Still Tweaking 'Em Up!

In July I filled an order for the "12 Nights of Horror" and took the opportunity to spiff-up each program. This mainly entailed modulating the volume levels so the sound doesn't jump between shorts or the shorts and features. I also added a few trailers I had acquired that promoted the show next week. The 12 nights should be run in order because of the serial chapters. When I later created the 3 Saturday Matinee series I either found or made trailers for each upcoming show, which is why I now had a trailer for Vampire Bat to add into the horrors.

In August I took the same revision approach before filling an order for 12 "Turkeys in Space." Since this series was put together later the sound did not need adjusting and I only re-did 4 of the programs. Several of them included 7-8 minute segments I called "Godzillathons." These were trailers for the many Japanese Godzilla movies -- in Japanese with the colorful Japanese lettering onscreen. It didn't matter that you can't understand the voice over narration. All the plots are the same -- Godzilla, other monsters, big fights & mayhem! However, I had initially inserted two Godzillathons in one of the shows and now felt 15 minutes of Godzilla was too much in one sitting. 8 minutes = fun; 15 minutes = deja vu.

This past week a satisfied customer in Wisconsin ordered three more shows for their small movie theater. Whenever I get orders for theaters I "Roxify" the features into programs. This means adding an opening Roxy montage that runs 16 seconds to the tune of the Universal Pictures 1930s music as the airplane circles the globe. I also add a closing montage that says "This Concludes Our Show" and has about 5 minutes of exit music. Mainly I add trailers, shorts or cartoons like an old-time movie show. Then I make a poster.

The first show they requested was The Angel and the Badman, which is certainly one of my top-ten favorite John Wayne films because of the presence of Harry Carey, stunt work by Yakima Canutt, a superb story and lovely Gail Russell. This is not a plug for the remake which opens next month and that I likely won't see until Netflix has it in March or so. The film runs 95 minutes, so not much room for extras on the disc. I added the western-themed cartoon The Mild West, a color Paramount "Screen Song" from 1947, and a trailer for Roy Rogers' "King of the Cowboys." In retrospect, I should have looked for a trailer to Stagecoach or some other John Wayne.

I already had the full one-sheet poster shown here on my website to advertise Angel and the Badman, and I did not alter it to say "Plus Cartoon." The posters serve two purposes: 1) To sell the film or program to my customer, and 2) For the buyer to download, print out or post on their own websites.

This is the second time I have sold Our Town (1940) this year to a movie theater that commented: "We are a small town, and we thought people would like to see the film." I heartily agree! Thornton Wilder wrote the screenplay after his celebrated broadway hit. Change comes slowly to a small New Hampshire town in the early 20th century. People grow up, get married, live, and die. Milk and the newspaper get delivered every morning, and nobody locks their front doors.

The program was already Roxified by the addition of two shorts. Happy Days is a 1936 UB Iwerks cartoon set in a small town: A group of boys plan to go fishing. They don't want Pinhead to come along, but he's the only one able to find any worms for bait. On the way to the fishing hole, the other boys bully Pinhead into chipping in to buy a used car. When Pinhead fills the car's tires with air, it begins floating. The boys finally land in the fishing hole, where Pinhead catches a fish.

The second twelve-minute short is called simply "The Town," a documentary look at Madison, Indiana, directed by the same Josef von Sternberg who made The Blue Angel and 6 other early Marlene Dietrich classics. I'm not sure why he made this film, but I recall it had something to do with the war effort to show soldiers the American values and home towns they were fighting for.

Finally, for Halloween they wanted The Night of the Living Dead, a great choice since it still shocks. I remind every buyer that there is one long shot of a nude female zombie. No one has ever asked for a censored version, though it would be easy to make. I just noticed the film was rated "X" when it came out, which must have been for zombie-bashing violence that looks tame today, and that one nude shot. There is no suggested sex in the film; too busy fighting zombies. I had a program for this already made up that included a trailer to White Zombie and the cartoons The Mad Doctor and The Magic Mummy, but this show was misfiled. When I didn't find it at once I remade the whole thing and feel the new version is a tad more fun with two trailers and one cartoon.

