Showmanship in Advertising (1949)

INTRODUCTION V Ever since the second printing of the Encyclopedia of Exploitation, we’ve been after Bill to get started on a book on advertising. Our reason is simple enough. As publisher of a motion picture trade journal, SHOWMEN’S TRADE REVIEW, we are very well aware of an ever-growing demand for a good volume on advertising. After much pressuring, Bill got started. As he progressed, he realized that this work would require not old samples of advertising but original and descriptive art, and that is how he teamed up with Monty Orr of whom we will talk a little later on in this introduction. Hendricks went through all the growing pains and headaches of any author engaged in writing a reference book. He progressed from one headache to another until, as Bill put it, his head ached all the way from the top of his pate to the tip of his toes. He was never able to read his manuscript without deciding it was no good and so, time after time, he started all over again. To us it seemed improbable that this finished job would ever come to pass and so we just about forgot the whole thing until on one of our trips to Hollywood and a dinner date with Bill, he stopped off at his home and dumped what we then thought was the finished manuscript into our lap. That same night we met Monty Orr for the first time and were also introduced to his brand of art. We were so impressed with the art work that we almost forgot there was a manuscript to read. Well, we could go on with this for many more pages but instead we will cut it short and simply say that between revisions, expansions and additions Bill must have completely rewritten the book at least five times before it reached the stage where even he felt it was as good as it could ever be within the scope of his ability. But not even our threats to drop the whole project bothered him because right on down through the galley proofs, the dummying, the page proofs and the final press proofs, Bill kept right on with his polishing process. And if we get no other satisfaction on seeing the printed book, we will be happy to know that the next mail can bring no further changes or re-written chapters. MEET MONTGOMERY ORR If Monty Orr is to be believed (and why should he?) he was infected by the twin viruses of Show Business and Advertising at a very tender age, indeed. This character stoutly maintains that while still in rompers he was lettering snipe cards and movie slides for the American and Orpheum Theatres in his native mining camp, Park City, Utah. He remembers occasional lucid intervals during which he attended school, sold haberdashery, displayed assorted merchandise, and painted signs. But the virus slumbered in his veins. The fever flickered fitfully. A relapse was inevitable. Flushed, hectic and glazed of eye, he wandered to Los Angeles where he masqueraded successfully as a poster artist for such show houses as the long-vanished Tally’s Broadway, Grauman’s Million Dollar, Egyptian and Chinese Theatres, worked 071 ads for the Carthay Circle and the early Fox West Coast chain. Sometime hereabout we also find him operating a commercial art studio which folded practically simultaneously with the ’29 crash, a circumstance which bade fair to cure our hero once and for all. But with a grim and sardonic chuckle, fate fingered him into the beginnings of the Metropolitan Ad Mat Service, a vineyard in which he toiled so assiduously that some of his efforts are still being cast into type metal for theatres in the more remote reaches of the globe. Followed some eight years as advertising art director for one of the west coast