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There’s no business like show business like no business I know<\/p>\n
Everything about it is appealing, everything that traffic will allow<\/p>\n
Nowhere could you get that happy feeling when you are stealing that extra bow<\/p>\n
There’s no people like show people, they smile when they are low<\/p>\n
Even with a turkey that you know will fold, you may be stranded out in the cold<\/p>\n
Still you wouldn’t change it for a sack of gold, let’s go on with the show<\/p>\n
There is No Business Like Show Business, Irving Berlin 1946<\/p>\n
Sometimes inspiration for these weekly essays I write come from the most unexpected source. I just finished having wings and a salad at a local watering hole when two llamas came sauntering down the street. As this is the Mid West and not Peru, I was surprised to see llamas but since I live in a unique place with unique people nothing totally shocks me.<\/p>\n
My son, who at every opportunity he can get loves to correct me, informed that llamas played an important part in the movie \u201cNapoleon Dynamite\u201d which co-incidence would have it was playing this weekend at the Historic Artcraft Theatre. When \u201cBack to The Future\u201d plays, a Delorean is parked outside the theatre. When \u201cChristmas Vacation\u201d plays, a beat up RV makes its appearance and when Monty Python and The Holy Grail plays, medieval knights armed with coconut shells saunter back and forth in front of the theatre. This, my friends, is something that has been lost and often forgotten in this business of ours….showmanship.<\/p>\n
When interviewed on the art of being a showman in 1911, Vincent Crummles, the famed British impresario replied ‘the real showman is born not made. It’s in the blood, as one may say, and he continues in the same business all the days of his life’.<\/p>\n
Nowadays, movie promotion is accomplished by expensive, ultra-sophisticated media blitzes. It is sophisticated, polished, and more than often ineffective. In days past that was not the case. Dazzling marquees, large cut-outs of stars, eye-catching posters greeting passersby, street hawkers, parades, and star appearances (or look-alike contests) were just a few ways Hollywood studios encouraged movie-theater owners to create a buzz in towns and cities to \u201csell\u201d movies during the Golden Age of cinema. For the past couple of decades no support has been given by Hollywood for local movie promotion. Ads have been pulled from newspapers, there is little TV advertising and there is no local support whatsoever.<\/p>\n
Here is a video of a promotional railway tour that Warner Brothers did in 1940 for the movie Virginia City.<\/p>\n