The Moving Picture Weekly (1920-1921)

16 —THE MOVING PICTURE WEEKLY Publicity Stories that Exhibitors Can Use oi Human Skulls Are Playthings For Children of Kia Kia Tribe The chiidren of tlie rich have expensive toys to play with. The children of tlie poor content themselves ivith rag-baby dolls, and home-made toys. But the Kia Kia children know no other toys than human sktdls, which they ttse much the same as your little boy does his building blocks. This is an actual scene in "Ship^vrecked Among Canniabals," coming to the Theatre on 2-Col. Scene Cut No. 2 THE WOOZY CRAWL FASHIONABLE IN HOOLA "Every little movement has a meaning of its own." Oh, boy you otta see 'em in New Guinea. Say, lemme tell you night life among the Kai-Kai's would make the night life of New York look like Uie Victorian period. Nothing doing in the day time. They sleep from sunrise to sunset, but when the red orb sinks into the ocean the Kai-Kai stars start to shine, there is something doing. Lizzie Umboo, the chief's daughter, is the vamp of the island. Lizzie would make Cleopatra look like Pollyanna. All the Kai-Kai warriors are her Mark. If Flo Ziegfeld was on his job, he would be over there with a contract signing her up for the next hundred years, for Lizzie's kind im proves with age — the older they get in New Guinea, the better they shimmy. About 1 a. m. in Hoola the principal village, there is a mixture of Murray's, Churchill's, Little Italy and Chinatown of before Prohibition days, all going strong. You would not think it possible to wear any less clothing than they wear in the Lobster Palaces on Broadway, but then, we didn't think there'd be a war. Wine flows as free as the Hudson — no one dances with his own wife and it doesn't cost a cent — they don't know what money is in that place. For two cocoanuts and a string of beads you can have a celebration that will make Armistice Day seem like a cemetery. Note "Shipwrecked Among Cannibals" is without a doubt the most unusual moving picture ever made. But even more than that it is a tremendous sensation as a box office magnet. It is going to prove a Godsend to thousands of exhibitors this summer. But it will not be half the success you could make it unless you exploit it properly and put it over right. The press sheet issued by the Universal Press Department is a mighty fine affair and will give you plenty of material with which to work. Get it from your exchange by all means and use the methods and accesories you find there. A very few of them are reproduced here. An Advance Story A motion picture that had no scenario! Such is "Shipwrecked Among Cannibals," soon to be seen at the Theatre. Not one of the cast had a minute's direction. Mr. Edward Laemmle and Mr. William Alder of the Universal Film Company, who were shipwrecked on the coast of Dutch New Guinea, took the scenes as they went along. The results are far more thrilling than if they had used a manufacture plot. What scenarist or director could write a story as strange as the daily habits of these weird people, whose women disfigure themselves for the sake of beauty? Of children, who at nine and ten years of age, appear as forty? In the midst of a tropical storm that almost wrecked their apparatus, these two men stood bravely by their camera and while the lightning struck near them and tall palms crashed at their feet cranked out hundreds of feet of film, the like of which never had been equalled. One night they hid themselves in the nearby bushes, while the Kia-Kia Head Hunters danced upon the moonlit sands in a religious ceremony. It would have meant death by torture, had a rustling leaf or a crisp branch betrayed the two white men, but Fate was on their side and they were able to take and bring back to America the strangest picture of adventure ever shown. "Shipwrecked Among Cannibals" is not a dry educational picture. It is the actual cinematic record of a true and thrilling adventure.