Ballyhoo (Jun 1960)

Record Details:

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

~3 fire safety. These presentations were made on our stage, by Martin Hurst, Deputy Fire Marshal of the Province of Ontario. We are also quite fortunate in that Prudhommes Garden Centre Theatre is located just outside St.Catharines and we were able during the summer to arrange visits by their stars, Miss Ann B. Davis, "Schultzy", Lee Marvin, etc. In our area, CHCH-TV got into the Junior Fire Department in a big way and supplied us with registration blanks, membership ecards and folders which we required. Our opening day was a hectic session on the main street. As I mentioned earlier we invited Cap'n Andy and the kids went all out on his arrival. He arrived at the theatre on one of the city aerial ladder trucks and was welcomed by the Mayor. He was then escorted down the aisle to the stage where he entertained the children with some stories and cartoons of the Fire Chief and his Officers. As you can see the first thing is to get going and then make the program as interesting as possible for the children. It is very important to work hard at the job,in spite of the fact that your expense has been guaranteed, because you will want to return to the heads of the industrial firms for more money for another series at a later date. You would be surprised just how much these people watch how these shows develop as compared to what was said to them on a former visit. You may have noticed that I have tried as much as possible to stay away from the "I" because this was a joint effort. Success was only possible because of the combined efforts of the Fire Department, the Newspaper, the Radio Station, the Television Station, many other interested persons and my wonderful staff. Complete support and assistance was always available from Mr. Jim Cameron, my District Manager, and Harrison Patte, my Booker. When you set up one of these shows, I can safely say you will get the same