Ballyhoo (Feb 5, 1954)

Page scan 0005 from Ballyhoo

Record Details:

Title:
Ballyhoo
Date:
Feb 5, 1954
Volume:
Ballyhoo (Feb 5, 1954) Ontario 'B' District
Leaf #:
0005
Language:
English
Collection:
Canada, Global Cinema, and Hollywood Studio System
Format:
Periodicals
Contributor:
Media History Digital Library, Greig Dymond in memory of David Dymond, Paul Moore and Jessica Whitehead
Coordinator:
Media History Digital Library
Description:

Ballyhoo

  • Ontario 'B' District Ballyhoo, editor: Dan Krendel (1952-55)
  • Profit Blitz for ‘Fitz’, editor: Dan Krendel (1955)
  • National Ballyhoo, editor: Dan Krendel (1956-57)
  • Time Out for Ticket Talk, editor: Norman Barker (1960-61)

Ballyhoo (1952-61) was published by Famous Players Canadian Corporation as a mimeographed internal sales and theatre managers’ newsletter. Editor, Dan Krendel, had been division manager of the Ontario ‘B’ District since 1942, and initially created Ballyhoo in 1952 to circulate weekly updates for a regional sales contest. Ontario ‘B’ District Ballyhoo continued until 1955 as a tool for sharing and incentivizing new sales techniques and publicity methods as the movie business declined in the face of television and the baby boom.

In Fall 1955, Profit Blitz for ‘Fitz’ was a nationwide sales contest, named for Famous Players’ president J. J. Fitzgibbons, honouring his 25th year as head of the business. Dan Krendel was made National Drive Captain and edited a weekly newsletter for the campaign.

From 1956 until at least 1957, National Ballyhoo was published weekly with Krendel as editor. He continued the style and content developed earlier for his Ontario ‘B’ District, but now extended vastly for a chain-wide coast to coast scale. Ballyhoo’s sharing promotional tools came at a time of contracting box office as television and automobile ownership became prevalent in the mid-1950s.

By 1960 until at least 1961, Time Out for Ticket Talk continued as a mimeographed newsletter, edited by Norman Barker of the head office publicity department. Time Out was compiled on a less ambitious scale than Ballyhoo. Compared to the earlier national compilation of local publicity gimmicks, Time Out often contained only a single memo or reproduced local story, and was often undated and only informally edited.

– Paul Moore, March 2024

Date Added:
April 11, 2024
Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

DRUMBEATS ALONG THE BONANZA TRAI). I'm glad to see that a couple of our lads knocked off a few bonus points for having pictures of stunts published in the trade press „ Len Gouin got himself quite a spread on a couple of his deals in BOXOFFICE, and Jack Bridges wound up with a picture and good story in the same magazine. That's 300 points extra for each ... Bob Harvey landed a good story on his activities in connection with GILBERT & SULLIVAN 50. Nice going chappies „% BUT ... how about the rest of you go-gettin’ showmen? Too tired to send samples of your work to Hew Tork? I can't do it for you .,. and it's 500 pointe for every published picture „% Those extra points may come in mighty handy in determining the winners „ May just serve to nose out your competitor „„ 80 ooo go after ‘en, gang „% and it's also good P.R. for yourself, Let's get a little action into our "Drumbeat" section fellows ... If you don't beat your own drums, believe me, no one else will ... and don't try to get by with one free plug over your local air-wavee, or a scene cut, each and every week. It just won't do „% I'm looking for sone real selling effort, not next month, or when you get a "natural" „ge but NOW, and that means HOW ... TODAY. incidentally ... in order to get January cleaned up, and our winnere posted, I'm going to toss into this section all your activities for the past two weeks „„ This should bring wus Fight up to date, and give you a fresh start in February ... XO TOTO TO 9 et! AL 00... DRANADA = HAMILTON One of Paul's features, TOPEKA, gave our boy a chance at a really cute street bally ... A cowboy in full Western garb, led a small dogs similarly attired, with gun belt and two loaded holsters, up and down Hamilton's main drags „% The pooch was a specially trained circus dog „ walked on his hind legs, turned somersaults, and certainly was the center of attraction whereever he appeared. Both dog and master carried signe on their backs . the dog's read ... "A Dog's Life isn't s0 bad cee Ton on my way to see TOPEKA ete"...cute, huh? For NO TIME FOR FLOWERS, what more natural than to tie in your local florists? Paul did Just that, and wound up with four florists who tied in the title of his attraction with their Telegraph Delivery Service ... Four excellent windows devoted to art and copy for theatre and feature. For REDHEADS FROM SEATTLE, Paul talked the Largest beauty salon in Hamilton inte providing him with several thousand imprinted envelopes „„ theatre copy on one side, and merchant copy on the other ... One of his comely usherettes distributed these envelopes at the city's main intersections „„ On the theatre side was copy as follows: "Lock inside for the Sharpest redheads in Town" ... And theatre and pie copy.