Moving Picture World (Nov-Dec 1923)

November 24, 1923 MOV ! \’G PICTURE WORLD 403 The Other Man Foster brother of the accused man himself one of the accusers, is Robert Armstrong acting in the interest of justice or is it because he loves his brothers beauuful wife? Whos Guilty? Reproduction of unusual lobby-card idea. Six of the 11 x 14j have inserts of the l lain characters and the press look contains copy for each to be lettered on boards the size of one-sheets, as illustrated herewith. Stunt may be adapted to other pictures also. Front cover of the four-page miniature newspaper herald. Exact size 9% x 12%. Headlines printed in red. Plenty of room for theatre imprint on back page. A good herald idea that has been used successfully on several pictures, and which seems to be gaining in favor. SPECIAL EXTRA 11 yt Simj e£. SCANDAL HINTED IN THE ACQUITTAL Mrs, Kenneth Winlhrop WEDDING SCANDAL REPORTED BY element of suspense and mystery. The idea may also be adapted to other pictures. THIS element of suspense and mystery is the keynote of the whole campaign. It’s good showmanpsychology to advertise “Don’t tell vour friends how it will turn out they’ll never guess.” The suspense and mystery idea have been carried out in virtually all of. the newspaper ads., which are found in a 1 separate four-page section of the complete campaign. There is a plentiful I assortment of newspaper ads., both as i to number, subject-matter, type and style. Twenty-four ads. are repro| duced, exclusive of seven teasers. This, | we believe, is more than the number usually prepared by most other companies. One thing we like particularly about the assortment of ads. is that several ; samples of strong type ads. are given ; one thing we don’t like about the ad. line-up is that our old bugbear, “credit lines,” is very much in evidence. THE publicity clip sheet on “The Acquittal” is indeed comprehensive. It contains stories of all descripI tion — reviews, notes, advance stories, i etc., and one or two very good feature stories. One little thing we notice in the publicity clip sheet is that the scene cuts, of which there are quite a number, have hand-lettered captions, Universal’s “A Lady of Quality” press book contains some mighty good newspaper ads, especially as regards art work. The illustrations are uniformly high class and are mostly from the pen of Mon Randall, who has done some of the best things in this business, in an advertising art sense. which have to be cut off by newspapers if they do not care to use the caption prepared. We haven’t swerved in our conviction that it would be better to have these captions set in type, and just one added reason is that, for instance, in one one-column cut we observe, the cut itself is three inches deep and the caption takes up almost another inch of space. These days extra inches mean a lot in newspaper pages, and we believe that all scene cuts would get a bigger circulation if not encumbered by hand-lettered captions — if not handicapped by that “extra inch.” IT’S not an easy matter to exactly place the credit for Universal press sheets. There’s P. D. Cochrane, George Brown, Paul Gulick and others who all probably have a hand in preparing each campaign ; not to forget Joe Hirt and Ben Wells, poster artists; Henry Clay Bate, Don Walk, Paul Perez and others. Anyhow, they’re a gang of good showmen ! THERE’S a story which may be old, but which the advertising men of this business will appreciate particularly. Here it is : A certain film magnate was looking over a onesheet prepared by his advertising manager. “Huh,” he said, “that’s no good. I’ll write you copy for a onesheet !” So the magnate wrote two closely typewritten pages of copy and showed it to the advertising man. “Fine,” said the ad. man. “What we can’t print on one side we’ll run on the other side.” “You’re fired,” said the magnate. “Such ignorance. Anybody knows that one side of a poster is pasted against the wall.”