Josh-da-man

This one scared the shit out of me when I was a kid...



I was, like five, and I just knew there was a "screamer" outside my window, all bloody and drippy and covered with veins. If the little black and white ad in the paper scared me that much, what the hell kind of experience would watching the movie be like?

Then I finally saw the movie...

inri222

inri222

Ash Ketchum

There were sixteen theaters within walking distance of my home in the Bronx. They've all been turned into furniture stores, supermarkets, discount stores, churches or restaurants. And all the theaters I went to in Times Square have either been demolished or turned into something else. It's depressing walking through Times Square now.

This is when they tore down the old Warner Theater in 1987, 60 years after THE JAZZ SINGER premiered there in 1927:

Defiant1

Wow, these ads bring back some good memories. I used to look at these all the time. I remember being particularly intrigued by the few movies rated R, which in Ontario meant you had to be 18+ to see it.

Mountain Biker

Nice to see I wasn't the only one cutting out the ads and putting them in a scrap book. Friday movie sections of the Sacramento Bee were the best, they usually had 3-5 pages for the new releases. Some of the ads were large enough to fill half a page or sometimes even a full page if it was a big summer blockbuster. Great memories indeed.

These days I collect full color 11x17 mini posters of all my faves from the 70's - 90's and put them in 11x17 photo albums. Always a great trip down memory lane looking through them

rw2516

I'm actually surprised so many did this same thing I did. I had a bulletin board in my room that I made NOW SHOWING and COMING SOON signs for and would tack the ads on the board under the signs, changing them every week.
Fifty years later I'm still doing the same thing with my own home theater and backlit poster frames.

orangerunner

How many of us out there in the 1980s used to bug the video store employees for their movie posters and cardboard displays when they were finished with them?

The movie posters in the theatre were always difficult to obtain as they were never sold commercially but the video stores used to either throw them away or give them away.

I would ride my bike up to the video store, sometimes daily, to try and time it right when they would take down a certain poster I wanted from their walls.

They must have thought I was some crazy kid with too much time on his hands!

Crocker Jarmen

Although the MPAA didn't start their rating system until 1968, the Ontario film board labeled movies "restricted" as far back as the 1950s. Back then, the R rating was given mostly to European sex pictures, but once in awhile there would be something I'm surprised got an R-rating.




Really? Elmer Gantry was determined only for those over 18, but Psycho, released that same year, wasn't?

Damfino

The Los Angeles Times used to have full page ads every Friday and half page ads every Sunday. (The Sunday calendar section was tabloid size). Sometimes studios would splurge and pay for a full color insert too.

DWilson

I don't remember the title, nor where I bought it, but I have a hardback book that is made up of newspaper ads for movies. I probably bought it in the late '70s or early '80s, and it's somewhere in my house.

Mabuse

I grew up with the LA Times in my household. The Friday edition of the entertainment section, which was and still is called Calendar, was nuts. One giant ad spread across two full pages in full color was the norm for anything new that weekend.

rw2516

I knew a guy who owned a video store in the 80s and would bug him to sell me the standees whenever it was a theatrical one I wanted. Usually the video stores got the video version, but every now and then it would be theatrical.
Got a Die Hard one where the skyscraper windows light up. Jewel of The Nile one with the red jewel in center lit up.
Remember seeing an Armageddon one in theater lobby. Had a digital clock that was counting down to movie release date.

orangerunner

Those standees sound very cool. I had more than I could fit into my room at one time. Unfortunately I had to throw a lot of them away as they were too big and nobody wanted them.

I still have the Back to the Future & Lethal Weapon 2 video versions. At one time I had the 6-foot-tall Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Delta Force, Shanghai Surprise (yikes!), At Close Range, Light of Day and counter-top versions of Maximum Overdrive, Back to School, ET, Pirates, Angel Heart etc.

There was a lot of thought and creativity that went into these items.

Abob Teff

First, I believe they demolished every theater Masters of the Univese played in. Only way to remove the tarnish.

Second, 1987 - 1927 = (not 50).

Abob Teff

Ash Ketchum

The theater pictured was shut before MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE came out and it was one of three onetime major movie palaces on Broadway closed and demolished that year, the others being the Rivoli and the Loew's State.

And thanks for the math correction. I went back and fixed it.

Quatermass

In the late 80s, I had a boss who bought the 4 unit storefront building where our office was. A video store opened in one of the units. It was owned by two families: a mom & pop and a mom & pop & their teenage son. They were retired military or had some other sources of income because they did not have a lot of customers. It was somewhat small so they had limited wall space for posters and didn't have room for any standups. The teenager would assemble them and they would usually be placed directly in our shared dumpster. I remember a giant Paul Newman head staring out of the dumpster for a week when "Fat Man and Little Boy" came out on VHS. The kid took most of the cool posters and I didn't have room for all that anyway, but there was lots of stuff just tossed out every week.

Defiant1

Yep, that was me. I remember one of the local mom 'n pop video stores would sell the posters for $5 and they would be in decent condition. Rogers (one of the big Canadian video store chains) would give them away for free, but with a caveat: they would hang their posters in these lit marquees which ruined the edges of the posters.

I really enjoyed the poster art of horror movies in particular from the 80s and 90s. I had a poster for Village of the Damned (1995) on my wall because I loved the glowing eyes of the kids.

Brack

I had a scrapbook from the middle to late eighties, when I was still in the single digits. I know it's still somewhere at my parents house with all our baby books, unless it's in my basement somewhere. Will try to find it. These were later replaced by movie posters I'd hang up in my bedroom, but I loved those newspaper ads.

IDrinkMolson

I remember being a little upset when the local paper ran the edited ad for "For Your Eyes Only".

Tabletopjoe

That's some double feature!

Giles

i have a collection of ads too but i foolishly cut off the bottom theatre listings - i need to scan them come to think about it.

Tabletopjoe

bluetoast

Yeah, I recently started resubscribing to The Boston Globe- no ads, even on Fridays. Still a lot of The for plays/musicals though. Used to love going through the Weekend Section of The Washington Post.