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Talk about resistance to power, the irrepressible David J. Schow has circulated a link to a 40 year-old TV commercial, reposted last year.

‘Retro Recipes’ takes credit for an upscaled 4K remaster … it certainly plays better than various earlier YouTube posts. When new, this expensive production heralded a new era in corporate image advertsing.

Apple’s version of George Orwell’s Big Brother looks pretty close to the Big Brother visualized in the 1984 John Hurt version of  Nineteen-Eighty-Four. Don’t worry, no matter how terrible a political reality becomes, a nation can be saved by an athletic yuppie with a sledgehammer:

Then, our reliable web crawler Michael McQuarrie sends along a very good item suggestion, straight from the web …

… it’s the entire page at the Internet Archive that posts scanned movie pressbooks. The selection isn’t vast but it is interesting. Pressbooks are odd items. It’s fun to read the hyped dummy newspaper stories that no self-respecting editor would reprint. And then there are the suggestions for ballyhoo advertising, so many of which require free services, the abuse of theater staffers, or strike us as potentially dangerous.

And best of all is glomming the final pages to see the myriad posters, banners and other goodies that can be ordered …. for relative pennies. Imagine, a giant full-color 24-sheet for Hitchcock’s The Birds for just a few dollars. The dimensions are 108 x 246 inches … that’s 20.5 feet by 9 feet!

I’m an aquaintance of film writer, guitar collector and all-around great guy Jan Henderson, who as a teenager in the 1960s had an ‘in’ to order from National Screen Services … and ended up with a killer collection of horror paper from the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, including some classic Universal posters. I forget what wiped them out, a flood or a fire. I should re-tell the story of my raid on National Screen around 1972 … for another time, maybe.

Note: these images all ENLARGE. Wait ’til you see the price of a stone litho one-sheet poster for Son of Dracula. Here’s the URL go-to link for

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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Just when you thought westerns were ‘deader than a beaver hat,’ the Warner Archive Collection comes out with a big one: the WAC’s first 4K Ultra HD release will be the John Ford/John Wayne classic The Searchers, newly remastered and fresh from screenings where it was blown up to 70mm.

The release date is December 17; the official press release is here, Pilgrim. It’s offered in a 4K/BD combo or as just a Blu-ray. For people pre-ordering at Movie Zyng, I’m told this:

“Movie Zyng is offering a pre-order special that you can also share with your audience. The code DUKE used at checkout will yield a 10% discount on the 4k title when ordered by November 30th.”

CineSavant usually doesn’t go for sales promotions, but Allied Vaughn tells us this is partly a George Feltenstein product, and we don’t pass up an opportunity to tub-thump for George.

Aw, who am I fooling?  It’s naked self-interest:  if The Searchers sells well in 4K, The Wild Bunch would be a natural to follow.

Madness! Madness!

Halloween is over, but if you’re a masochist looking to wallow in the pain and dread of this last week, we have the nightmare site for you, ready and waiting.

I tell ya, Hieronymous Bosch is back, and H.P. Lovecraft’s Got Him!

It’s six minutes of impossibly macabre and disturbing ‘horror tableaux’ from the VAPE. His creations are B&W AI-generated mind-warpers that seem to be pulled from our darker subconscious. We previously linked to a pair of VAPE shudder-samplers. Some of the earlier nasty visions appear to be reprised in this laugh-a-minute picnic appalling cavalcade of horror.

We’ve chosen to reproduce a couple of the least brain-damaging images. The link IF YOU DARE is

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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This item circulated by Joe Dante is something you’ll want to zoom into, or ‘open in a new window’ that will show it full-sized. It’s an ad cooked up by none other than Forrest J. Ackerman. It appears to have been placed in ‘the trades’ sometime in 1958, around when Forry might have been prepping the debut of his magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland.

Ackerman was an enthusiast of Sci-fi — it is said that he coined that contraction — and a rabid collector of books and movie memorabilia. His main job was as a literary agent, an activity that included negotiating for authors and illustrators and finding odd jobs for fellow enthusiasts.

Ackerman heavily promoted artist and movie monster fabricator Paul Blaisdell for a number of years. He uses Blaisdell’s ‘Monsters of Distinction’ to also get attention for his ad. The achievements listed come with familiar names — Ib Melchior, Sol Lesser. He touts his representation of solid Sci-fi authors like Porges, von Vogt, Siodmak, but also can be seen promoting a couple of protégés, Martin Varno and Wyott Ordung.

