Spun Off Greenbriar Book, Showmen, Sell It Hot #1

 

Showmen: Back to Oz, Ads That Winked, Ramon Rouses, and Iced Air Meets Vaudeville

THE WIZARD OF OZ in 1949 --- 1949 is understood to be when The Wizard of Oz went finally into profit. The “Masterpiece Reprint” as tendered by Metro collected one million in domestic rentals, $787,000 in foreign rentals, and posted $1.1 million in worldwide profit. Expense included a fresh campaign and prints, ads spun around current doings of the star cast now bigger stars than ten years before, Ray Bolger, Bert Lahr, and Jack Haley active and distinct marquee assets along with “never better” Judy Garland nearing end of her MGM employment. The Masterpiece Reprints were initiated after WWII to cover what otherwise might be product shortage for Leo, fulfill requests for certain oldies, and hopefully secure first-run money for the best of them. MGM sold these like new releases, terms no different from features fresh out of labs. The Wizard of Oz had lost money in 1939 but would not now. The million gain suggested an evergreen in the making, confirmation being a 1955 encore on ersatz “wide screens,” response again rosy to tune of $448K in domestic rentals, $483K foreign, and $577K in profit columns. Lease to CBS for a single broadcast the following year plus option for more suggested library stock could thrive on networks, one executive however reminding colleagues that there was only one Wizard of Oz, and don’t expect others to perform so well. Right he was, otherwise we might have had Meet Me in St. Louis annually along with any number of MGM musicals on a same basis, but again, and understood by all, there was no place like Oz.

Back for 1955 Dates, This Time on Ersatz Wide Screens

The Wizard of Oz has tumbled from specialness it had. What was yearly event on networks would become periodic filler on TCM. Theatrical saw Oz through a first half of seventies placement alongside whatever else might appeal to youngsters as part of a series that was MGM Children’s Matinee. Prints were new, if not so vibrant on Eastman stock, this mattering less to viewers many of which had for years been seeing Oz in black-and-white at home. Home video by the late seventies allowed fans to record The Wizard of Oz and watch endless from there, MGM/UA obliged to if possible improve image and sound so they could offer something special on cassette to diehards. “Restoration” became a byword, Oz a precious pearl to polish and keep on polishing. They’d even revive the old Technicolor dye-transfer process for a nineties reissue, anything to suggest something like we’d not seen before. A more recent wild card was The Wizard of Oz in 3-D, surprisingly good at least to mine eyes, Oz an ideal subject for depth per rich foregrounds in most every scene, compositions circa 1939 seeming to look toward three-dimension future. One could watch Oz in 3-D and not go back to Kansas again, Warners arguing against that with yet further enhance that is 4K. Where now possible to lay depth and clarity like this to any title, how about King Kong, The Adventures of Robin Hood, any of a hundred we could name at random? I notice even The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari available on 4K from Kino. Where indeed do we go from here?

HER HIGHNESS AND THE BELLBOY (1945) --- Faint cause to recall this, unless Lamarr is one’s dish, or comedy less funny but typical of time when MGM mostly bungled at the genre. So why mention Her Highness and the Bellboy? I say for ways it was sold, one here from hundreds offered in 1945. Technique was varied as theatres using a same attraction, no two ways a same. Management had to learn their audience and how it was likeliest to jump. Her Highness and the Bellboy was Hedy Lamarr and little else, ongoing bane of ordinary Metro product dependent on stars to prop formula few would care about otherwise. Lamarr was for sex but they couldn’t all be White Cargo, her acting as in H.M. Pulham Esq. no arrow toward future things. She’d stay statuary or exotic as in forbiddingly so. Lamarr as “Tondelayo” or Robert Taylor’s ill-advised consort in Lady of the Tropics lured respective men to doom, otherness baked in thanks to Lamarr’s otherworld beauty and accent to further a distance. To do comedy saw her still remote as a Princess thawed by Robert Walker’s Bellboy who translates slang and jive-talks for her as cameras caress. To sell meant to suggest, not what an audience would get, but what they wished they could get. Chicago’s Apollo Theatre teases with time-honed art of stars winking at what turns out to be nothing at all. Peruse of myriad ads from this period sees the device in common, if commonplace, use. Idea was to imply coupling to follow Hedy’s “Royal Command to Love,” Bob bashful, “… but could he give room service!” Anyone who regularly went to movies knew winks and saucy asides meant no more than they would in humdrum real life, but hope sprang eternal that perhaps this time things would be different. At least laughs might compensate for empty promise of ads. Her Highness and the Bellboy doubled its negative cost in US rentals alone, plus foreign, to generate $916K in profit. Beware Bob as role model, however, “Hey, Angel Puss! Hey Toots! Let’s Smooch!” likelier in real life to provoke a punch in the snoot.

