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I've been doing pop culture all week, and I thought I'd finish the week on the same theme. My first offical job as a teenager was in a movie theater. I started as a doorman and usher, then did concessions and box office, finally working as a manager. One summer I worked as an operator (non-union projectionist) when I was living in Ocean City, Md. Always in demand were old posters (one-sheets) from movies that had left the theater. I've still got a big box of them somewhere, I always thought they would make a dandy wallpaper for a game room or something, but I never had a house with such a dedicated room. In any event, the first question of the day is, what are your favorite movie posters? Doesn't matter how good the movie was, I'm just talking about really good posters themselves. Here's mine, I have it framed and hanging on the wall of my office:

Last Embrace was a 1979 film starring Roy Scheider about an ex-CIA operative. His wife had been killed on his last mission, and now people around him are dying. Is he going crazy, or is he the target of some nefarious plot? It was a pretty good movie, but I just love the one sheet art. (BTW, I'm pretty sure the picture above is of an insert ( 14” x 36” ), not a one sheet( 27” x 40” ), but it was the best picture I could find).

One other thing that was always fun was collecting reels of trailers, previews of coming attractions, called trailers because originally they were shown after the feature presentation. We would get trailers in every week to put at the beginning of films, but after the film was released and then gone from theaters, they would be thrown out or rolled up and tossed into a dusty cabinet in the projection booth, where they were forgotten. Some of my friends and I would gather these up and splice them together onto hour long reels, and sometimes at night after the theater was closed we would run private shows of these trailer reels. It was really a lot of fun. Question number two is: What trailers did you really enjoy? I offer you this:

The effects are crap by modern standards, but the mood! My God, the mood!

posted by WeirdDave at 06:30 PM

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