CineSavant Column
Hello!
We’re now in the roll-up days before Thanksgiving. The national news coverage makes us think California is a rain disaster area, but CineSavant Central is so far only getting moderate rain. So we’ll have to wait for an earthquake or another freak firestorm to put us back on the Threat Board. I hope readers back East in all the terrible weather WE see are doing okay.
Meanwhile, CineSavant Column items keep bouncing back, and in a fun way.
Author Tom Weaver followed up on the story about the 1958 The Fly that we posted last Saturday. It’s about an off-color trade ad for the movie, that we have repeat-posted again here on the left. ← You’ll likely want to enlarge these images to see them better.
As expected, Tom was on the story long ago, having touched on the 1958 trade ad when interviewing the film’s star David Hedison. The actor said that the original ad was a double-page spread in The Motion Picture Herald.
We were intrigued because the trade Ad made us wonder ‘wouldn’t anybody complain about that?’ Tom Weaver’s follow-up shows that apparently somebody did, that somebody being the head of the Motion Picture Association.
In the first of two additional clippings forwarded by Tom, Variety said on July 23 of 1958 that the original was first seen in a different trade paper. To quote Variety:
“Prodded by the Johnston office (the MPAA), 20th Fox changed the text of an ad for “The Fly” last week, but not before it had run in The Motion Picture Daily to a good deal of surprised trade comment.”
So somebody did think that ad offensive. The mini-article explains that the ad was used again, but with a less fun a less eye-opening wording.
Here’s the incontrovertible evidence! ‘Before’ and ‘After’ ads, and a mini-blurb about the first version that was “too much for the MPAA.”
So once again, the CineSavant Column can take its proud place at the head of American journalism.
And we’ve got room for an enthusiastic plug for a lavish new disc release.
Arrow Video’s fourth monster box of Hong Kong martial arts pictures goes fantastic, with 16 full features, all restored, all viewable in multiple languages and versions, and all appointed with expert extras.
The content gets very weird, what with fantasy spectacles filled with visual effects. I remember seeing titles like Super Inframan playing back when Los Angeles had hundreds of neighborhood movie theaters. I should think that the bulk of the movies in this collection will be new genre territory for a great many fans … the kind of fans that collected blurry, oddly scanned and poorly dubbed VHS tapes ‘back in the day.’
It’s a pricey item positioned to move as a Christmas disc … Arrow says that it will be released on December 9. I’m starting with the bonus disc with a docu on the Shaw Brothers … everything in it will likely be news to me.
Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson