Exhibit Review: Classic Film Posters, Barrymore Film Center and Museum, Fort Lee, NJ

Film fans often take for granted the unique power of a movie poster. It must intrigue and lure potential audiences without misleading them about the content being advertised. If it’s lucky, it will also be aesthetically beautiful, and freeze the image of the film for ages to come.

I thought of this while viewing “Coming Attractions: Classic Film Posters from the Konstantino Spanoudis iKON Collection,” at the Barrymore Film Center and Museum in Fort Lee, NJ, not far from where I live in Bergen County. If you have a chance, rush to see this exhibit before it closes January 5. Even better, couple your trip with a ticket for one of the classic, independent, or art house movies playing in this burgeoning mecca for cinephiles in the tristate area.

The 70 items on display range from 1910, the dawn of the silent era (which began, this nonprofit center and museum will remind you, in Fort Lee) to 1981, concentrating mostly on the U.S. but with some foreign posters for a wider context.

As you look through the materials, you might be surprised to discover that issues that preoccupy Americans now had their genesis over a century ago. Censors back then, for instance, focused first on these posters—an inexpensive alternative to newspaper advertising.

Lithographers were the original creators of movie posters, and, like the other form they created—circus posters—highlighted, and sometimes exaggerated, lurid content. Opponents’ anger, then, often concentrated on the art itself, which would likely be seen by more passersby than the movies themselves.

As late as the 1930s, American movie posters were still seen as the products of hacks who labored in an industry more respected for the money it generated than as an art. So many motion pictures were being produced then that the useful life of a poster could be only days, leading to their trashing, recycling, or return to exchange.

French, German, and Italian artists often signed their work, enjoying greater recognition than their largely anonymous American counterparts. (A conspicuous exception: Saul Bass, who transformed the movie-poster industry with his art for Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder, and Alfred Hitchcock—and whose seminal work for Anatomy of a Murder is shown here.)

Konstantino Spanoudis, a Greek-born Fort Lee owner and curator of iKON Art Gallery, has amassed well over 6,000 movie posters since he began accumulating this art in the late 1980s.

What’s on display in the museum’s 1,800-sq.-ft. exhibition gallery reflects his fascination especially with classic Hollywood, B-westerns, Abbott and Costello comedies, sports, and “race films” (movies made by Black filmmakers for segregated movie houses).

Nearly 20 of the pieces relate to Bergen County, mostly Fort Lee, including for:

* Fighting Death (Solex Studio, Fort Lee, 1914)

* Silent “vamp” Theda Bara’s Carmen (made at Fort Lee’s Fox Studio, 1915); and

* The multi-part Lincoln epic, Son of Democracy (filmed in Ridgefield Park, 1917).

Among the other titles promoted by these posters:

* Sarah Bernhardt’s Queen Elizabeth (1912), one of the first silents to promote a specific film and star rather than “the movies” in general; and

* Gilda (1946, pictured), the film noir starring Rita Hayworth;

* La Dolce Vita (1960), by Federico Fellini, one of the imports that these posters advertised;

* A trio of James Bond films, from the Sixties dawn of the franchise (Dr. No, Thunderball, and You Only Live Twice);

* Jaws (1975), and;

* Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).

The industry has progressed from an ephemeral advertising art to one whose most prized items can garner $40,000 to $50,000. The Barrymore exhibit provides a great way to appreciate two fine arts that nobody expected much from at their beginnings: the motion picture industry itself, and the posters that promoted it to a public that eventually couldn’t get enough of it.

Quote of the Day (Lynda Obst, on How China's Influenced Hollywood's Film Product)

“China is the No. 2 market now. In 2020, it will be No. 1. That's why movies must all be sequel-ized or sequel-izable. So that they become more and more familiar to the international audience, where 80 percent of the profits are now coming from. We can't afford to spend the same kind of money marketing movies internationally that we spend here, so we need pre-awareness: titles and characters that are already known. International audiences love action, wild and exciting special effects that can only be created by our technology. No nuance. Not so good for so-called writing. And China won't look at anything that isn't 3-D, which means everything is made that way – even with domestic audiences rejecting it.”—American film producer and author Lynda Obst quoted by David Edelstein, “The Tentpole of Doom,” New York Magazine, July 8-15, 2013

What Ms. Obst predicted a decade ago did indeed come to pass: China became the world’s #1 film market in 2020.

It’s become more complicated since then. Ironclad COVID-19 lockdowns shut Hollywood out of China for a time, and in 2023 all top 10 movies for the country were homegrown products, according to a January report on the prior year’s international box office from Deadline.

So will Hollywood continue to cite China as the primary cause for The Sequel Syndrome?

Whether the American industry remains in the default position that pre-awareness sells will be determined by this summer’s grosses. This January article from MovieWeb indicated that 35% of wide releases for this year will be sequels, spin-offs, and reboots.

But, in a sign that audiences might be tiring of same-old, same-old, the latest installment in the “Mad Max” franchise, Furiosa, has underperformed at the box office.

Hollywood executives have been complaining that since the pandemic, older viewers have largely preferred to stay at home. But these audiences have been given little reason to come out to see more adult fare, and Hollywood still hasn’t figured out a way to market low-budget films for niche audiences. Until it does, filmgoers will have to brace for more of the same.

Quote of the Day (Patricia Highsmith, on January, ‘A Two-Faced Month’)

“January. It was all things. And it was one thing, like a solid door. Its cold sealed the city in a gray capsule. January was moments, and January was a year. January rained the moments down, and froze them in her memory: the woman she saw peering anxiously by the light of a match at the names in a dark doorway, the man who scribbled a message and handed it to his friend before they parted on the sidewalk, the man who ran a block for a bus and caught it. Every human action seemed to yield a magic. January was a two-faced month, jangling like jester's bells, crackling like snow crust, pure as any beginning, grim as an old man, mysteriously familiar yet unknown, like a word one can almost but not quite define.”—American novelist and short-story writer Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995), The Price of Salt (1952)

Last week marked what would have been the 100^th birthday of Patricia Highsmith. For the longest time, she was known for two psychological thrillers adapted into classic films by Alfred Hitchcock (Strangers on a Train) and Anthony Minghella (The Talented Mr. Ripley).

Yet only over time—and especially after intrepid biographers worked mightily through her abundant published and unpublished writings, separating fact from fiction—would the outlines of an author as tortured in her private life as Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, or Shirley Jackson emerge.  

Five years ago, a novel in a far different vein from her best-known novels of suspense, featuring a lesbian romance that she wrote under a pseudonym, was translated to the big screen: The Price of Salt, retitled Carol, directed by Todd Haynes and starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara. 

Leafing through the book recently in a larger anthology of Highsmith’s work, I was much taken by the above description, and thought it would use it while I still had the chance this month.

For a fascinating overview of the multiple treatments of her work by Hollywood, please see this blog post from the American Film Institute from a couple of weeks ago.