The first trailer is for the infamous turkey Robot Monster. It's campy and quite funny, both the feature and the trailer. The second trailer is for the classic King Kong and is loaded with action and the great music score. I also added a TV ad for a Shrunken Heads toy kit. Turn out heads in a mold, paint and add hair and the next they have shrunk down. Today it feels like a ghastly pastime for kids and so is pretty funny. The Mad Doctor is the only Mickey Mouse cartoon that was never renewed. Why? Possibly it proved too intense for young audiences and was shelved and forgotten. The sight today of a madman trying to cut out Pluto's heart may upset young viewers, who should not be allowed to see Night of the Living Dead anyways!

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Most Memorable Viewings!

I woke up recently thinking about the most memorable movie moments in my life. They weren't necessarily the best movies, but ones that nonetheless stick in my head forever. In fact most of the happy memories from before I turned ten are about the movies I saw, good or bad.

At the top of the list would be the first movie I ever saw, or that I remember seeing, at the age of 5. It is impossible for anyone under 60 to recall their first movie ever because they would be watching TV before they could walk or talk. With no TV or movie theater experiences, I recall sitting on a park bench watching a serial in 1951 and being too scared to look at the screen when the Dead End Kids got killed at the end of each episode of Jr. G-Men. Chapter One ends with a fight on a runaway elevator that crashes; chapter two with them hiding in a building that blows up. They didn't even know there was a bomb inside, so how would they know to get out? Too intense for a first timer, I really thought they got killed at the end of every episode. I can recall other serials over the next 7 or 8 years of "Free Movies in the Park" in Deerfield, Wisconsin -- Lost City of the Jungle, Mystery of the Riverboat, Gang Busters -- but none had the impact of that first summer of thrills.

Just a year or two later the Tom Mix serial The Miracle Rider suddenly started showing on television late Sunday morning. It had a science-fiction element of a flying projectile in which Tom is stuck for one of the cliffhanger endings. I particularly recall an ending in which a gun is rigged to fire when Tom enters a room. This may have been the first serial I saw on TV, but the main reason it impressed was that it was on right after getting back from church! Boredom turned into excitement.

Those summer free movies in the park of course had features -- projected outdoors on 16mm and sometimes in the rain. I recall the occasional umbrellas more than most of the features: Francis the Talking Mule in the Haunted House, Destination Moon, The Deadly Mantis and particularly The Mole People, which may have been my first monster film. The familiar theme of an archeology expedition finding a lost civilization may have sparked an interest in our lost past and Atlantis that remains with me today.

When I was 8-years-old my mother dropped me off at a movie theater in Madison by myself to see a Tarzan double feature of Tarzan the Ape Man and Tarzan Escapes. It was intense at the time but mainly has been on my mind the last five years as I have researched Tarzan Escapes still looking for the lost Vampire Bats scene. For more on my quest, check out this earlier blog. The only development is that I will be getting a pressbook for the 1954 reissue of the film in a few days. I already know that it talks about the bats.

The most memorable movie experience of my entire life occurred when I was 14. You can imagine it took more thrills than giant bats to make such an impression. My mother again dropped me off at a theater in Madison. I remember standing in line to get a ticket for the sold out afternoon show, which must have been the first Saturday that it opened. The film -- PSYCHO. No one in the theater knew what was going to happen, and it sure happened. I had been primed by being a fan of Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV show. I couldn't tell you which if any Hitchcock features I had seen before, but none was like Psycho anyway. I recall where I was sitting in the middle of the theater surrounded by tension, totally at the mercy of the filmmaker. At the climax someone actually screamed at the screen: "Don't go in the basement!" She did.

I often ask people what movies they saw as kids that they remember most vividly. Try it. One gets strange and fascinating replies.


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Trailers Galore!

Over the years coming attraction prevus or "Trailers" have done more to bring audiences back every week than movie posters. As evidence I give you television today. You even need to watch the ads so you don't miss a few seconds glance at next week's explosion or face-off on "24," or you need to sit thru the credits to watch a gag set-up for the next episode of "Entourage." You may leave a movie theater talking about all the terrible movies that are coming soon, and yet you enjoyed seeing two minutes of them now so you don't waste a second on them next winter. Then a year later some image may have lingered enough for you to get the film from Netflix or start watching it on cable. Or not. My memory of Transformers trailer is enough to keep me from ever watching it.

