SCREEN-TO-SCREEN SELLING: THE SHOW MUST BE SOLD

They lived by the credo that the show must go on--even if it meant running the projector inside a tent. If the film was torn, they patched it. If the projectionist was drunk, they ran the show.

The men and women of the roadshow era--those years shortly after World War I and into the 1940s--were the wildcatters of the motion picture trade. They huckstered with a sound truck--if there were still-empty seats before a showing. A few times around the block, screeching hell and damnation interspersed with recorded applause and martial music, usually resulted in a full house, tent, Masonic Hall or outdoor theater.

They toured in Caddies, Buicks, hearses, anything that could haul piles of film cans, posters, lobby displays, bundled pamphlets. There were also crated books, bearing titles like “The Facts of Life,” “21 Ways to Enjoy Sex,” “Evil Weed,” “Vanishing Gangsters” and “Beauties of Burlesque.” Anything to help “sell” the movies of the roadshow era--and make a little extra money on the side.

For more than two decades, nearly 100 roadshow men and women took movies to the hinterlands of America, drawing crowds by offering “the venal truths that Hollywood dare not reveal” (in the words of one retired showman) through sheer, audacious showmanship. They survived the disdain of the major studios and restrictions of local censorship laws, creating their own low-budget “classics” before liberalized studio movies and the advent of television rendered the roadshow exhibitor obsolete. Even today, though, a few gems of the period are still making money--via video.

“Hollywood Confidential,” “Chained for Life,” “Test Tube Babies,” “Confessions of a Vice Baron,” “Child Bride” and other shockers circa 1920-58, are now on videocassette in some stores. Ray Atherton and Lawrence Fine, two local video entrepreneurs, have bought rights to a number of roadshow films and are trying to make deals for cable and public TV airings.

MTV also has acquired rights to air “Racket Girls” under its original title “Pindown Girls.” Not yet scheduled, the documentary was filmed in the early ‘50s. It is the first documentary made about women wrestlers.

If roadshow pictures didn’t quite live up to their hyperbolic promotion, they were colorful--even in black and white. Consider some titles: “Gambling With Souls,” “Road to Ruin,” “The March of Crime,” “Birth of Triplets,” “Poor White Trash,” “Human Wreckage.”

Posters often featured blood-colored illustrations of half-clad women who cringed from their ravishers, wild-eyed satyrs clutching bare-shouldered maidens, devils embracing hashish smokers and cigar-smoking “dames” teamed with smoking guns.

Ad copy wasn’t much subtler:

“Bloody kisses for his brother’s wife . . . a hangover that lasted a lifetime . . . playboys make deadly pets,” from “Hell Bent for Murder,” starring Van Heflin and Wallace Ford.

“A puff, a party, a tragedy . . . dangerous as a coiled rattlesnake . . . the devil’s joint,” from “Marijuana.”

“Why didn’t they tell me? . . . scarlet diary of a modern girl,” from “High School Girl,” produced in 1931 by Brian Foy of the famed Seven Foys.

In the lobbies, curious moviegoers were treated to first-hand looks at opium pipes, the waxed heads of evil-doers, instruments of abortion, electric chairs, bullet-riddled gangster limousines and oversized portraits of “desperadoes.” (Those photos had usually been snapped in a morgue.)

There also was the comfort (or enticement) of knowing that a uniformed nurse would be in attendance--which hinted at the possibility of fainting spells--as well as the voyeuristic implications of an “adults only” program.

Little wonder that the price of admission was a then-high 50 cents. For double features, which sometimes included a burlesque film (statuesque Lili St. Cyr was a certain draw), the ticket could go as high as $1. (Theatrical features from Hollywood were going for 15 to 35 cents.)

Promising sensationalism in the guise of cinematic sermons, roadshow movies ballyhooed the evils of drugs, vice, promiscuity and crime.

They screened wherever there was a profit to be turned--in tents throughout the moonshine hamlets of Tennessee, against white-sheet screens in fields of the Cotton Belt, inside dirt-floored Skid Row shelters in the flop-house districts of Boston and New York. These “marginal” theaters were seldom visited by sales reps from the major studios. So they depended on the roadshow potpourri of expose-sensationalism to fill the seats--and provide an alternative to their staples of Saturday serials and Westerns.

The top markets: The Bible Belt, West Virginia, South-Eastern Texas and the Panhandle, Washington, Maryland, Kentucky and Illinois.

Shortly before his death earlier this year at age 72, Don Kay recalled his days of hustling screen wares from a car trunk. It all began when he came under the spell of roadshow “legend” Louis Sonney.

Said Kay: “I was emcee for a Mississippi Showboat quartet that went broke in Oakland. Mr. Sonney was looking for someone who could haul film, collect receipts and eventually sell. I took the job as a stopgap until I could get back into the glamour of the stage.

“My very first sale was ‘The Spoiler.’ I got a week’s engagement of ‘Gambling with Souls’ at the Palace on Market Street. That was 1935, which coincided with the opening of the Oakland Bay Bridge. I earned $58--more loot than I had seen in weeks.”

He bought a 1936 Auburn and wore out three sets of tires the first year. “After that I toured with a Cadillac, like most of the big operators of that day.”

While still in his captain’s uniform, following four years in the Tank Corps with Gen. George Patton in Africa, he returned to tub-thump movie exploitation to the hinterlands. He invested his mustering out pay on a new car, and loaded up the trunk with “Poor White Trash,” “Hollywood Confidential,” “Narcotic,” and “High School Girl” and headed for the mining towns of Montana and Nevada.

