Moving Picture World (Dec 1920)

618 MOVING PICTURE WORLD December 4, 1920 Selling the Picture to the^Public Skimmed the Cream from C ompetitor Advertising Recently we told how Harry Swift got the merchants in Schenectady to send out all their bundles tagged “What’s Your Hurry?” This was followed by big splashes on the Proctor Theatre, where the Wallace Reid attraction was showing. It was capital work. Then Harry Fink, of the Palace, kicked in with a card which he broadcasted. Its largest lines were “What’s My Hurry” and “Palace.” The full text reading: What’s MY Hurry? I’m on my way to the Palace to see Charles Ray in “45 Minutes from Broadway.” That gave Fink all of the benefit of the elaborate Proctor advertising and put the Palace on the map alongside of Proctor’s. It probably did not hurt the Proctor business and is assuredly did help Fink offset the other exploitation. It tickled the local paper and he got a long story which further helped, and it was not charged to the house, but run as news, for a large portion of the town was talking about the stunt and that made it pure reading matter. Tied Up Street Traffic to Boom “ Go and Get 1C Some months ago a New Brunswick, N. J., newspaper took up a subscription for an airplane to be donated to Rutgers College. The plane was purchased, but it got in a freight jam and was so long coming that it promised to be a flat sensation when it Anally arrived. Then Aaron Shustermann, who thinks exploitation even in his sleep, promised to pay Associated First National some money for the use of “Go and Get It” and decided that it was up to him to do something. He suggested to the editor that he hire a man to go and get it. The idea made a hit and a former army aviator was given instructions to “Go and Get It.” He did. He found it only 150 miles away, tracing the car, got it out of its crates and started to sail it home. But it was not properly tuned up and he had to come down at Trenton, where he loaded it onto a canal boat and brought it up to New Brunswick. He thoughtfully arrived the night before the picture began its run. He had it all set up by morning and, hitching it to a Ford, he started for the newspaper office. New Brunswick was founded a few years before the airplane and the streets were too narrow to accommodate the forty foot wings and the usual street traffic. He would not give way and neither would the traffic. It was the biggest jam the city has ever known. He finally got it to the newspaper office, but not until everyone in the downtown district had seen the signs with which it was plastered. The paper gave him a big story and even the opposition sheet had to come in with the news. The judge fined him $25 the next morning for collecting a crowd but it was cheap at the price, for that gave two more stories and a lot of additional ticket buyers. And through it all ran the theme that he was a reporter and had been told to “Go and Get It” just like the army hero of the Marshall Neilan story. It was a clean-cut hookup. Advance Show Got Results When “The Penalty” showed at the Isis, Grand Rapids, an advance showing to newspaper men brought unexpectedly good results. The show was given the Thursday preceding the Sunday opening. This enabled the newspaper men to write their stories leisurely and run them before the opening instead of hustling the stuff out for Monday along with the reports of the other shows. It got the Goldwyn off to a flying start. The advance showing of good films pays from every angle where it can be arranged. Dorothy Gish's C ud of Gum Wins Albany Window Display Harry Swift, the Paramount exploiter in Albany, got a window display for “Little Miss Rebellion,” because Dorothy Gish chews gum in that production. She was at the Proctor house and Swift was on the job. He got a Kreise window and stuffed it full of stills, cutouts and six kinds of gum, with signs telling that she chews “our gum” so you could pick on any of the six and still be fashionable. THE GISH GUM GUSH Swift certainly seems to be making an effort to earn what he finds in his pay envelope. He doesn’t wait for some one to give him a stunt to copy. He gets ideas of his own and some of the other Paramount exploiters will have to jump out of their boots to keep up the Swift pace. Albany is not precisely a jazz town, but Swift is doing his best to make it so. Points the Finger of Scorn at “Notorious Miss Lisle ' Something really new is the huge fist pointing to the cutout of Katherine Macdonald in “The Notorious Miss Lisle” in the lobby of the People’s theatre, Portland, Oregon. The effect of this huge pointer extending down into the lobby multiples the value of the cut-out a hundredfold. It starts outside of the lobby recess and draws the eye into the space. It is comparatively simple to work this fist, making it from beaver board or stiffened corrugated board. It will work for almost any display, but it works especially well for this title. In the same way it might be helpful to link up displays with cross sidewalk banners by looking strands of ribbon or colored cloth from the sign to the posters or stills as is sometimes done on a smaller scale in store windows where the sellingpoints are pasted to the window, the streamers running to the advantages indicated. LOOKS LIKE A BAD BLACKHAND ATTACK ON THE AMERICAN BEAUTY How the People’s Theatre, Portland, Oregon, made everyone look at its lobby cutout for “ The Notorious Miss Lisle," a First National, with Katherine Macdonald. You simply could not get away from it