A rare glimpse at the lost art of film illustrations

FOR decades, it was assumed that studio-produced lithograph posters were used by theaters around the U.S. to promote the latest movies. But that wasn’t the case.

“Hundreds and hundreds of theaters throughout the United States and all the various theater chains had their own in-house poster artists who created posters designed to interest a local audience,” says film historian Anthony Slide, whose latest book, “Now Playing: Hand Painted Poster Art From the 1910s Through the 1950s” (Academy Imprints), shines the spotlight on this long-lost chapter in Hollywood entertainment history.

The vibrant, colorful posters are on display in the lobby of the Linwood Dunn Theater at the Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study and are available for viewing whenever there is a program at the Dunn. They were culled from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Science’s collection at the Margaret Herrick Library. Out of the thousands that were created over the decades, only about 100 survive in the collection.

Among the films featured are “Son of the Sheik,” “King Kong” and “The Black Pirate.” The posters were to advertise a film for one week and then they were discarded, says Slide, who co-wrote the coffee table book with Jane Burman Powell and Lori Goldman Berthelsen. “It wasn’t a matter of throwing them out but painting over and putting a new poster on top of the old one.”

The majority of the posters in the exhibit and book were done by Batiste Madalena. It was sheer serendipity that the posters were found. Madalena worked at the Eastman Theatre in Rochester, N.Y., says Slide. In 1928, George Eastman gave up running the theater and handed it over to Paramount to run, and the posters were thrown out, according to Slide.

By happenstance, Madalena was bicycling by the theater one day and saw the discarded posters in the rubbish.

“He made many journeys to and from home and the theater [on his bike] and saved them all,” says Slide.

Slide says it’s still something of a mystery why theaters hired their own artists instead of using the far less expensive posters supplied by the studios. “Obviously, the local management thought these posters were better than what the studios were sending out.”

Because they worked in advance, the artists never saw a movie before designing a poster. All they got were production stills from the studios and the exhibitors’ campaign books, says Slide. “Usually they were sort of spot-on [about the movie’s theme]....”

Remarkably, Slide says, these artists would have to paint a poster in an hour or less. “And they were not creating one poster for the lobby,” he says. “Most lobbies had six or eight [posters], and they were all of different designs.”

Because so little is known about the artists, including Madalena, O.M. (Otto) Wise and Edwin Isaac (Ike) Checketts, Slide is hopeful that the book and exhibit will bring forth relatives with information about them.

-- Susan King