Unlike commercials, Trailers are ads you want to see. I don't need to describe what trailers are. Everyone knows! Their promotional value is beyond question, so what's new with trailers and me? Thanks for asking. A couple of things.

In a conversation with a new movie theater who bought the 12-part horror series and "Turkeys in Space," the owner commented that he planned to promote them all of August before running them in the fall, and he planned to run promos on 3 TV monitors in the lobby that ran continuously. I said many of the programs included trailers for the next week's show and he could pull clips off that. On second thought, why should he need to do that work? I put them together myself and included these trailers on a separate DVD that runs 28 minutes: Phantom Creeps, Dementia 13, Carnival of Souls, House on Haunted Hill, Little Shop of Horrors, Gypped in Egypt cartoon clip, White Zombie, Brain That Wouldn't Die, Giant Gila Monster, Teenagers from Outer Space, Ghosts on the Loose, Vampire Bat, Horror Express. The last two were trailers that I made up for the Matinee Series from key scenes and "Coming Soon" wording.

28 minutes is just a scratch on all the trailers I do have or have made for public domain films. Why stop there? Why not give away with every request for the Roxy Sampler Show a second disc which is two hours of trailers? Consider it done, or as soon as I put it together. This disc can serve multiple purposes. First, my buyers can see what is available and what looks exciting or funny to them. Second, they can run trailers as part of the pre-show or in the lobby. In the case of bars and cafes, trailers are wonderful filler to run all the time, either with or without the sound turned up.

This ties in with another email I got last week that asked: "We would like to put a series of grindhouse/horror/b-films together. Do you also have any trailer compilations?" The answer to that is yes, but I haven't been advertising them other than the Horror Mania poster and program shown here. I have an excellent collection of Film Noir trailers from Crossfire to Sealed Lips to Kiss Me Deadly, and since I made a poster for them today, I am now in the business of selling that DVD. Visit the new Trailer Page.

I have three DVDs I call "Trashy Drive-In Prevus" and can sell them soon as I make a poster and put on the website. After that it's a matter of coming up with themed ideas such as "Babes, Beaches and Bikers." The poster is finished and will go on the website shortly. I have the trailers but don't need to put them all together until I get my first order.

Remember that if the poster can sell a program to YOU, you can put the same poster on your website to sell the show to your customers. "Sell" in this case means getting them to watch and enjoy, because if it's only trailers you better give them away. It's your best way to learn which films they would pay $2 bucks to come see.


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Matinee #3 - Final Four!

Missile to the Moon is the featured attraction for installment #9 of the Saturday Matinee Series #3 at the Parkway Theater in south Minneapolis. Needless to remind, this series is available for anyone to show in their movie theater or as a 12-part TV series. One of the regulars commented about Missile on Facebook: "This was one of the few "bad" SF movies from the 50's that I hadn't seen yet (or, if I did, I had completely blocked it from my memory). Man, what a stinker! But it was still worth watching." He also added that no one walked out! The film is also in the Roxy "Turkeys in Space" series. I put the highlights into the trailer that appeared in the previous week's Matinee, and those highlights are 1) A moon woman hypnotizing the hero, 2) A giant spider attack, and 3) Brief glimpse of the Rock Men threatening one of the teenagers who is about to expire due to greed and the script.

The shorts were at least entertaining. "Dancing on the Moon" is a Max Fleischer color classic about a nightly honeymoon flight to the moon on board a rocket ship. The passengers are pairs of animals -- 2 bears, giraffes, elephants, etc. Mr. Cat screws up and gets left behind while his new bride goes lunar by herself. Naturally she returns to earth fuming and the stork does NOT bestow on them a blessed event. All the other animals get stork-delivered babies but the cat stork only lands and shakes his head. Also featured were trailers to "Abbott and Costello Go to Mars," "Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers" and other vintage 1950s Sci-Fi.