PRIVATE NUMBER and RAMON NOVARRO --- What would our perception of Ramon Novarro have been in 1936? I mean seeing him live on the Chicago stage singing and dancing with his own “pretentious” (why that word?) revue cast, including song-and-dance sister Carmen Novarro. Here was Ben-Hur himself live! Novarro wanted to sing more than act. He built a theatre, in fact an outbuilding adjunct to his house, where he’d perform for friends and show movies. MGM preferred Novarro romantic, but his was more a specialized and non-formulaic appeal. He’d last on stages so long as there were those who’d remember him from movies. Latter-day Metro hired him to play Mexican grandees, RKO having a spot for him as police investigating R. Mitchum in The Big Steal. He even turned up years later on a Wild, Wild West episode, which I looked at and thought Isn’t that Ben-Hur from fotos in Brownlow’s The Parade’s Gone By book? Novarro has Roy Smeck as music support for the ’36 Chicago engagement, Smeck familiar for being among first Vitaphone recitals, so good with guitar that manufacturers named a model after him. Smeck laid the instrument on his lap and plucked same sitting down, his and other old Vitaphones where great performing is at. Feature-in-support on Chicago occasion was Private Number, which Greenbriar visited before. Note how Chicago misinforms on it. “Ardent … unquenchable … dangerous!” One thing to lie, but why so forcefully? “Backstairs love” implies acts explicit, 1936 a least likely of years for that. A then-public understood economic imperative to exaggerate. Robert Taylor and Loretta Young promised nothing apart from clinch piled upon clinch, him a “millionaire’s son” and her “common clay.” Enough said it seems, but Private Number needed more than those 80 minutes as fair exchange for admissions, thus a Ramon Novarro or in smaller situations, a co-feature or oodles of shorts to make dimes please like dollars.

NOW OR NEVER plus VAUDEVILLE --- Not sure where this particular Majestic Theatre was located, but it’s sure “Iced Air” was the sell, theirs “The coolest spot in town!” This was 1921, early for air conditioning as we’d know it, 1925 occasion for a first installation at the Rivoli Theatre in Times Square. Efforts prior to that amounted to electric fans, these often blown through frozen blocks to achieve “iced air” effect, ersatz AC better than swelter in summer and often houses closed when heat was severest. The Majestic was “Big Time Vaudeville” plus “First Run Feature Pictures,” Now or Never a “feature” for purpose of placement at top of that week’s program, “funny, bespeckled grinning laugh-maker” that was Harold Lloyd, a half hour of him basis for fifteen, thirty-five, fifty cent admissions, depending on time of day and age of patrons. Nola St. Claire is among distant past that is vaudeville, no movies using her it seems, nor Wiki to mark her coming or eventual going. There are those who intimately know vaudeville long gone out with tide, but I’m not among them. Suffice that Nola led the ensemble that was ventriloquism, a “humorous trickster sawing a lemon in half,” which raises query if lemons were harder to halve in 1921, Sherrie Mathews with “Personality Plus” and turning out to be a man, in fact a man who died selfsame year he appeared at the Majestic. Hazel Moran works here with lariats, was known too for “a running fire of chatter.” Hazel claimed to be the only woman spinning eighty-five feet of rope on stage. For the record, her act generally lasted six minutes. Too bad we could never reclaim any of these entertainers unless they dipped in films, many doing so, but far from all, and so far as I know, none of these.