The movie The Projected Man wouldn’t happen for ten years, while The Volcano Monsters is proof that Ib Melchior was indeed working to adapt the Japanese Godzilla Raids Again into an entire new movie. (Agent’s tip, Forry: spell your client’s name correctly.)

As an agent Forry seems to have at least a few irons in the fire. The promotional ads in trade papers like Variety ranged from pretty classy to really tacky, and Forry’s isn’t bad at all.

Contributor-advisor Gary Teetzel comes back with old Trade Paper clippings about a title that caught his interest. We reviewed it a few weeks back: Jack Holt and Fay Wray in  Black Moon.

A trip through the logs of the Motion Picture Herald found the usual publicity mentions, plus notes from exhibitors writing in to say how the title fared with their particular audience. Thus we read about business at the Bijou in places like Preston, Idaho and Redwood Falls, Minnesota.

The movie Black Moon depicts what threatens to become a black revolt on a Caribbean island. Only one article that alluded to the film’s chances in towns ‘sensitive to race issues’ showed up, from Detroit on September 15, 1934:

This next piece comes from the same paper, showing off a theater’s ‘front’ advertising. The Gainesville, Georgia illustration is missing, but we do get a photo of a display in Dallas. Theater manager Louis hired ‘a savage black gent’ as part of the voodoo hoodoo sales ballyhoo.

Here are four scattered entries in what Gary says was the Herald’s ‘What the Picture Did for Me’ column. Distributors likely pitched titles as if they were spun from gold, but when exhibitors felt cheated they could vent in the trades:

Over in Photoplay Gary found this full page item promoting the film with its star Fay Wray. “Aw, it’s King Kong’s friend with a dog and a cuddly puppy. Let’s go see Black Moon, Earl!”

You should be able to read all of these except the last, so here’s what it says: “Fay Wray conned her canine family into posing for this picture. The mother dog didn’t like the idea at all!  She’s heard too much talk among movie people about kidnapping threats and the advisability of protecting one’s children from publicity. But Fay reassured her. On the lot Miss Wray is hard at work now on Columbia’s Black Moon.”

Gary found a  Photoplay article that features a couple of the Black Moon costumes, and a  Lux Soap ad that also makes mention of Black Moon.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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Forget so-called ‘scary’ movies … the next day and maybe several days more are going to be nail-biters, depending on the breaks. Let’s hope for a peaceful democratic election and transfer of American political power. That’s my two bits for the day, Amen.

The CineSavant Column items today are good reading. Joe Dante and David J. Show forwarded links to these recent articles, each of which puts forth some big opinions and bold ideas.

The first item is a November 2 posting on Fast Company dot.com, written by filmmaker and actress Justine Bateman.  The title alone says what it’s about and raises our curiosity:

Bateman gets her message across efficiently, explaining how corporate culture has killed movies by turning entertainment into ‘content,’ and embracing technology that will allow marketable ‘content’ to be manufactured by computers. The short article ends not with more cries of doom, but the thought that something new and different will emerge from the entertainment void that will be created.

On a more positive note is an October 23 article on The Ringer by Abe Beame. Movie theaters are crashing everywhere because the corporate movie industry is embracing streaming, choking distributors and movie theaters out of the profit chain.

Rather than bemoan the falling enthusiasm for new product, Beame looks at recent trends and cites the growing popularity of repertory theaters and special screenings. He gives several anecdotal examples of creative ways that film societies, etc., are getting someone other than Marvel-addled teenagers out to the theaters. luring the cinema-literate hipster crowd that everyone thought had gone extinct… even here in too-cool-for-you Los Angeles.

Agree or not, the title has appeal for film enthusiasts, and any encouraging word is good news for us who like to cheer-lead for movies in general. You may not agree with the title of Beame’s article, but we like its positive ring:

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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Just a quick notice today, as we find ourselves in a state of max trepidation over next Tuesday’s election — we have to admit that we feel like Gert Fröbe, just above. Can sanity prevail?  We’re doing our best to be optimistic.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has made a disturbing announcement — they’ve laid off a number of specialists in motion picture preservation and library archive work. Although it mostly happens behind the scenes, preserving films is supposed to be one of the Academy’s key functions. Here is the news, as reported at  Variety,  The L.A. Times and  Deadline.

I guess that’s might happen when you sink mega-millions into a museum. It’s the kind of corporate move one expects from a conglomerate-owned movie studio. The Academy’s preservation staff has reportedly been gutted of both its leadership and its most experienced specialists. Photochemical film experts with the knowledge and judgment to do the job right are not expendable. Word is already circulating, calling for an intervention by Scorsese, Spielberg, et. al..

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson