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National Lampoon parody movie ads

May 8th, 2008 by Scott Marks

As if preparing me for this Sunday afternoon’s date with dreck, I came across this ad from the 1978 National Lampoon Sunday Newspaper Parody. While not as rich as their hilarious high school yearbook vamp, the paper spoof still brought back a lot of memories and more than a few snide chortles.

Sadly, we’ve become so politically incorrect that much of what once passed for social criticism could not be posted for fear of harsh reprisal. And that’s just from my partner on the site, forget about Al Sharpton.

It’s safe to say that twenty minutes with a NatLamp parody is bound to be more enjoyable than Indiana Jones’ skull, although it may not produce as many laughs. I’ll let you know. In the meantime, enjoy a nasty chuckle.

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Regal Cinemas considers canceling daily newspaper movie ads

March 18th, 2008 by Scott Marks

PLITT THEATRE GUIDE
P.U., spielberg — I’ll meet you at the Round Lake 2…or the Cinestage

First the critics, now the box ads. It’s bad enough that newspapers no longer see the need to employ reliable reviewers to steer readers in the right direction, now they won’t even know what time to show up and where!

Maybe newspaper chains are correct to do away with their full-time reviewers after all. Regal Entertainment Group, which operates 6,388 screens in 527 theatres in 39 states, is considering pulling the plug on costly newspaper listings. Exhibition chains spend millions of dollars each year running daily theatre showtimes, and the loss of this steady ad revenue would be another devastating shock for the already suffering dailies to absorb.

Reuters’ Sue Zeidler was at ShoWest when Regal CEO Michael Campbell made a point that somehow never occurred to me: “Personally, I think that theater listings in newspapers should be free to us and also free as a service to the public, just like TV listings are. I don’t see a lot of difference there.”

He’s right. Since television is no longer free, why shouldn’t cable companies have to pay the same rates as movie chains to list their showtimes?

What’s Free TV?

The practice of not running ads on Mondays has been commonplace among secondary exhibition chains for years. In the late 80s, Cineplex-Odeon began the cost-cutting maneuver of staggering their weekly box ads. Never on Monday, always Thursday through Sunday, and infrequently on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Even before the internet one had to find alternate ways of tracking down showtimes on off days. The Chicago Reader’s free weekly theatre listing was frequently more accurate than the city’s two dailies. While dependable, the no-frills sheet of showtimes lacked ballyhoo. I used to study the Friday movie section like a handicapper chewing over his Green Sheet. It wasn’t just the splashy full-page ad mattes that caught my eye, but the smaller box ads that invariably included a grainy pressbook image from the movie.

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It came as no surprise that an upcoming study by Yahoo and The Motion Picture Association of America found that 73 percent of American moviegoers get their showtimes on line. At first I resisted electronic theatre listings. There was still the thrill of the hunt, riffling through newsprint to track down that night’s entertainment. Last year I caved in and bookmarked Yahoo! showtimes. No more driving around Saturday afternoon trying to track down an elusive morning edition for a spur of the moment matinée. Besides, with David Elliott gone I no longer read the local paper.

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Vintage Movie Ads

June 24th, 2007 by Scott Marks

heldover.jpg

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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