Ads and Oddities #7

 

Ad/Odds: Winston-Salem as Show Town Supreme

Newspapers.com gifted us over Mother’s Day weekend with free access to their archive, opportunity to dig among microfilmed pages, reminder anew of what damage was done to precious print when libraries converted their lot to ugly photostat and junked original pages. Sad outcome for so much of what had survived but no longer does. I at least was able to sift Winston-Salem Journal pages for what might engage or bring back memory of showgoing in that hour-distant town. Winston was home to R.J. Reynolds Tobacco (get it? Winston and Salem cigarette brands), and you could smell the place from five miles out. I was regular hauled to a children’s dentist in Winston and afterward inveigled rides to attend special stuff at lavisher-than-Liberty theatres and a host of drive-ins. Display ads were a daily passion since we took the Winston-Salem Journal. What envy I felt for residents with access to the Carolina Theatre’s weekly kiddie shows, topic of inquiry whenever meeting anyone who’d grown up in W-S. Dan Austell managed the Carolina, he and I speaking several times long after his retirement from showman grind. Dan’s rival was the down street Winston Theatre, ads as often side-by-side to force choice among potential patronage. Here is 1960 for-instance, Psycho at the Winston and Portrait in Black at the Carolina, both to start Thursday, August 18, 1960. Two peas in a suspense pod these attractions were. Consider respective lure of both, Hitchcock as architect of Psycho, and surely talked about for sensation so far roused, Portrait in Black star powered and the Carolina’s ad looking frankly better. Imagine debate over which to see. Firm policy as applied by Hitchcock said no one seated after start of Psycho. Was this enforced at the Winston? Did management turn down a sell of multiple seats for a group in order to accommodate what surely seemed a silly rule? The Carolina meanwhile tried a similar dodge as in no admission during final ten minutes of Portrait in Black. Again, think of impatience where stopped at entry doors. As Hitchcock himself would have said, It’s Only a Movie, and remember that in those days, few cared when they showed up at a show, formula plots easy to divine within minutes of seating oneself. Meanwhile under the stars was a first run of The Lost World at the Winston-Salem Drive-In, and we could wonder why the dinosaur, or large lizard romp, didn’t rate solid roof play. Maybe it was fact the Winston and Carolina were the only premiere theatres W-S had at that time, which meant a lot of worthy bills ended up outdoors (for instance: Dr. No). Grindhouse presence deeper downtown was the Lincoln, Center, and Lafayette, three houses using old stuff and places I often dreamed of being.

Dan Austell was a hound for the old “Bravest Woman in Winston” gag. He had used it on behalf of Hammer’s Hound of the Baskervilles in 1959 (a yearly booking for Carolina kiddie shows afterward). Device was simple --- invite women to apply for a midnight sit, all alone to see The Haunted Palace, a latest Poe/Price out of AIP. Jim/Sam would surely have given Dan a ribbon for his initiative. WAIR radio co-conspired with the Carolina, spot calling for “nerves of steel … the courage of a lion.” How much courage did it need to sit 87 minutes and then collect ten dollars in cash? Miss Ida Voss, nurse, was game. Perhaps she could treat her own trauma for having watched The Haunted Palace. Date was Wednesday, November 13, 1963 at midnight (hope Ida, for hers and patients,’ sake had Nov. 14 off). She would sit in ABSOLUTE DARKNESS (with exit lights off? Don’t tell fire or emergency marshals). “Every era has its monsters” said Austell in ad copy wherein he mentions the Golem. Wow. Just how old was Dan? The Haunted Palace would enjoy a three-day run at the Carolina. It was the same for us at the Liberty. Any chiller staying that long was heady stuff. It was like a roadshow beside single Saturday berth as half of a double feature which was customary placement for genre stuff. In fact, the next two Poes, Red Death and Ligeia, got Saturday only treatment in my town, that a tip-off to the series slipping. Still and all, I regarded The Haunted Palace as perhaps the Greatest Motion Picture Ever Made for seeing it in ‘63, then again at our Starlight Drive-In come summer 1965. I sent around a petition in sixth grade for Col. Forehand to bring The Haunted Palace back, but no dice. Love persists however thanks to Blu-Ray access.

