Monster Movie Exhibition

Happy Halloween cinema trick or treaters! Today we have three very special treats to offer up for your Halloween entertainment and edification. First up is a visit to the Greenbriar Picture Shows blog about a legendary horror double feature that swept the country, followed by an interview with Greenbriar's John McElwee, and then our Bijou Mini-Matinee Halloween Spookfest.

John McElwee is a lifetime crusader dedicated to preserving the history of classic movie exhibition on his website Greenbriar Picture Shows. We recommend bookmarking his site for a weekly visit. Two recent fascinating articles covered the 1938 re-release double feature of Frankenstein and Dracula. Click here for The Pair That Curled Your Hair and here for Part 2 Frankenstein/Dracula Forever.

During the Golden Age of Hollywood, movie exhibition involved much more than posters and trailers. Theater managers and film distribution companies ballyhooed the films, theater exteriors and lobbies in imaginative ways. This is nowhere more evident than in the rare ads, photos of huge crowds, monsters on the marquees and super-sized posters you will enjoy on your visit back to 1938.

We had a few questions for John about what spawned his interest in classic movie exhibition and perpetuates his passion:

Where do you get the fabulous newspaper ads, stills and photos that you treat us to every week at Greenbriar? For instance, where did you get the graphics for the Frankenstein/Dracula post?

I've collected press books, trade magazines, and theatre ads for going on fifty years. I was making scrapbooks in kindergarten. The most fascinating aspect of the picture business for me is how they were sold. Greenbriar's emphasis from the beginning has been on the exhibition aspect of movies. My collection is no great shakes in terms of value. It's mostly old ads and scraps of paper others discarded and I salvaged. My idea of a "prize" would more likely be a theatre page out of an old newspaper someone threw away.

Did you ever work in movie promotion?

Other than campus shows, no. In any case, I'd have only been happy promoting them prior to about 1966. After that, showmanship in the classic grassroots sense pretty much disappeared.

Do you recall when you first saw Frankenstein and Dracula?

These two I remember well, as both were much anticipated at that point in my life. Frankenstein was November 6, 1964 and Dracula March 5, 1965, both on Channel 3's Horror Theatre from Charlotte. I actually went back and verified those dates in old newspapers. That's how far gone I am!

When you were growing up, how many movies did you see every week?

It could run as many as seven or eight with our theatre changing bills three times a week and television running network and syndicated features seemingly non-stop. I read TV GUIDE with a microscope in those days. My parents had given me a subscription for my fifth birthday.

Do you recall the first film or films you ever saw in a theater?

The first theatrical I recall was The Shaggy Dog, which was Summer 1959. Beyond that, it was mostly Disney's for awhile, then various Italian strongmen, Three Stooge features, etc., until I ran across Konga in 1961, which was my happy introduction to horror/ sci-fi pics. Our only theatre in my North Carolina hometown was the Liberty (which I refer to often on Greenbriar). The competing Allen had burned up when I was eight. There were two drive-ins, but I couldn't get to those unless neighbors, my sister and her boyfriend, etc. took me. On one memorable occasion, my mother actually carried my sister, cousin, and I out to the Starlight Drive-In to see The Haunted Palace and Brides Of Dracula.


Did you watch lots of films on television while growing up?

Television was, of course, the only place to see older films in those days, so I watched mostly there, especially as I got older and my interests broadened out to all sorts of film. I was certainly raised with vintage cartoons, so plentiful on television that I'm sure I took them for granted. Sherlock Holmes, Abbott and Costello, and other features were prolific as well, though it didn't seem so at the time. I couldn't get enough of these, and monitored TV GUIDE so as never to miss them. The Three Stooges, for whatever reason, did not appeal to me then (although I like them better now). Laurel and Hardy, on the other hand, were a near obsession.

Did you collect 8mm movies as a child? Did you ever put on shows to your friends?

I collected 8mm from 1964 at the age of ten until 1972 when I switched to 16mm. It was a real novelty to be able to show movies to your friends. I even took my Blackhawk comedies to school and got credit for giving Chaplin and Buster Keaton programs in the classroom. 8mm collecting was expensive, though. Those Blackhawk bulletins were wish books for me, even if I could only manage a single short subject purchase in any given month. A great moment came in 1969 when I acquired a Dual 8 magnetic sound projector. Threading up my first talkie, Brats with Laurel and Hardy, was quite the event. Here was something I'd only seen on television up to that time, and now I could watch it whenever I pleased.

