Ballyhoo (Oct 22, 1954)

Page scan 0003 from Ballyhoo

Record Details:

Title:
Ballyhoo
Date:
Oct 22, 1954
Volume:
Ballyhoo (Oct 22, 1954) Ontario 'B' District
Leaf #:
0003
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.

4 ASSIST ADVERT. ct 4 Ai1L the major companies are interested in seeing their product get the best selling job possible ... and will often share in our advertising costs. Don't decids at the very last minute that this or that particular attraction requires a boost ... and don’t wait for somebody to tell you. If you feel that you should spend a little more, drop me a note well in advance ... specifying how much more you think you should have ... Ili pass the information on to Jimmy Nairn for action. DON'T spend the extra money first, and then ask us to try and get it back for you ... It won't work. NEW ASPECTS ——. Just as with CinemaScone, VistaVision is an important new adventure. Exactly what do you know about it? If you've been reading all that the trade magazines hays been writing about it, you should be pretty well informed. Start talking it up ... Sell it ... Glamourize it. You're the only one who can get it across to your customers ... and sell, itt NOW. Get the romance of Showbusiness in your souls ... and a ee eT Sl some of it is bound te rub off on your customers. INTERMISSEON TRATLERS Do you use a confection intermission trailer? How long hare you been using your present one? Do your patrons get just a little bat bored with it? Here's a thought, and a good one. There are several good trailers available ... If four or five theatres in a closely-knit group order a different trailer each, and interchange them every couple of weeks ... you need only show the same treiler about two weeks ovt of ten ... and by the time it comes around again, your customers will hardly remember it, and feel that you're constantly freshening up your screen. Think about it ... and ACT on bre PRESENSATION One of the most important phases of « theatre's operation o.. and the one most frequently neglected, is the presentation of your screen attraction ... Anybody can push the buzzer and have the operatars throw a picture on the screen cee It takes a showman to dress up his stage, his screan and his picture so that they combine to give an illusion of reality to his performance. When you have a GinemaScope feature and regular 1.33 short subjects on the same program, do you just leave your screen wide open after the feature, and throw a standard size news on the giant screen? How wrong, and how disillusioning., ALWAYS draw your masking to the size of your picture, and when CanemaScope comes on, part your curtains and open your masking with the expanding film. What a difference it makes. I know that all my theatres follew this practice ... but, dust in case you forgot .-. MAKE SURE. Have you any equipment in your booth over and beyond the besic projectors? Have you theught cf putting it to use? Your effect — machine can do quite a job for you ... ib can even mask in, your picture if need be ... Give your prejectionists the green light, and sag what tricks they can do with their equipment and their ingenuity.