Here's a Winston-Salem mosaic, a show page for August 1, 1965 to parse with same eagle eye as applied near-sixty years ago. Where to begin amidst so much? First comes a smallest, the Carolina’s “Summer Vacation Movie Party” featuring the “Oldtime Comedy Classic” Utopia with Laurel and Hardy. This might have been selfsame 35mm print I ended up with in the mid-seventies. There surely was not more than one or two at the Charlotte exchange. Utopia needed all of help it could get from Glenn “Great” Scott of local radio notoriety, him for emcee duty and bingo wrangler plus host to the Teen-Beats Combo, local talent per customary. Seats were thirty-five cents and with that you got a free Dr. Pepper (never cared for the drink ... seemed to me like sucking acid out of a spent battery). Mary Poppins was having a first outdoor run at the Skyview, a family lure. So would be The Sound of Music with reserved seats and two-a-day, to begin August 11 at the Winston. My children’s choir group rode down one Saturday for that, me forced to forfeit War-Gods of the Deep running at the Liberty for that same and only afternoon. I just knew there’d never be another chance to see War-Gods of the Deep, and indeed there was not, at least in theatres. Operation Crossbow ceded to The Sound of Music at the Winston. Seems every war venture wanted to be another Guns of Navarone. This one got plaudits from neighbor town patrons, plus a theatre manager in Concord, NC who testified to its “pulse-pounding.” The Winston pounded to extent of refusing seats during a final ten minutes. Was this device getting tired by 1965? The Sons of Katie Elder gets first-run play at the Flamingo Drive-In. What made the Winston and Carolina pass on one so big as this? "A God-Fearing Mother Whose Four Sons All Turned Out To Be Gunfighters!!!” sounds spun by Flamingo management, and bravo to his enterprise. So many of a show world barely utilized pressbooks and were probably the better for it. Note State Fair as second feature to Beach Blanket Bingo at the Winston-Salem Drive-In, recalling Sam Arkoff’s observation that we’d not need “B” pictures again for fact that older “A’s” could serve as seconds, so few having gone to see them when they were new. Meaningful also was fact that State Fair would TV-premiere October 3, 1965 on ABC, a mere two months off.

A Mightiest (revived) Monster would turn out to be King Kong himself, thirty-eight years young when I experienced the 1933 classic in 35mm and uncut on Friday, April 2, 1971, the Carolina Theatre as host. As is obvious here, they really pushed the Janus reissue which had as primary selling point footage not seen since 30’s yore and shocking now to modern eyes. I saw Kong with a crowd for 5:00’s show, them all there to see something till then forbidden, or so ads promised. There were articles by the Journal’s resident film critic, Jim Shartzer, who promised new sensations way more than television or previous reissues had afforded us. I had seen King Kong on Channel 3-Charlotte in 1965, so was primed for a revisit in any case, plus benefit of a large screen in hopefully better quality than tube transmission allowed. I drove too fast down 421 so as not to miss RKO credits, wanting to verify they were intact and not replaced by Janus titles, or something worse. Such was this event that I stayed over with my law student brother (Wake Forest) so I could experience Kong a total of three times, one of the best cumulative viewing experiences I’d ever have. Clocking reaction was a kick, each time noting how crowds laughed when the Venture crew ran from the bronto attack on Skull Island. To me it seemed viewers were less jeering than seeking moment’s relief after intensity of the beast snacking on sailors in the water, some of that formerly censored. No doubt Kong was well enjoyed at all three shows I saw. Neat how the Carolina pasted the image of Kong beside Winston-Salem’s own Wachovia Building, 30 floors and the city’s tallest structure at that time (superseded later by the 34 story Wells Fargo Center). Janus Kong prints got play around NC, mostly larger towns, the Liberty passing perhaps for lack of interest plus fact Col. Forehand had used it in 1956, which he considered like yesterday. Having seen the Carolina’s Kong, I was more-less satiated, and would wait but two years before acquiring a neat 16mm bootleg off the Janus release.

