DeMille's King

Yes, Easter was a week ago, but I just got around to looking for ads for the silent Cecil DeMille classic King of Kings which I watched Easter morning. As with many ads of the silent era, these are word-heavy advertisements with limited use of images, though the ads typically became less wordy as the movies spread from the East and West coasts inward.

This ad from the Los Angeles Times (5/18/27) is for the Hollywood premiere of King of Kings, and also for the opening of the legendary Grauman's Chinese Theatre, with D.W. Griffith and Mary Pickford in attendance.

In Cincinnati, the film opened in October of '27 accompanied by a live orchestra, and being heralded as "not a movie release," i.e., not likely to show up in the smaller neighborhood movie houses anytime soon, all the more reason to head downtown for it.

A year later, it shows up in Phoenix, Arizona, with some photos this time. This was most likely the shorter version which DeMille prepared for wide release, 30 minutes shorter than the big city version.

Held over!

50 years ago this week (first weekend of April, 1970) in Oklahoma City, this ad with an interesting hook ran: These movies have been held over (presumably by what they used to call "popular demand") so they must be good!

Of the four, only MASH was a critical and commercial hit. Anne of the Thousand Days was a prestige hit, up for 10 Oscars (winning one) and winning several Golden Globes including best drama, but it was not a big box office draw. Marooned took in a fair amount of money but doesn't appear to have made back its production cost. The Adventurers, the only one of these I haven't seen, was a huge stink bomb. None of the others are particular favorites of mine--I didn't see the MASH movie until a few years after the MASH TV series premiered, and to me, the movie suffered.

Pandemic nostalgia begins

As the coronavirus continues and the country is on lockdown, I'm feeling more nostalgic than ever--and I usually feel pretty nostalgic. So I'm going to try and make one post a day: some of random movie ads, some of pop culture artifacts that mean something to me, photos from movies I've been watching at home, and anything else that helps me escape the current apocalyptic situation, which is so far both frightening (everything closed, jobs lost) and boring (no shuffling zombies in the streets yet). I will undoubtedly post several flashbacks to the summer of 1969 when I discovered top 40 radio. More about those circumstances in later posts. But first, a record from a little earlier.

We were visiting my grandmother in Cleveland in the summer of 1968 and one afternoon, I stumbled on what must have been an episode of American Bandstand which featured Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart performing "Alice Long (You're Still My Favorite Girlfriend)," a song which I discovered later was a follow-up to their previous top 10 hit "I Wonder What She's Doing Tonight." The two songs sound similar but at the time (I was 11 and wasn't into much music beyond the Beatles and the Monkees) I had never heard "Tonight." But I loved "Alice Long," and when I got back to Columbus, I bought the single. I'm pretty sure it's the first 45 I bought that had a picture sleeve. I don't have much else to say about it--when I mentioned it in a blog post here back in 2010, I said it was "wonderful bubbly 60s bubblegum" and any listener who had heard "Tonight" first would probably prefer that song. But Alice will always have a place in my bubblegum heart. The video below looks to  have been stretched for widescreen presentation, but the song is intact.