"Phantom of the Opera" and More in "The Reel Journal" from 1925

Open publication - Free publishing - More film

A magnificent new resource for film historians and researchers--or for anyone interested in learning about old movies and the history of the American film industry--is the website Issuu, specifically the collection of "Boxoffice" magazines hosted there. "Boxoffice" (which is still publishing) is a trade publication for movie distributors and exhibitors that dates back to the 1920s. The historical back issues, nearly all of which can be found and browsed at Issuu, are a wealth of information--an embarrassment of riches, really--for studying American film history.

The above issue of "The Reel Journal" (a predecessor of "Boxoffice"), from February 14, 1925, features this double-page advertisement for "The Phantom of the Opera," starring Lon Chaney, which was then in release from Universal Studios. Interestingly, the image featured in the ad does not include Chaney, perhaps because the actor--known as the "Man of 1000 Faces" for his elaborate make-up--was being kept under wraps in the film's publicity to preserve the impression his visage would make on viewers.

The old issues of "Boxoffice" available for view on Issuu represent a unprecedented level of access for such an historical resource. Although the Issuu interface (available for use by anyone to "publish" newsletters and the like) is somewhat clunky--there's no easy way to conduct searching, for example, and in the case of "Boxoffice" at least, poor indexing of the hundreds of issues available--it is possible to bookmark particular pages, create your own library of publications, and (as seen above) embed individual publications on your own webpage or blog. There are several options for navigating individual issues, although (again in the case of "Boxoffice" at least) image quality is rather poor.

The above issue of "The Reel Journal" can be navigated and explored fully. It's an amazing immersion in movie culture of past eras. In the future, I will likely post additional issues of "Boxoffice" and its predecessor publications, as I discover nuggets of information and images that I think warrant the treatment.

Cinerama Holiday: The Original Widescreen Process Returns

Cinerama, the original widescreen motion picture format, has made something of an encore this year. This is largely due to the special-edition DVD release in September of one of only two narrative feature films made in Cinerama, "How the West Was Won" (1963). In the wake of this release, Rebecca Paller, a curator at the Paley Center for Media (a major media archive), blogged about Cinerama; and journalist Keith Phipps has written about Cinerama on Slate (comparing its brief use for narrative films in the early-1960s to the similar potential today for IMAX).

Both of these writers make useful observations about Cinerama. (Readers not familiar with the widescreen format can study up here, here, here, and/or here.) Both offer personal stories about viewing Cinerama, Paller about seeing it when it was first available in the 1950s and 1960s, Phipps about experiencing it during an unlikely Cinerama revival in his hometown of Dayton, Ohio, in the 1990s. These anecdotes point up a terribly important feature of the experience of Cinerama--that is was an experience. As Paller recounts, her family travelled many miles to a theatre in another town to attend Cinerama films, and as the title of her piece ("Put on Your Sunday Clothes") indicates, this was the kind of experience that people anticipated for days if not weeks, dressed up for as if going to church, and bragged about to their neighbors afterwards. I know from my own research that theatres featuring Cinerama advertised and tried to attract patrons from a very broad geographical range, due to the limited number of Cinerama-equipped theatres and the uniqueness of the experience.

The importance of Cinerama, especially to film exhibition, cannot be underestimated. It was important for several reasons: First, it created a cultural sensation in the early-1950s that reignited public interest in movies and moviegoing, after it had slumped for several years post-World War II and had begun to be affected by competition from television. Second, it established a new technical standard, that of the wide screen, that invigorated film exhibition in the early-1950s (precipitating CinemaScope and all the other widescreen processes of the 1950s) and introduced widescreen as a means of viewing visual media that continues to reverberate today with the diffusion of widescreen TVs. Next, it transformed the stylistic palette of cinema, requiring filmmakers to adapt to creating moving images for a wider screen. Finally, it introduced a new mode of moviegoing--what came to be known as "roadshow" or "hard ticket" exhibition (due to the fact that patrons needed reserved seat tickets), that included advance ticket sales, printed programs, intermissions, and a new lease on life for picture palace movie theatres, which were well-suited for the kind of film viewing experience provided by Cinerama.