Program 10 was all Gene Autry, what with the serial chapter from the Phantom Empire and his best film from the 1930s, The Big Show, which I feel can be enjoyed by non-western fans because it is a contemporary film about Hollywood and fame. Gene plays two roles, the first as a haughty cowboy star making B-movies for a Republic studio look-alike. He also plays the amiable stunt man for the star who can ride, fight and sing. When the prima donna takes a walk, Gene is enlisted by the studio to impersonate him at the Texas Centennial celebration. Spectacle scenes were actually filmed at the Centennial, and are fascinating for preserving that history. Lots of music and guest groups. In one scene these four stars appear together: Gene Autry, Smiley Burnette, Roy Rogers as one of the Sons of the Pioneers, and 3 Mesquiteers ventriloquist Max Terhune.

Many of the Matinee programs are not really aimed at kids and are not true recreations of the Saturday Matinee Experience. I aim for variety and to entertain the older audience that just enjoys following the serial, cartoons and seeing vintage films in a movie theater. Hence I took a chance and featured Tod Slaughter in program #11 -- Crimes At the Dark House (1940). A madman kills a man who has just inherited a large estate, then impersonates his victim to gain entrance to the estate so he can murder his enemies. Mr. Slaughter portrays a Victorian villain out of an old-fashioned melodrama, that I find delightfully tongue-in-cheek. In the first scene he puts a chisel to the head of the sleeping villain and pounds away. The cartoons feature this kind of stereotype villain in Chukc Jones' The Dover Boys and Cubby Bear in Sinister Stuff. I got the idea to include this film when Johnny Legend told me he saw Tod Slaughter films as a kid in Hollywood at matinees and also when I acquired a better video master.

The Matinee series closes out with Buster Keaton in Speak Easily (1932). Naive, bookish Professor Post (of Potts College) inherits a huge amount of money and decides that now he can afford to go out and enjoy life. He falls for a dancer in a bad stage show, and with his new money decides to buy the show and take it to Broadway. Will the Professor prove too nice to succeed in show business? Or will he triumph over bill-collectors, critics, and sexy vamp Eleanor Espere? The MGM features that Keaton made with Jimmy Durante are universally despised by Buster's fans, but I kind of like it. How bad can it be with Thelma Todd and Sidney Toler in the supporting cast? In a great scene, Buster gets trapped onstage during the musical he financed and his unwitting blunders add the needed comedy that saves the show.

Plus the final chapter of The Phantom Empire in which the underground super-city of Murania melts into nothingness. The melting scenes totally astounded audiences of the time and are still impressive in their "special effects," as in how the heck did they do that.


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Auction Action!

Emovieposter.com broke their big Mini/Major auction into 3 parts. My six lobby cards were in part 1 that ended Tuesday evening. Here is a link to all of the posters with final prices. I believe the Babe Ruth insert poster fetched the most at $9,700, likely because of the cross over interest to baseball fans.

Certainly there were bidders out there willing to spend money. My six lobby cards eventually sold at respectable prices in the ballpark to what identical posters had gone for in past auctions. My thanks to "crowzilla" (bidding name) whoever you are for taking my 3 most expensive cards for a total of $2,026! I wish I knew how much higher you would have gone if the runner ups had increased their bids. The Lady from Shanghai card went for the most, as I predicted, at $901. Notorious sold for $713 and Suspicion for $412, all to Mr. crowzilla. Suspicion was the biggest surprise since I don't think it's all that great an image and the most it had sold for in previous auctions was $485.

I thought Shadow of a Doubt would sell for more than $310. Haunted House with the great close-up of Thelma Todd went for $408 and the lowest seller was The First Kiss at $171. I suspect "Kiss" will go up in the future since it seems to be the only known lobby card with Gary Cooper and the ever-popular Fay Wray. All of these posters are pictured in last week's blog entry.

In total my posters sold for $2,900. I feel good about selling them now at sizable prices, and would have been disappointed if they sold for half of that. The auction house keeps around 25% so I should get a check in the $2,200 range in about 6 weeks. They still need to collect the money and ship the posters. They deserve that much commission since I could never have found buyers with money and I don't trust auctioning myself on ebay.

