Here’s another pressbook courtesy of director Joe Dante (Trailers from Hell). What makes this one rather special is the inclusion of a cost sheet, typed on onion paper (you young whippersnappers can Google onion paper). The cost of 8000 pressbooks (six pages for this one) for this movie was a stiff .13 cents per pressbook (rounded off).
ComicRack reader version: Download River Gang Pressbook
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By the 1970s, pressbooks became rather dull affairs, usually black and white, and with an emphasis on poster art (for the newspapers) than pre-canned articles. This 8.5 x 14 inches pressbook shows all its pages, but I placed them out of order to move the poster pages toward the end. If you download the reader version, it will show the pressbook’s pages in their correct order. Phantom of the Paradise is one of those odd movies that, while fetching, doesn’t quite make sense, but just go with it for the rock horror opera aesthetics wrapped around a Faustian bargain and the dread of Dorian Gray. Of course the box office didn’t know what to do with it, at the time, but it’s now a cult movie and rightly so. Brian De Palma went wild with it and it has Paul Williams music. And that works for me.
ComicRack reader version: Download Phantom of the Paradise Pressbook
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You can’t simply live by horror movies alone, no matter how much of a fan you are. There are so many movies that are beautiful, ugly, happy, sad, and just plain mind-expanding or my eyes! dreadful. That’s the wonder of cinema: you have the trashy to the sublime to the breathtaking; whether in the eye or the ear or the cadence of the story itself, it’s really filled with many emotions. Toward the breathtaking side of things there’s Lawrence of Arabia. This 1963 release pressbook for the movie, after it had won a box-full of Oscars, is breathtaking too, in its own way.
ComicRack reader version: Download Lawrence of Arabia Pressbook
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I know of two movie heralds made available for Forbidden Planet. Both feature Robby the Robot. The theater would add its information on the last page.
Interesting to note that this low budget movie does get a nicely produced pressbook to promote it. I like the mustachioed clock with the skull pendulum. It’s an odd little embellishment that, while not exactly well placed, does hint of pressing danger. I’ve not seen the John Calvert Falcon movies, three in all, but this pressbook does wet my appetite to see this one. My favorite series is Boston Blackie with Chester Morris. I’ve yet to come across any of those pressbooks. But it is only a matter of time.
ComicRack reader version: Download Appointment with Murder Pressbook
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Wasn’t it great knowing the good guys from the bad guys? The early Westerns always kept it simple. Perhaps too simple. By the time they rolled around to television, we expected everything to be wrapped up nice and neat by the end, even with the commercials. Buck Jones starred in the 1932 movie, White Eagle, and followed his role into this serial, the eight from Columbia. From Ron Backer’s The Gripping Chapters, the Sound Movie Serial book: “There were apparently a lot of mountain lions roaming the Wild West, as can be seen in the cliffhanger to Chapter Ten of White Eagle (1941)…One lesson to be learned from many of these serials was how easy it was to dispose of a large ferocious beast with a very small knife.”
ComicRack reader version: Download Buck Jones White Eagle Serial Pressbook
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Christopher Lee may have disliked how his famous count was being treated by Hammer, but each movie was always a treat for me to catch in the local movie theater. The 1970s were a great time for horror movies and conventions. Hammer, and especially Lee’s Count Dracula, were still the icing on the fandom cake. While Scars suffered from a lack of attention and commitment, it’s still a fun, bloody romp.
ComicRack reader version: Download Scars of Dracula Pressbook
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The problem with being a disorganized collector is that you tend toward acquiring things and promptly forget about them. I had made photgraphs of this convention program back in 2016, but, well, here you go. Memory Lane Alert! When I went to conventions, back in the day, they weren’t the slick-slacks affairs they are today; where your wallet goes bust and your body is crushed trying to fit into spaces not even Einstein had thought about. And you got a REAL convention program. I mean a honkin tome you could actually read and enjoy, along with the cool bag-o-stuff it was tossed in. Highlights in this Comics Buyer’s Guide Fantacon 90 Convention Program include I Was a Zombie in Night of the Living Dead by Dennis Daniel and Editing The Famous Monsters Chronicles by, oh yeah, Dennis Daniel again (man, he got around). The other highlights are the cool advertisements and the tids and bits regarding the con itself.
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ComicRack reader version: Download Fantacon 90 Convention Program
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It’s unusual for a noir film to toss in humor and a light touch along with the criminal goings-on, but Borderline does that. Not all that well either: with Raymond Burr as the heavy and Claire Trevor and Fred MacMurry as agents not realizing they are on the same side, this story never quite finds its footing. So Borderline may be the film’s title, but it could also mean the way it doesn’t quite decide what’s serious and what’s funny, leaving the viewer precariously watching along that borderline to figure it out.
ComicRack reader version: Download Borderline Pressbook
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Continuing our 1970s theme of satanic mayhem, here's Asylum of Satan. The illustration has a real Coney Island spook house feel to it.
Sure, you always think of Yvonne De Carlo as Eddie's wholesome mom on The Munsters, but she's a bit of a devil, too, you know. A school janitor gets the cheerleading squad into trouble with witches. John Carradine also manages to stop by. Originally given a PG rating, after the producer spiced it up, it received an R.
This is a very large Mexican lobby card for Satan's Mistress. John Carradine did a cameo and Britt Ekland, although top-billed, didn't appear much. This movie came out around the same time as The Entity (which you really shouldn't miss). The card uses two very strong elements: a frightened, vulnerable woman and a pair of sinister, threatening eyes. Note the emphasis on sex and terror to sell theater seats.