Motion Picture Herald (Apr-Jun 1955)

A Lot of Carnes Are Won Without a Record Score says . , , owner-manager of the Northwood Theatre, Northwood, la. Northwood, Ia. It’s Monday morning, and may as well call the Monday Morning Quarterback Club to order and see if we can come up with some sort of an explanation as to what clobbered us last week. Rest assured that when this meeting is adjourned we will till have our pet theories, guesses and “scientific” formulas, but the coaches and professionals will still be in their jobs and we’ll whip up another batch of enthusiasm for this week’s battle. It’s getting so that I’m commencing to hate people, and I realize that this is about as wrong an approach as you can come up with and still lay claim to being in showbusiness. Of course, the reason I am starting to hate them is the same reason why you’ve been hating them for these many past moons. They aren’t coming across with their dough. Even standard trickery, bribery and chicanery is losing its soft fleecy feel when you pull it over their eyes. It’s taken a long time — some two or three generations — but it seems like an awfully lot of people are walking around these days with their eyes wide open. That’s the penalty we pay for paying taxes to educate them. Now they’re so smart that we can’t fool them any longer. And that makes me mad and I think I hate them for it. • Now anybody knows that if we’re going to fill these stadiums, pay off the mortgages, keep the coaches in Cadillacs and fill the slush funds, we’re going to have to start loving the people more than we do and give them the kind of team that wins all their games and makes them rush to the arena to be thrilled. At present we fresh-water institutions seem to be fielding the wrong kind of team, running the wrong type of plays against the wrong type of opponents, catering to the wrong class of patrons, and maybe charging them the wrong price. If you can get any wronger than that you don’t belong in the quarterback Club, you belong on the faculty! •Admitting that our club is just as confused collectively as anyone in the indus try individually, about all we can do here is to throw in some as yet unheard of theories about why we aren’t filling our stadiums, then call in a bunch of experts to go over these theories and see if any of them hold water, said experts to include leading professors in the fields of numerology, phrenology, geneology, anthropology, cosmology, bygology, also atomology — you can’t find anything these days that somebody doesn’t blame on the explosions of atomic bombs. We know this much: Right now people aren’t coming to shows, at least where we are. It’s easy to say that there’s too much TV, too little money, wrong kind of pictures, wrong kind of theatres, lazy exhibitors, etc., etc. So far nobody has come up with an answer that solves the problem. So why shouldn’t we step into a few foreign fields and see if something is working against us that we’ve completely overlooked. It isn’t hard to see why certain classes of people aren’t interested in certain types of plays, but when you have a play that runs the opening kick-off back for a touchdown, yet your public fills your seats with the emptiness of its absence, then it’s time to call in the ology boys. Being a citizen of a nation possessed with a mania demanding that each day, week and year present us records of being bigger, better and consequently happier, we feel frustrated by tbe days, weeks and years that are not record-breakers. When today is smaller than yesterday, and this year shrinks in the shadow of last year, we hear alarm bells ringing all over the place. What gave us in America the BiggerFigger disease? We are collectively immature, suffering from an inferiority complex. We are afraid that everyone will susnect us of being weak if we don’t beat yesterday’s record today. In the effort to do so we belabor ourselves, our families, our industry for the sake of setting an enviable picture of a bold young giant, each day getting bigger, therefore better. We’re driven to it, seems like, ev'en if we have to resort to cannibalism to accomplish It. It might be argued that unless we sub You can be TOP man on the Totem Pole! DISTR!3UTORS— Upholstery fabrics and general seating supplies theatre seat seruice tu. 160 Hermitage Avenue Nashville, Tennessee It's the neatest trick ever! You'll show a real balance if your patrons know they can look forward to comfortable, relaxing seats. We work wonders in repairing or replacing your worn seats — fixing up so that they practically welcome extra patrons with open arms. And we do it without losing you a minute's worth of admissions . . . at a cost exceedingly low. Get the facts! WRITE— WIRE or PHONE 42-1658 MANUFACTURERS— Foam Rubber & Spring Cushions, back and seat covers Ofee att4 CaMf Some advertisements offer literature on the product advertised, and often a coupon Is Included as a convenient means of procuring It. Moreover, The Theatre Supply Mart (Insert at page 35) provides a postcard for this purpose. . . . Or, If you do not see what you want advertised In this particular Issue, you may write the BETTER THEATRES SERVICE DEPARTMENT, Rockefeller Center, New York 20. BETTER THEATRES SECTION 43