I placed a few bids myself in this auction, namely on this lobby card for Tobor the Great which I was considering as a Christmas present. It did not have many early bidders, although it once sold for $175 at auction. I bid $45 and it sold for $73. I don't regret not getting it.

Will I auction more through emovieposters.com? I think so, yes. Wish I had comparable material.



See my public domain catalog and Café Roxy programs for movie theaters, etc. at Festival Films

The Great Poster Auction

I submitted six rare lobby cards to Bruce Hershenson's summer Mini/Major Auction at emovieposter.com. They can all be spotted in the above collage of 32 lobby cards featured in the auction. Click on the photo to view larger size. Bruce holds 3 poster auctions every week, but four times a year a special Mini/Major auction only sells top quality rare posters. These auctions get more publicity thru weekly email newsletters to over 6,000 collectors. I suspect every major poster collector in the world checks in to see what is offered.

I thought the timing might be right to sell some prizes that have languished in a box for twenty years or more, but the economy is slow and so many great posters are being auctioned that I may be disappointed. There is no minimum bid, so a poster that sold five years ago for $700 might go for $250 or less. But now may be a better time to sell than six months from now if and when large poster collections are dumped on the open market so the owners can make ends meet. This page link shows 5 of my posters. I don't know how long the page will be up after the auction.

This brings up the larger question of whether movie posters are good investments in the long run. (I don't know beans about it, but can speculate.) Perhaps not for posters that are mainly of interest to fans of a particular star or genre. Years ago a friend found a small stack of Buck Jones lobby cards in an antique store, bought them for around $75 and re-sold to a western dealer for $900, and then that dealer made money because he knew multiple Buck Jones collectors. How many of them are left? What would those lobby cards sell for today no matter how rare?

Certainly the cream of the crop posters of classic films, horror & sci-fi films, Disney animation, etc., will only increase in value. That's what I hope I put up for sale. The Lady From Shanghai lobby card may fetch the most because it is an iconic image featuring two undying legends, Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth. The hall of mirrors epitomizes the shadowy ambiguity of the film noir underworld. This is the only American poster image of that scene, and the lobby card is fairly rare because emovieposter.com has never auctioned this one before. Heritage House Auction Galleries sold one in 2006 for $956, several other copies and finally one in 2008 for $2,868! Final sale price can depend on condition, but mainly whether several people want it! Will it soar in value in the next ten years? I don't know what to expect, but I'll venture mine sells in the $650 range. As of Friday morning $417 has been bid via 15 bids so the interest is surely there. The auction ends Tuesday night.

The second lobby card is from the lost 1928 film The First Kiss starring Gary Cooper and Fay Wray. Both stars are still famous and appealing and Fay Wray has a cult following from King Kong. It's a passionate image illustrating the title of the film, and may be the only known copy in the world because I could not find the poster anywhere on the Internet. However, it has not been auctioned before to my knowledge so there is no reference price. All I need are two Fay Wray fans bidding against each other to get a good price. Auctions are funny that way or so I hear. So far it is up to $35 bid, but by 7 bidders so there is hope of a high price.

Next up is another lost, silent film from 1928: The Haunted House. Emovieposter sold one in 2005 for $787. It certainly falls in the evergreen horror genre, and the girl being menaced by Montagu Love is cult figure Thelma Todd who has a huge following. Currently at $155 with only 2 bidders. Someone may get a bargain.

The last three lobby cards are all from Alfred Hitchcock films of the 1940s -- title cards (meaning the main one) from Notorious and Shadow of a Doubt, and the glass of milk card from Suspicion. Emovieposter sold the Notorious card in 2007 for $1,316. (Currently 8 bids; $220) The one pictured here is a scan of my actual poster and shows off the slight discoloration due to the natural age. They sold a Shadow of a Doubt lobby card exactly like mine in 2007 for $667 (currently 5 bids; $140) and a Suspicion (currently 9 bids; $166) in 2007 for $485.

Since I only paid about $10 each over 20 years ago, my investment in lobby cards I spotted at the Syracuse Cinefest and could not walk away from was certainly a wise decision. With over 4 days to go, indications are that Lady From Shanghai could skyrocket. The others, who knows? Many bidders wait until the last moment to put in their high bid, so that the previous high bidder will not have time to reconsider if he wants to go even higher.