Did you ever attend a Halloween horror show in a theater yourself?

I wish! The only Halloween shows I ever got to attend were those I put on myself. Stage events of that sort were pretty much played out in my area by the time I started keeping up with horror films around 1963. Chillers from the 30's and 40's were gone as well, having been released to television. Oh, to have been born ten or twenty years earlier and experienced that Golden Age of live spook shows and Universal horrors in theatres! Ads I've run across in old newspapers are so mouth-watering. Imagine an all-night marathon of original Frankenstein and Mummy pictures. Theatres continued booking these into the late fifties. You could still go see Karloff and Lugosi classics on a Saturday morning twenty to twenty-five years after they were first released. The Realart reissues of the Universal horror films kept them in circulation for a very long time.
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We thank John McElwee for helping keep movie exhibition alive and accessible. Here is a clip from the trailer used in the Realart Pictures re-release of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man followed by a Bijou Halloween Spooktacular Mini-Matinee:

Mini-Matinee #42 – A Bijou Halloween Spookfest

Frankenstein and Wolf Man were mere appetizers to the banquet of horror shorts that follow in our Bijou Halloween Mini-Matinee. Click here to enter the Bijou Mini-Matinee Theater on YouTube to enjoy the show. NOW PLAYING:

THE MAD DOCTOR (1933)
It would be hard to find a better Halloween cartoon than this vintage Walt Disney Mickey Mouse classic. The influence of the early Universal horror films like Frankenstein is evident in this frantic and frightening animated adventure. The Mad Doctor might as well be Frankenstein considering what he tries to do to poor Pluto. Skeleton gags abound.

FORTIES HORROR TRAILERS (1940s)
Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney, Jr. and Peter Lorre star in a trio of horror trailers from the 1940s. The Devil Commands (1041) trailer stars Boris Karloff as a different kind of mad scientist - one with a passion for dissecting the mind of his dead wife, rather than her body. Next, Lon Chaney, sans facial hair, stars in the trailer for 1944’s Weird Woman, a supernatural thriller based on the popular "Inner Sanctum" radio series. Tyrant Peter Lorre creeps us out as a cruel torturer in charge of a penal colony in this trailer for Island of Doomed Men (1940)

DEVILED HAMS (1936)
A sizzling musical short set in Hades, with vaudeville crooner Gus Van holding court as Satan, ruler of the nether world. Those on trial must prove themselves thru their music. Dancers Toy and Wing do some out of this world “toe” dancing to big band jazz. Erskine Hawkins and his band blend with Gus Van’s warbling to heat up the satirically sinful shenanigans. From Season Five of the original Matinee at the Bijou PBS series.

COBWEB HOTEL (1936)
The “hotel” is actually a spider’s web in which a sadistic host spider entertains unsuspecting guest flies. This surprisingly violent and sadistic Fleischer Color Classic was featured during Season Four of the original Matinee at the Bijou series on PBS.


HAMMER HORROR TRAILERS (1959-60)
A trio of classic British horror trailers from the Hammer Films. First up is The Mummy (1959). Christopher Lee is Mummy Kharis, and Peter Cushing the British Archaeologist who exhumes the ill-tempered remains. Next, Christopher Lee returns, this time as Dracula in Horror of Dracula (1958) and Peter Cushing returns as Dr. Van Helsing. Hammer had to change the U.S. release title from Dracula to Horror of Dracula to avoid confusion with Realart’s continuing re-release of the original Dracula and other famous 1930s Universal horror classics. Then Peter Cushing returns as Van Helsing in The Brides of Dracula (1960), Hammer’s overtly sexy interpretation of the Dracula myth that may very well have influenced the work of Anne Rice.

Brother Can You Spare a Dime? Going to the Movies During the Great Depression

Faithful readers may recall “Before There Was Prozac”, a wonderful reminiscence by a new contributor, Marianne Richardson. Below, Marianne’s first original contribution to the Bijou Blog, in which she examines the role the movies played during the Great Depression, through the lens of some very personal family recollections.

