News
Exhibit Peaks At Century-old Film Marketing
By Robert Marich
Nov 28, 2011—A New York Times article describes an exhibition of early movie marketing—going back 100 years or more—that is focus of a historical exhibition at the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts at Kennedy Center.
Says the article: “The library’s exhibition covers this early period in the form of the newsletters — the Edison Kinetogram, the Kalem Kalendar, the Lubin Bulletin — sent to theater owners and operators of film exchanges, giving summaries of the latest productions and offering prints for outright sale. Later, as rentals replaced sales and systems of national distribution emerged, trade publications like Moving Picture World and Motion Picture News — examples are in the show and online at mediahistoryproject.org — arose to review films, provide technical advice and offer tips on attracting customers.”
The New York Times article by Dave Kehr continues: “The humble one-sheet, expanded to use three, six and even 24 sheets, often used to cover entire theater-fronts in a riot of colorful images. Soon enough, film companies found themselves in the business of selling posters as well as renting movies. Besides serving as a profit center for producers, advertising material also probably provided a competitive edge. The stodgy, duotone posters produced by Edison and Vitagraph, with their big blocks of explanatory text and black-and-white photos, couldn’t stand up to the bold graphics and colorful images of the gorgeous stone lithographs offered by Biograph and Kalem.”
Each chapter of Marketing to Moviegoers: Second Edition ends with a history section that concisely describes trends, practices and key events of the chapter topic. I used the Kennedy Center library in New York and the motion picture academy library in Beverly Hills, CA extensively in researching parts of the book.
For full text, click links below; this website’s text is searchable via searchbox at center left of homepage:
www.nytimes.com/2011/11/24/movies/the-birth-of-promotion-inventing-film-publicity.html
www.marketingmovies.net/chapters/chapter-1-creative-strategy-for-marketing/
www.marketingmovies.net/chapters/chapter-8-exhibition-theaters/