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P.D. Robot Vs. Federal Agent

In 1994 my family (me, wife Chris, son Jeff and brother-in-law Scott Johnson) decided to attend the Mystery Science Theater 3000 convention. The show was produced in the Twin Cities and we were fans at the tail end of the Joel Hodgson era. Actually Joel had just left the show and did not attend the convention, but Trace Beaulieu, TV's Frank Coniff, Jim Mallon, Kevin Murphy and Mike Anderson were there plus special guests like Kim Cattrall and Beverly Garland. The convention was held in a Raddison hotel in a southern suburb about 20 minutes from our home. We attended a Friday panel discussion, MST3K live show in a theater and the Saturday night party.

It was a costume party to come as your favorite character from any movie lampooned on the show. There were two costume categories to enter: 1) Torgo from Manos, the Hands of Fate (1966) and 2) Non-Torgo. Jeff and Scott went as Torgo, and can be briefly glimpsed in the video you will watch after reading this. Torgo wears rags and a tattered hat, has a padded, gimpy leg and lurches about on a cane stuttering the way Torgo talks, of course. There must have been 50 Torgos at the party; they invited a dozen or so on stage to do their walk & talk like Torgo all at the same time.

Because we knew several months ahead that we would attend, I had too much time to work on my costume. As you have already guessed from the picture, I built a robot costume like the one in the Bela Lugosi serial The Phantom Creeps. It took about two months to build. The head was sculpted in clay and cast in fiberglass, a skill I had picked up building props at the Guthrie Theater for ten years. In retrospect I built the head way too big, considerably bigger than the serial robot head. I started building so I could peak through the mouth and the rest followed. It was probably a more effective costume being too large, since I am only average build at six foot tall and the big head pushed it well above 7 feet.

So about 10:30 on Saturday night, Sept. 17, we got to the hotel for the "Glittering Costume Ball." I unpacked the robot pieces and put them on in the parking lot. Chris had the camcorder and filmed my famous walk as "Robot in a Parking Lot" for the ages. The robot walks into the party, turns around in a confused daze and then... that was all we got on film. Afterward Chris said "The camera just cut off and I couldn't get it going again," or something similar. All I remember is sweating like a watermelon, going outside for a break and taking the head off, then back in. Hey, I won first prize! Second prize went to a woman who wore a laboratory table and went as The Brain That Wouldn't Die. My prize was a Devil Dog prop pictured here that was used in some MST3K sketch. They had a stage about five feet off the ground and I recall almost tripping as I walked down it after getting the prize. On Monday a photo of the robot appeared in the New York Times. Someday I'll find that photo in some box!

So we only got one minute of footage at the convention ( and one minute of national fame) but we also filmed several minutes at home a few days before with some ominous music playing and Jeff filming the embarrassment with a shaky camera. I didn't look at the footage for years, but suddenly everything we had shot 16 years ago came in handy.

I got an email and had a few discussions with Nick Villa who has a website called Old School Horror. His idea is to make public domain horror films available for online streaming/viewing with the twist that they will be introduced by a horror host like Count Dracula. Horror hosting has been done on TV since the 1950s, but not on the Internet. Our discussion was how Festival Films might fit into his plans and I gave him some copyright advice. Nick mentioned he would be happy to give a link to my site.

This got me wondering why any normal person would want to visit my site since it is geared toward TV stations, movie theaters, video companies, etc., who are intentionally seeking public domain films. The answer was to create a page that anyone could go to for a few minutes entertainment, then investigate my others pages if interested. Public domain showings can be used by anyone at all, even if they had never considered doing so. Hence the video and web page P.D. Robot Vs. Federal Agent was created. I cut my robot footage into scenes from the Bela Lugosi serial, a project in the back of my mind for some time. In the process I gave my robot the name of "P.D. (for Public Domain) Robot," and a whimsical plot evolved! P.D. fights for Freedom of Usage as he conquers the evil Federal Agent and flees from the army. Then there is a surprise ending. So go watch it and enjoy.

Anyone out there with a website, please link to the P.D. Robot page!



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