“Brother can you spare a dime?” We all know the images the phrase conjures: breadlines, the Forgotten Man, down and out and unemployed in 1930s America. Americans needed help and hope, an antidote to the malaise and uncertainty of this Great Depression – and Hollywood gave it to them. The one bright spot of the economic crisis: the cost of a movie ticket dropped from a quarter to a dime.

One might think that in such tough economic times people viewed spending money on the movies as throwing it away. Yet, when you talk to people who lived through the Depression, that’s not the case. When there was a theater they could physically get to, people went every week – if they could get that dime. My great-grandmother Grano was very soft-hearted and wanted to help people. When a neighbor complained about having no food for her family, Grano gave her $2. But Grano was not pleased when she found out the woman used part of the money to take her family to the movies. My Grandma and I could understand Grano’s indignation, but we could also sympathize with the neighbor. As my father put it: “Movies were an escape to a world where people would have loved to have been to, but couldn’t.”

When I asked Grandma what it was like seeing the movies during the Depression, she didn’t even wait for me to get the question out. “It was great! Getting a break – if you could find a dime – it was wonderful!” She lived in Wooster, OH, and the Schine’s Wooster Theater was an art-deco palace. She was luckier than many, because both her parents had jobs. “Grano would give my sister and me the money [for movies], but many times her brother Harold would give me a dime. I'm sure there were other ways I got the money. A dime at that time was big money. [We didn’t have] money for candy or popcorn, [but we] would stay to see the movie twice.”

For some the dime was harder to come by. My mother’s father, Grandpuppy, earned it by working in the family’s garden. When it started to produce, he’d load everything into a wagon and walk along the street, selling beans and peas for 5 cents a quart, and radishes and carrots for 5 cents a bunch. He split what he earned with his sisters, who helped him. “Ma banked the money for us. One time I had $3 in the bank – thought I was a millionaire.” He’d mow “absolute huge” yards with a push blade lawnmower for 50 cents and take an extra turn at the dishes to get a dime for the movies.

In addition to the main theater in Fowlerville, MI, Grandpuppy recalls that when he was about 12 or 14 years old, a man named Abbot, along with some of the town merchants, started showing cowboy films on the side of a downtown building – for free. “I don’t know why he done it. I guess maybe ‘cause he could.” Eventually they rented the inside of a building, and for a dime you could watch cowboy movies “to your heart’s content.” At the main theater Grandpuppy saw newsreels, short comedy sketches, and lots of different cowboy features and serials.

Westerns were very popular Depression fare in all forms of entertainment. Gene Autry and Roy Rogers were in the movies, and the Lone Ranger and Tom Mix were on the radio. Every one of my grandparents remembers seeing countless cowboy pictures. “They were the only kind they had on Saturday when we went to double features,” Grandma recalled, and she loved them. “After school, Hattie and I would play Cowboys. She’d be Tom Mix and I’d be somebody else, and we’d make our feet go like horses, like we thought horses’ feet would sound.”

The cowboy movies were Grandpuppy’s favorites, but of course, there were more than just Westerns. Grandma was dazzled by the glamour of Busby Berkley musicals, but she didn’t have a favorite – “I liked ‘em all. If it was a movie, I liked it.” The excitement of the Tarzan films thrilled her, but she revealed: “Of course, I couldn’t watch them all the way through, then. I can barely watch them now. Too scary! I mean, you know when they put a guy between two trees it isn’t real, but they left it to your imagination.” (She’s referring to the memorably gruesome scene from Tarzan Escapes (1936), which she saw when she was about 12 years old.)

Going to the movies during the Depression was about more than just the films – it was the act of going out on the town. For Grandpuppy, the best part of the movies was spending an entire afternoon and evening with friends. A sack of peanuts cost a penny, and after the movies, he and his friends would share the peanuts and walk up and down Grand River Avenue, just looking in the windows of the stores and watching the people. Grandma went to the movies with her older sister or friends, and on the day when the movies were changed to the new week, they would hang around the lobby to ask for the old pictures and posters, which Grandma hung all over her bedroom. Grandma had a unique hobby: collecting photos of Doris Davenport, because they shared the same name (Davenport was a Goldwyn Girl at the same time as Lucille Ball, but she only made seven films from 1934-40. I have no idea how Grandma found photos of such a little-known actress, but she did).


