Moving Picture World (Jan-Feb 1927)

Celling the Picture to the Public f* j Ohis Department Was Sstablished. September 23, 1911 txj its Present 6iitor~ £>pe$ Winthrop Sargent Building the Institutional Tradition A Simple Way to Make Regular Patrons ANY EXHIBITORS seem to regard themselves as retailers of indivi^rrl dual retailers of individual film titles rather than regular purveyors of *it*'*' amusement, and conduct their business wholly from the day-to-day angle. Today and tomorrow they sell one title, and Friday and Saturday they offer another. They have educated their patrons to buy by title, and when they have a title that is not salable, business falls off, even though an unpromising title may represent a really entertaining play. As a result the sales have to be made each time the title is changed. Today the wise exhibitor seeks to sell his theatre as a place of amusement, and often when a title does not promise much entertainment, he will sell half his seats on the tradition that the theatre is a good place to go for entertainment. He no longer stresses his main title to convey the suggestion that this is all he has to offer. Naturally he does not lose the sales value of a star name or the appeal of a clever film title, but he sells the rest of his program along with it, and he also sells the theatre as an institution. One man fairly stumbled upon the institutional idea. He did not think it out, but he was clever enough to grab it when it showed up. One day he received a letter of appreciation from a well-known woman. She had particularly liked the show the night before, and she sat down and told him about it. She was well known in the fairly small town, and it pleased the manager to know that she liked the house. In a burst of pride he lettered a card “What Mrs. Blank thinks about the Dash Theatre.” This he used as a mount for the letter, set it into a one sheet frame and put it in the lobby close to the curb line. “Mrs. Blank” meant more to the town than Mary Pickford or Pola Negri. People stopped and read her letter. They talked about it. A day or two later another wellknown woman sent him an even stronger letter. He put that in the frame, and before the paste was dry he had a letter from a third person. It was not long before a minister expressed his approval of a special film and added that he often visited the house. A judge followed, and presently a school principal praised a travel picture, proudly adding that he had visited the foreign land shown and could testify as to its accuracy. Since then there has been no lack of letters for display and the frame has become a permanent one. To conserve cardboard, the backing is now changed only once in three or four weeks, and the design is planned so that the names can be “stripped” in. The entire town is taking an interest in the display, and all of the patrons have come to regard the theatre in a new light. They no longer shop for titles. They go to see the program at the Dash. They regard the program as a whole and no longer judge the main title only, and they often find that they have been entertained in spite of the fact that the main title was not quite up t<$ standard. Naturally all who have written letters act as personal press agents and give the house considerable verbal advertising, and the entire town regards the Dash Theatre as a place of entertainment rather than the temporary home of some particular film feature. The business has been more consistently good with no increase in advertising costs, and it is now possible to make a special drive on a particularly good feature and draw extra business with much less advertising space than was required when each feature had to be advertised as an individual item. This does not, of course, mean that the features are not advertised. They are, just as they always have been, but they are advertised merely as an offering of the house and not as a star in its own right. Don’t make the change overnight. Build up gradually. Work away from feature advertising to institutional advertising so gradually that the change is not apparent. You may have to solicit the writing of the first letter. The rest will take care of themselves if you get the first letter from a real leader. Twelve Dollars Got An Extra Big Crowd Spending twelve dollars for candy bars and a Santa Claus costume, G. Newton Wallis, of the Iroquois Theatre, Petrolia, Ont., got four times the usual juvenile patronage for a Saturday matinee just before Christmas and double the usual adult patronage. His advertising was in the form of an open letter from Santa Claus urging the children to be at the matinee December 18 and promising to be there in person with a little gift for each child. This was neatly set up as a letterhead for Santa, with a cut of the old man himself and “Santa Claus Headquarters, North Pole, Canada.” The rest was done in typewriter type. Santa appeared at the end of the first show, which permitted the adults to enjoy the performance without disturbance, and he coaxed a number of the more gifted to the stage to do some little stunt, knowing on whom to call. A nice little entertainment supplemented the regular program and the youngsters and oldsters will talk about it for some time to come. Hoot Gibson, in Taming the West, was the attraction. Everyone Helped Two newspapers and the merchants of Dallas, Tex., helped out over Reginald Denny in Take It From Me at the Old Mill. The News gave a party to its club of juvenile readers, with a bar of candy a Denny button and a postcard to each little guest, while the Dispatch ran a Write-a-title-for-thispicture contest with $2.50 and ten tickets daily as prizes for the best captions for stills from the play, a new still each day. A bakery used 10,000 inserts in its wrapped bread and the tie-up stills got windows in a dozen big stores. A FLASHY WINDOW FROM A COSTUME COMPANY IN LOS The figure on the left is supposed to be Laura La Plante in The Midnight Sun, dressed in a Russian costume. The centre is a part of the three sheet, cutout and with the letters made on a flasher.