⁵ Marilyn Monroe sex film — are inconclusive.

Monroe's image and estate is protected by the brand development and licensing⁶ company Authentic⁷ Brands Group. Its spokeswoman, Carlson, said a sale of the film would invite legal action for "perpetrating a fraud on the public, violating the Monroe estate's exclusive rights to her image and other claims of intellectual property infringement⁸."

"To me personally, it doesn't even resemble her," Carlson said.