Hello!

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