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Vintage Movie Ads

June 24th, 2007 by Scott Marks

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Aside from bronzed bums and terrible food, the one thing this Chicago transplant can’t get his head around is the fact that movie reviews appear in the Thursday entertainment section of the San Diego newspaper as opposed to Friday.

Between the time my I received my first driver’s license and the year revival houses were replaced by home video, every Thursday found me stopping at ‘Blind’ Jimmy Arnold’s corner newsstand for the late edition of the Sun-Times to see what films opened the next day.

You never knew what was going to pop up at neighborhood theaters in the pre-VHS/megaplex era of independent exhibitors. What was going through the mind of the Devon Theater booker when he paired Marcel Ophuls’ 4 hour holocaust documentary The Sorrow and the Pity with Carl Reiner’s pitch-black comedy Where’s Poppa?

I perused the Friday movie section with the same fervor a race track tout scanned his Green Sheet. The splashy box ads frequently acted as my first introduction to a vast array of features. I miss the lost art of ballyhoo. Forget about colorful marquees and lavish lobby displays. Nowadays, most multiplexes don’t even bother to hang a corresponding one-sheet at the entrance to the shoe box.

In the months to come, I’ll be dropping hundreds of vintage newspaper ads in the Image Vault.

Link:
Vintage Newspaper Movie Ads

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Filed Under Image Blog, Rants