“There were few introverts in the game,” Kay said. “Survival on the road took stamina. To wind up a winner took super drive, grit and an overwhelming intensity to achieve.”

And then there was Kroger Babb.

He gave up a 28-year career as an RKO publicist to roadshow Floyd Lewis’ classic “Mom and Dad,” one of the first roadshow pictures in color, which shockingly included a sequence of the birth of a baby (men and women were divided into separate audiences). Those involved with Babb at the time, including Don Kay and David Friedman (now chairman of the board of the Adult Film Assn. of America), estimate that the $32,000 film grossed more than $20 million over a 10-year period.

It was in 1933 that Sam Cummins, who favored the Appalachian territory, imported the Austrian-made “Ecstasy,” which instantly immortalized Hedy Lamarr as an undraped sylph goddess (and gave Bible Belt censors something new to scream about). Cummins would later put his touring Buick into retirement and pioneer the foreign art market in Philadelphia.

Pappy Golden, who roadshowed the Southwest, achieved legend after he scored big with the then-outrageous “Damaged Goods” (it showed the bare back of a woman and included a loooong kissing scene) in a Texas town close to the Mexican border. (He later bought out the local brothel and invited his cronies for a weekend of fun.) He was nearly broke when he died in 1980 at 79.

But most of all, there was Dwain Esper.

A motorcycle stuntman-movie showman-producer-exploiteer, Esper was silver-haired, with the appearance of a river boat faro player. He also had the sweet-talking charms of a snake-oil drummer on the Missouri Trail.

Among the “forbidden fruits” he unleashed: “Chained for Life,” “Confessions of a Beer Baron” and the now-camp classic, “Reefer Madness.” (At the “height” of his career in film exploitation, Esper exhibited the embalmed body of “Elmer the Dope Fiend.”)

It was while exhibiting “Reefer Madness”--which he filmed in the mid-’20s in collaboration with his wife Hildegarde Esper (who was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times in the early 20s and is profiled in an adjacent article)--that a young reporter asked Esper what he thought of nudity in film. Said Esper, “Twenty-five feet of it is a tease, 50 feet is an eye-opener, 100 feet is sure-fire box-office.”

“In that case,” continued the reporter, “wouldn’t 200 feet of naked flesh in a movie be nothing short of sensational?”

Esper flashed a grin, then replied, “All it would mean is trouble.”

While secular and morality movies like “The Life of Christ” and “Ten Nights in a Barroom” found audience acceptance throughout backwater towns from 1914 to the early days of the talkies, shocker expose-exploitation flicks like Willis Kent’s “High School Girl” and Esper’s “Narcotic” set fire to the business.

It was Esper’s “Sex Maniac” (1943) that riled the censors in Maryland, West Virginia and Kentucky. It also helped to launch a flurry of like-minded exposes of various vices and crimes: “Everybody’s Girl,” “Blonde Pickup,” “Flesh Merchant,” “Human Wreckage,” “What Price Passion,” “Forbidden Women” and “I Changed My Sex.”

Little wonder that the roadshow man--who got 50% of ticket sales--kept one eye on the box-office, the other on the police censor.

Few had permanent mailing addresses--and cash was the spoken language. Hotels, auto expenses, meals, helpers (poster tackers, box-office checkers, book lecturers, candy hawkers, sound truck spielers--all of whom were usually hired locally), were paid from a roll of bills. Nightly cash settlements were as much a part of the roadshow man as his diamond stick pin and Masonic ring. (During the ‘20s and ‘30s, transactions taking place in and around San Francisco were paid almost exclusively in silver dollars.)

The sale of books (for which the roadshow man got 100%) was what brought women to the circuit. That is, certain films lent themselves to “lectures”--often delivered by women--which in turn inspired books. And another means of making audiences reach into their pockets.

As Caroline Dezel, wife of Al Dezel, roadshow dandy of Michigan, Illinois and Indiana, was fond of saying, “We girls (Hildegarde Esper, Betty Reid and lecture pros Ruby Lee Griffin, Helene de Cenzie and Ev Fischetti) sure did our share milking the land of ‘bilk and money.’ ”

The “girls” gave lectures during intermission or after the movie (there were men lecturers, but women were more prevalent and more popular).

Of the 30-odd roadshow lecturers, Ruby Lee Griffin gained such popularity, her photograph was eventually used on the cover of “Facts of Life.”

Hildegarde Esper recalled, “None spoke so well, none was prettier . . . Ruby’d shimmy some and lecture some, and always with class.”

John Dillinger’s jilted Indiana sweetheart, Ev Fischetti, gave impassioned speeches trying to enshrine the desperado as a Robin Hood: “No reason, none,” she wailed, “to have gunned him down like a mad dog. . . . All he did was rob a couple of banks. Big deal. . . . He never killed nobody. . . .” She often ended her plaint with, “Johnny never hurt a woman or child; he was a good boy to his mom.”

Throughout the applause (sometimes peppered with a few jeers) she would hold up his famous straw hat, his cane and the “actual gun” he supposedly fashioned from a broomstick in jail for his historic break-out (at Crown Point, Ind., in 1934).

Never mind that there seemed to be a hundred such “authentic” guns floating around the country. That’s what the roadshow was all about.