Motion Picture Herald (Oct-Dec 1956)

Film Publicity and the National Magazines This graph, prepared by Life magazine, shows the number of editorial pages devoted to motion picture copy by the national magazines in the years from 1945 to 1955. According to the data, pages devoted to motion picture news in all the magazines hit a low point of 475 pages in 1950, about the time television was achieving full national growth. Since then, however, there has been a steady increase, including a sharp rise in 1954. The total for 1955 was almost 600 pages, more than the total in 1945. Kastner To Be Honored by ColumbiaDrive A new Columbia Pictures International sales drive honoring the international company’s president, Lacy W. Kastner, was announced last week. Called the “Lacy Kastner Leadership Drive,” the campaign will run from November 26, 1956, to May 25, 1957. The new competition will be judged on a newly-instituted point system which awards a specific number of points for specific categories. Separate quotas will be set up for each territory as regards billings and numbers of playdates. Sub-branches which reach their quotas will also participate in the awards, it is announced. Commenting on the forthcoming drive, Columbia Pictures Corporation’s executive vice-president Jack Cohn, in whose honor the last drive was conducted, urged the International sales organization to top last year’s record-smashing results. “From one associate to another,” he said in a message to the International organization, “I am sure that with honor to Mr. Kastner as your incentive, final results will show that ‘Foreign’ has once more turned in a great record!” Bulletins, standings and all other pertinent news material on the sales drive will appear in a regular house organ which will be distributed regularly throughout the organization during the life of the campaign, which is the first international drive to honor Mr. Kastner. Cleveland Holiday Business Is Good CLEVELAND: Holiday business was good in the first run downtown theatres, operators here report. Neighborhood theatre business was spotty, but business in the territory was excellent wherever the program included a top attraction such as “Love Me Tender” or “Friendly Persuasion.” Heavy attendance was reported for “This Is Cinerama” at the Palace, “The Ten Commandments” at Loew’s Ohio, “Oklahoma!” at Loew’s Stillman, and “Giant,” in its third week at the Allen. Holiday evening business in the neighborhood houses was affected because of radioTV announcements of heavy snowfall in the eastern part of the state in the Ashtabula area with predictions of spreading into Cleveland. Roads were reported hazardous and the public was advised to stay at home. Skouras to Head March of Dimes Spyros P. Skouras, president of 20th Century-Fox, will serve as national chairman of the Motion Picture and Theatre Industry Division of the 1957 March of Dimes, it was announced this week. Basil O’Connor, president of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, described the appointment as “a major step forward towards what we of the March of Dimes hope and pray will be a decisive campaign to advance the protection of the people of this country now and henceforth against paralytic polio through the use of Salk vaccine and to extend the maximum benefit of our scientific knowledge to those who are stricken. To Fight Red Union Abroad The Hollywood AFL-Film Council recently announced a nationwide campaign to inform the American public that a number of motion pictures produced abroad by American interests or with American financing are employing Communist union members in preference to members of anti-Communist unions. The Council said that the titles of all such pictures made from now on will be widely publicized along with the names of the companies involved and the American interests therein. Special targets at the outset of the drive will be pictures made in Italy and France where there are competing groups of unions in the entertainment industry, one group part of the Communist Party’s apparatus, the other group being anti-Communist. The Free Trade Union Committee of the AFL-CIO, which has been trying to help democratic unions in Europe, brought the situation to the Council’s attention. Glaubinger Named U.A . Manager in Buffalo Albert R. Glaubinger, sales manager for United Artists in Boston, has been elevated to the post of branch manager in Buffalo, it was announced by William J. Heineman, vice-president in charge of distribution. Mr. Glaubinger succeeds Stanley S. Kositsky, who has been named as branch manager in Philadelphia. 28 MOTION PICTURE HERALD, DECEMBER I, 1956