An amazing collection of classic movie ads
Hey, Pop Readers, here's a story of a fan who's made a career out of his love of movies – and has a collection that will make many of you nostalgic.
One of my favorite people is Jim Carl, the senior director of the Carolina Theatre of Durham. Throughout the year, Jim schedules a variety of film series featuring 35mm prints of older movies, ranging from established classics to cult genre films and flicks familiar to those who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s.
In the last few months alone, I've seen films like The Sword and the Sorcerer, Ghostbusters, Masters of the Universe, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, the original non-CGI'd E.T., The Bride of Frankenstein and Creature from the Black Lagoon in their original 35mm form – and that's just since September!
This weekend, I'm going to The Studio Ghibli Collection, a festival of 35mm prints of Hayao Miyazaki anime films, most of which are in their original Japanese with subtitles.
Jim's festivals have let me relive everything from Beetlejuice to Fletch to Flash Gordon to Return to Oz on the big screen – and recently, he showed me the origin of his film fandom, his massive collection of ad slicks.
What are ad slicks? "Before there was Photoshop, movie studios would send theaters sheets with differently-shaped ads for their films, where they could stencil in the showtimes and publish them in local newspapers," Jim explained to me. "On Friday, newspapers would be filled with these huge ad slicks trying to get you to come see the films."
While he was growing up in Texas, Jim was privy to a lot of test screenings for new movies – some of which never even made it into wider release. Every week, he would cut out the ad slicks from the Friday newspaper, the only souvenir of the films he could afford, and post them into photo albums. He still has more than a hundred of these albums in his office at the Carolina Theatre – with thousands of ads for old movies in chronological order.
Jim admits he stopped collecting in the early 1990s after being bummed out by a screening of Alien 3 in NYC – (20-year-old spoiler) "I couldn't believe they killed off Newt in the first 10 minutes!" But since he's been working at the Carolina Theatre, he's become heavily involved with their programming – and helped bring the films he loved growing up to a whole new generation of moviegoers.
"I'll have so many people thank me after screenings for showing a film they remember from watching on VHS or HBO growing up," he says. "Some of the most popular films we've had at festivals have been things like The Legend of Billie Jean and The Final Countdown – which were anything but hits when they were in theaters, but everyone remembers from TV!"
Jim's collection is so extensive that he's been contacted by some DVD producers about including the ad slicks as part of the DVD extras – and in some cases, the ad slicks are the only proof that some lesser-known films even played in theaters!
He shared a number of his favorite ad slicks from both well-known and obscure films with me. Here they are with some commentary!
Great White – This was an Italian Jaws rip-off – so much of a rip-off that Universal Studios successfully sued to get it yanked from U.S. theaters! To this day, it's never been released on video or shown on U.S. TV. Jim's piece is one of the few pieces of evidence that it was even released in the U.S.
Inchon – Never released on DVD, this Korean War drama with Sir Laurence Olivier, Toshirō Mifune and Richard Roundtree (Shaft!), was the biggest box office flop of 1982 and is considered one of the worst films of all time – and that's on top of the controversial production, which was funded by Sun Myung Moon, founder of the controversial religion the Unification Church. Olivier was blunt about why he did the film: Money.
Here's a promotion for one of the first screenings of Poltergeist – the involvement of Steven Spielberg as the producer was heavily played up.
And here's a group of screenings from the summer of 1982 – there's a promo for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the re-release of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (whose director, Tobe Hooper, was helming Poltergeist), the re-release of The Beatles in A Hard Day's Night, and a personal favorite – The Last Unicorn, which wasn't huge in its theatrical release, but later became a huge hit from TV and DVD.
Jim reminded me that it wasn't unusual for films to be re-released – "Before home video or streaming services, it was the only way to see your favorite movies again!"
I'd like to thank Jim for sharing his collection with us – and I'll be at the Carolina Theatre again this weekend for the Studio Ghibli festival! Check out this Facebook page for his Retrofantasma series to see some of the incredible films he'll have on the big screen for next year!
Do you remember ad slicks, or have any favorite films you remember from growing up? Sound off in the comments below!
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