Films Facts and Forecasts (1927)

70 FILMS: FACTS AND FORECASTS newspaper, the cost of this advertising being borne by the picture-theatre owners. The producing companies rarely advertise in the ordinary newspapers, though they take space in the trade papers. The great size of the American newspapers helps. In the United States there is one picture-theatre to every 6,500 persons (the proportion here is 1 to 12,000), and the number of new houses increases steadily. That means there is a big public ready to read about the film. The newspapers recognise the importance of the film in the daily life of the people, and there is scarcely a paper in the fair and large sized cities that does not contain a whole page daily devoted to the pictures. Photographs of players and film-directors deck the pages, and large advertisements of the fare at the picturetheatres are offset. The huge New York papers are equally favourable to films. The New York Times, for example, has two or three film-pages in the supplement devoted to amusements every Sunday. The lesser cities follow suit. Though Los Angeles has a population of only 1,250,000, the main Sunday paper contains over 200 pages, and the daily evening paper has about thirty-six. Both have their quota of filmnews. The largest Sunday newspaper in London (the Observer) has only thirty-two, and no London evening paper has more than twenty on the average. Naturally, films hardly get a look in in England. In addition to the regular film-feature, it is not uncommon to run special film-articles on other pages, and sometimes one finds two different half-column accounts of the same event on separate pages, on the principle that if you miss it in one place you will see it in the other. The publicity man's job is simple. With so much space at his disposal the film-editor admits much " stunt copy," boosting a player or a film,