Though the movies were incredibly popular, theaters still faced tough times, and as many as one-third had closed by 1933. In addition to lowering admission, theater owners introduced “Bank Nights” to lure customers in. Grandpuppy remembers that between the theater and the merchants of Fowlerville, if you spent a certain amount of money, you’d get a ticket to enter the Wednesday night drawings when they gave away prizes and cash. One night he won $3. “I went into the corner store and bought shoes. Had change left… maybe a dollar? I turned right around and bough me some— whaddaya call ‘em, short pants, with the elastic in the knees? [knickers] Them were my Sunday school clothes.” In Wooster Bank Nights were on Thursdays, and they did the drawings using movie tickets, sometimes giving away as much as $300. “That place was packed,” says Grandma. “People you knew didn’t have the money to afford a ticket. People saved their tickets and used them from week to week.” I wondered what would have happened if two people had the same number on their ticket, but Grandma didn’t know.

Perhaps for my grandparents the movies were a kind of immunization against dwelling too much on other memories of Depression-era childhood: Grandpuppy worked hard at so many odd jobs because he was the only male breadwinner for his mother and four sisters after his father left; Grandma and her sister walked to and from school barefoot on the sidewalks because “it was the Depression. We saved our shoes for ‘good.’” The 1930s were a difficult and uncertain time for millions of Americans, but what my Grandparents enjoy remembering is that, for a moment, “If you could pony up a dime, you were in a different world.”

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Here is a clip from Gold Diggers of 1933, a Busby Berkeley musical that epitomizes the kind of escapist fare produced by Hollywood during The Great Depression. Marianne recommends these entertaining examples as well: 42nd Street (1933) It Happened One Night (1934) The Thin Man (1934) Flying Down to Rio (1933) The Public Enemy (1931) Tarzan the Ape Man (1932) The Red Rider (1934) Kid Millions (1934).

Great thanks to berkeleysgal for sharing this great clip with the world. Ginger Rogers’ pig Latin version of You’re in the Money is priceless. If it whets your appetite for more, Turner Classic Movies offers The Busby Berkeley Collection, a fantastic 6-disc DVD that includes this and five other great Busby Berkeley musicals.

RICHARD NEY - From Hollywood Babylon to Wall Street Jungle

Actor Richard Ney tried to warn us about the shortfalls of stock short-selling when he abandoned a 25 year Hollywood career to become a best-selling author of books critical of Wall Street obfuscation and greed.

Ney made his screen debut as Greer Garson’s son in William Wyler’s 1942 wartime drama Mrs. Miniver, which garnered six Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Actress (Garson). In 1943, Richard Ney married Greer Garson, despite being at least ten years her junior. Their troubled marriage lasted until they divorced in 1947. The high esteem American filmgoers held for screen icon Garson, combined with the negative publicity surrounding their stormy divorce, put a damper on Ney’s hopes for a successful career in movies.

Despite a handful of good performances in films like The Late George Apley (1947), Ivy (1947) Joan of Arc (1948), The Fan (1949) and several lesser films, Ney found himself relegated to featured roles in trivial films like Babes in Bagdad (1952), a horrid Arabian Nights rip-off which co-starred Gypsy Rose Lee, and Premature Burial (1962) from B-movie king Roger Corman.

Like other fading film actors, Ney began accepting roles in 1950s television shows such as Studio One, Kraft Television Theater, General Electric Theater, The Millionaire, Peter Gunn and Have Gun, Will Travel.

In the early 1960s, Ney began transitioning out of the film and TV entertainment business and into something else altogether. Having received an economics and public finance degree from Columbia University in New York, he opted to move into the financial world. But instead of just being a financial consultant or market advisor, Ney started writing about Wall Street, achieving national notoriety for accurately predicting the 1962 stock market crash.