W.C. Fields for midweek Carolina joy (May 13-14, 1970), You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man and The Bank Dick affording fans rare opportunity to see these ancients on auditoria terms. I caught a parent ride and drop-off out front to see the pair while elder business was attended, this how I saw time-to-time shows in W-S. Fields and other cult names run constant at colleges and college towns; in fact Wake Forest ran these same features roughly round same time the Carolina did, which must have miffed Dan Austell mightily. Also there was Channel 36 out of Charlotte using The Bank Dick the same week it played on paying basis to Carolina patronage, what there was of it. My matinee stay was sparsely attended, an outcome I expected. Cult stuff tended to crumble on NC screens. Remember a Bogart festival the Visulite in Charlotte tried putting on? Fields without a crowd confers but half an education, at least for knowing how he’d be received by modern viewership. I might as well have been watching at home. Still it was thrill to see Honest Man and Bank Dick in 35mm, both features new to me as stations I could pull in never used the Fields-Universals (some of Paramounts yes, but never the U’s). Latter-day marketing of Fields was afoot, a record album of his voice excerpts for instance, plus mainstream magazines mentioning him. To collect Fields on 8mm meant buying one or more of his Sennett shorts, and maybe that was as much of him as anyone needed. The Paramount features finally showed up as a syndicated group the same year as I saw these two at the Carolina, and one distant station, Channel 11 in Johnson City, Tennessee, actually used them on Sunday afternoons, a double feature each week and including not only Fields, but the Marx Bros. and Mae West output. Why care if reception was fairly faint? Reality of my situation was that nobody around town or at school had heard of W.C. Fields, save handful of old-timers barely recalling the Great Man since he died in 1946. Have we today gone back to that low level of Fields awareness?

Oh, my stars … The Birth of a Nation as a theatre attraction at the Winston Theatre, October 8-14, 1970. The Winston had gone to “Ultra-Vision” a couple years before, Barbarella I recall as its debut with the expanded screen. My cousin drove us down in ’68 to snore through 2001, but this time it was dear Mother that sacrificed her peaceful Sunday so I could share in D.W. Griffith’s spectacle. Might this have been moment to consider boarding school placement for me? Birth was distributed by Joseph Brenner. His was the shortened 1930 version with a recorded score. Dig these ads with the cast listed … Gish, Walthall, Mae Marsh, Wallace Reid. Was I dreaming or what? Ad copy is for the ages --- “Today’s young audience will find its mood varying from high camp to tense silence as the plot unfolds.” High camp? Never would have thunk it. And what of “laughter at Victorian romance and melodrama … quickly snuffed out by chases, rescues, battles, fights and sheer narrative drive.” If anything it would be The Birth of a Nation snuffed out at theatres; you’d think that was more/less achieved by 1970, which made this booking the more a stunner for me and undoubted others. The Winston-Salem Journal went to town on op/eds, letters to the editor, etc. during the week Birth ran. I sat the whole time not believing a 1915 feature in an Ultra-Vision theatre in year of Our Lord 1970. None so bizarre a moviegoing moment in my life since. This was in fact my first-time seeing Birth. Never having owned an 8mm print, it was all kinds of terrific to watch it this way, the show packing expected wallop. Suffice to say, The Birth of a Nation never turned up at any other NC theatres around that time, at least to my notice. Next Birth rendezvous would be come-across of an original souvenir book found at a Massachusetts antique shop in 1972. I figured this to be a rarest relic in the world till realizing some years later that many others saved such artifact to make the booklet somewhat common among collectibles from vanished day.