Ballyhoo (Jun 1960)

Page scan 0001 from Ballyhoo

Record Details:

Title:
Ballyhoo
Date:
Jun 1960
Volume:
Time Out for Ticket Talk (Jun 1960, no date)
Leaf #:
0001
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.

Les Mitchell Capitol theatre St. Catharines JUNIOR FIRE DEPARTMENT CHILDREN'S PROMOTION To begin I would say that the idea for this series first came to me as we neared the end of a series of Elmer Safety Shows. I could see the many advantages of having these Community Service Children's Shows in my theatre and felt I should do what I could to keep that type of activity going when the Elmer series had finished. I first contacted the Fire Chief and explained the idea to him. He naturally was very happy to heve the opportunity se sell fire safety to the children and went right along, by forming a Committee of the Fire Prevention Officer, the Senior Platoon Chief and myself. After we had approached the newspaper and the radio station and were assured of their support, we called on the industries in the city and the district, they also supported us completcly in the project and we were under way. Through the $1,500.00 contributions that we received from sixteen industries, we were able to give the children free admission and guarantee the theatre a stated rental for each show that is held. As you can imagine, this system is quite satisfactory, because the boxoffice is not dependent on weather and other oppositions and the parents and the children like the free admission idea a great deal. On top of that, with free admission, the kids seem to have more money to leave at our candy counter and we run well over $100.00 in confection sales each morning. During the course of planning our opening, I contacted a very good friend of mine, vho happens to be known as Cap'n Andy and has one hour television show daily on CHCH-TV, Channel 11, in Hamilton. The ratings give the Cap a daily audience approaching 300,000, so it is fairly certain that he reaches most of the children in our area, as well as the rest of the station viewing area. I arranged with the Cap to set aside an occasional spot for St. Catharines