In 1965, Ney was interviewed by The New York Times, and was quoted as saying that the stock market system was composed of “incredible mechanisms for legalized larceny.” He went on to say, “The average investor in the market is a blind man crossing the street. He can’t compete with professionals.”

In spite of his fervent criticism of Wall Street, Ney was always an avowed capitalist and drove a Rolls-Royce with WAKE UP displayed on the license plates. A frequently circulated quote attributed to Ney is: “Money is the sixth sense that makes it possible to enjoy the other five.”

Then in 1970, Ney started writing books about Wall Street. His first was titled “The Wall Street Jungle.” It described in clinical detail how the stock market really worked, particularly on the inside. The financial establishment did not welcome Ney’s analyses. His second book, published in 1974, was “The Wall Street Gang,” another expose that peered even more mercilessly into the inner workings of Wall Street and the impact and manipulations of its “specialists” and “market makers.”

Reportedly, The New York Times refused to review Ney’s books, and a number of sources claim he was one of only two people banned from appearing on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. (The other was supposedly Ralph Nader) However, upon the release of “The Wall Street Jungle,” a Los Angeles Times columnist praised Ney’s writing as “lean, lucid, delivered with the zeal and pungency of a born muckraker.”

In 1975, Ney published his third book with the longish title “Making it in the Market: Richard Ney’s Low-Risk System for Stock Market Investors.” All of his books are now out of print, although a quick perusal at Amazon.com found they’re all available used, from next-to-nothing to prices nearing $200 for collectibles. Ney also published an investment newsletter from 1976 to 1999 titled “The Ney Report.”

Ney died in 2004. Inevitably his film career and marriage to Greer Garson were the first items mentioned in his obituaries. But his later career was not forgotten. In the Washington Post obit, Ney was quoted as saying, “Hidden behind the facade of pompous jargon and noble affections, there is more sheer larceny per square foot on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange than any place else in the world.” Strong words indeed.

Given what’s been happening on Wall Street in recent weeks, one wonders whether, if he were still alive today, Richard Ney would be justified in winking from behind the wheel of his Rolls-Royce and saying, “I told you so.”

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Here you can enjoy the MGM theatrical trailer for Mrs. Miniver, along with a brief scene between Richard Ney and Teresa Wright. The complete, unedited version of Mrs. Miniver is available from Turner Classic Movies. Great thanks to Jeff Carrier at CinemaStarPhotos for providing the photo of Richard Ney and Greer Garson.

Aesop's Film Fables

This week we pay homage to the wildly imaginative Aesop’s Fables series of vintage cartoons. These inspired animated treasures often feature a rapid fire series of nonsensical non-sequitur gags, reminiscent of the animation sequences in the Monty Python Flying Circus classic TV shows.

Thunderbean Animation wunderkind Steve Stanchfield has generously permitted us to share with you some fascinating examples from Thunderbean’s eccentric and vastly amusing Aesop’s Fables DVD collection. Steve, together with his creative sidekicks Chris Buchman and Rex Schneider, have produced a magnificently realized compilation of some of the best cartoons in the Aesop's Fables series.

But before we watch the cartoons, we can’t think of a better way to set the stage than by reprinting, with permission, Chris Buchman’s expert and entertaining commentary on the subject.

An Aesop’s Fables Primer
by Chris Buchman

Aesop’s Film Fables animated cartoons are loved by fans who accept them for the pleasant, oft-times, off-the-wall, diversions they are. They are loathed by critics who dismiss them as primitive efforts unable to meet the standards of the Disney polish – a comparison of apples and oranges if ever there was one, since the Disney polish was to come at another time. During the Aesop’s Fables period (1921-1933), Disney cartoons were in a similar state of primitive exuberance.

Animated cartoons, of course, don’t have to be polished; they don’t need to display a refinement of the artist’s and animator’s skills; possess strong characters, or even a coherent story line, to be thoroughly entertaining.

The Aesop’s Fables series, initiated by pioneer animator Paul Terry in 1921, proved a tremendous success from the start, and its continuing popularity is owing to the imaginativeness of Terry and his animators whose free-wheeling style, and sometimes surrealistic brilliance, anticipated the celebrated work of Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, and Max Fleischer.

For added punch, each cartoon concluded with an Aesopian moral, though it is doubtful Aesop ever said, "Many a true word is spoken through false teeth.”

It matters not that the Fables bear little resemblance to the tales of the ancient philosopher-storyteller. They remain a curious lot from a different world inhabited by mice, farm animals, bugs, flies, spiders, jungle creatures, and even dinosaurs, with occasional appearances by Terry’s own Farmer Alfalfa, and a playful, sometimes protagonist, black pussy named Henry.

The Fables boast no super stars – just a stock company of inviting characters made delightfully expressive, frequently lovable, and irresistibly amusing by the animators.

One is easily provoked to giggling at the sight of petite Dame Hippo in tights holding a tiny umbrella, delicately pressing a finger against her one snaggled tooth, skipping merrily along, blushing coyly; or a big fat hairy spider, lusting after an innocent babe in the wood, gruesomely licking his chops; or a pair of love-smitten mice kissing passionately; or a chorus-line of amorphous fowl dancing themselves into graves.

With the arrival of ‘talkies’ in 1928, Amedee Van Beuren, who had produced the Fables series since its inception, assumed ownership and announced that all future pictures would be produced in sound with the remaining silents already completed to be accompanied by music and sound effects for release. Terry, whether averse to making sound cartoons or in conflict with Van Beuren, departed the company in 1929.

The first Aesop’s Sound Fables released, “Dinner Time” debuted at New York’s Mark-Strand Theatre on September 1st, 1928, rather significantly, a good two months before Disney’s “Steamboat Willie” (generally regarded as the first sound cartoon), made its bow at the Colony Theatre on November 18th.

The series eventually dropped the Aesop’s morals, introduced Cubby Bear and Tom and Jerry, who continued in their own respective series after the Aesop Fables title was abandoned in 1933, by which time over 500 silent and sound Fables had been produced.

The Aesop’s Sound Fables, like Fleischer’s Talkartoons, are outlandish, surreal (both adept at conjuring up grotesqueries), adult, and funny. They are supported by invigorating scores to set the adrenalin flowing and the feet to tapping.

The Aesop’s Fables have been called many things: wonderful, crude, vulgar, primitive, and inconsequential!

They are wonderful, crude, and vulgar; and it’s their sometimes primitive quality that makes them all the more appealing.

But they are hardly inconsequential, and the proof is in the viewing! Enjoy.

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Here is Gypped in Egypt, a wild, weird, wacky and wonderful (and those are just the "w"s) Aesop's Fables cartoon.



Mini-Matinee #41 - Aesop's Film Fables

And for your further amusement and edification, we present this and four more entertaining examples in our Bijou Mini-Matinee Theater on YouTube. Read the film descriptions below, and click here to enter the theater (or click the link under the marquee on the top left).

GYPPED IN EGYPT (1930)
Spooks, skeletons, sarcophagus-cum-pianoforte-playing mummies, dancing Egyptian hieroglyphics, and a quartet of singing, drunken turtles are featured players in this wild Aesop's Fables classic cartoon. The main characters here, Waffles the Cat & Don the Dog, would soon morph into the original Tom & Jerry human characters.

THE FARMERETTE (1932)
A buxom vamp not unlike Betty Boop, voiced by Bonnie Poe (one of Betty's voices), is hired by a failing farmer to turn business around in this Aesop's Fables cartoon. Her rendition of Sophie Tucker's famous hit 'Some of These Days' is a hoot and performed on the keyboard by maestro Gene Rodemich himself.

A ROMEO ROBIN (1930)

Dancing grotesqueries, surreal, nightmarish doings, a dash of black, brutal humor, a prancing gay goose, and a bizarre feline finale all combine in this wild Aesop's Fable cartoon.

HOT TAMALE (1930)

In the anything goes, why not, and to hell with the censor, category is this Aesop's Fable cartoon HOT TAMALE (1930) with one-a-minute gags for grown-up kiddies who like wooden horses almost as large as adobe huts, singing troubadors, and passion, pulsating, schmooching mice. A cartoon that other studios would love to have made but dared not to.

THE CAT’S CANARY (1932)

This delightful Aesops Fable was featured on the original PBS Matinee at the Bijou series. A cat (that looks very much like Felix) catches and eats a bird, which proves a gastronomical mistake leading to catastrophe when cat begins singing like a performance by five cool cats singing and dancing on a fence. bird. This attracts other birds, of course, leading to a hilarious

If you enjoyed these Aesop's Fables cartoons and would like to discover other rare cartoon treats, Thunderbean Animation has produced a variety of other great cartoon collections you can read about here.

Movie Poster Paradise

All things considered, the most comprehensive and informative movie poster site on the internet today is L.A.M.P. - which is an acronym for “Learn About Movie Posters.” Exploring this site is a mesmerizing experience for movie fans because in addition to showcasing American movie posters for inspection and sale, there are also international versions, poster auctions, top selling posters, tips on collecting, guidelines for determining the market value of posters in your own collection, information on how to preserve posters, a newsletter and countless features on every facet of the poster hobby and business.

Collectors and researchers will appreciate how the search options extend beyond the usual alphabetical and “by dealer” categories to include searches by poster year, type, size, country and artist. The LAMP site itself is a growing database of 60,000 movie posters currently for sale, but it’s also a portal to 30 associated movie poster sites around the world with over 4 million posters in stock and available for sale.

An “Introduction to International Movie Posters” section provides a valuable primer for learning how to navigate the otherwise intimidating global movie poster marketplace. And by purchasing from authorized LAMP Dealers, customers get a 100% money back guarantee and the satisfaction they are dealing with some of the most reputable dealers in the business. For visits and transactions on international poster sites, LAMP provides convenient “world time clock” and even a “world currency exchange” section.

Some collectors prefer the thrill of the auction and the bidding process to try to get a desired movie poster cheaper. LAMP provides links to two dozen recommended online auction dealers and offers a primer with warnings and tips for avoiding the potential pitfalls in experiencing a safe and successful transaction. For example, a novice might unknowingly overpay for an original Gone With the Wind poster knowing only that the film was released in 1939. LAMP offers this valuable insight on that particular film:

Not all original one-sheets for a particular movie, such as Gone With the Wind, are valued equally. In this case, Gone With the Wind, which was initially released in 1939, was re-released to theatres in 1940, 1941, 1947, 1953, 1954, 1961, 1967, 1968, 1970, 1974, 1980 and 1998. Each time it was released, the studios issued newer versions of the movie poster and related paper items. All of these issues are ORIGINALS and are legitimate movie art, but their value as collectables differ with each issue. In this case, the earlier releases are much more collectable and consequently more valuable than the later releases. The year of the release of the "paper" and not the initial release of the movie is the key factor and should be considered when assessing a poster’s collectability and value.

On the LAMP home page you will find links to daily and weekly online poster auctions. Currently the Tuesday auction ending 10/7 contains 253 Japanese posters, while the Thursday auction ending 10/9 has 565 American insert posters.

One interesting section lists posters that have sold for large amounts, and you can click to look at the poster and what it sold for. One fascinating factoid answers the question “What is the most expensive movie poster in the world?” The answer is the silent 1927 film Metropolis, which was also one of the most expensive silent films ever made. In 2005, a California collector bought 1 of 4 remaining copies for a record setting $690,000.

The LAMP site provides information and pays homage to the many unheralded artists around the world who create and produce movie posters: Without sound or movement, a movie poster must attract the viewers’ attention, and somehow portray the whole spirit of the movie at a moment’s glance. A great deal of the success or failure of the film rests on the movie poster artists' ability to entice the viewer to want to see the film.

LAMP currently has over 1500 titles linked from their archive to IMDB (the Internet Movie Data Base), and is continually adding more.

Bijou salutes this ambitious site and recommends a visit. (For what its worth we have no financial affiliation with LAMP, we just like to take every opportunity to promote people and businesses involved in preserving and perpetuating our classic movie heritage)


LAMP is a portal to a movie poster paradise populated with awesome movie art and hard-to-find information for collectors, hobbyists and those who love movies. The enormous collection of imagery and information available on this site is testimony to the continuing success of LAMP’s stated mission: “A little bigger, a little better each day - saving the past for the future.”