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Movies - This is an interesting story on how films were distributed during this time. Every film studio would have an exchange located in almost every major city. An exchange is an office owned by the studio. Now, the way the movie studios distributed their films for people to see was they would send the films and posters to the exchanges in the major cities. Then the city theaters would have the films and posters picked up. In the small towns the films and posters would be delivered by Greyhound bus. After the film was shown for 3 or 4 days the movie theatre manager would send the films and posters to the next town. The film would go through a route of many theatres before eventually getting back to the exchange. In many cases the posters ended up torn and frayed and thrown away. |
| Now, another great resource for finding pre-1940 movie posters was from other countries. The reason was that these did not have to be returned because the value of the poster was less then the cost of the return postage. And then there were some theatres that maintained their own exchange. |
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Consider that the theatre owners could not give their movie posters to collectors because they have to get to the next theatre. Then the question comes up that if all the movie posters were returned with the films where do the movie posters before 1940 come from? One source was poster called a window card that was about 14'' x 22” and these were sometimes bought in large quantities by one theatre and distributed to store windows around town. Now, these were given away after the film was finished. Sometimes they would also survive because they were used as backing boards for picture frames by framers. One huge find was the Cozy Theatre Collection in Los Angeles with a collection of movie posters from the 1930s to the 1950s. This collection had tens of thousands of posters and lobby cards and hundreds of thousands of still pictures. Today this collection would be worth millions. It is interesting that no one from the studios thought of keeping an archive of their posters. Since the public could never get a hold of the movie posters one would have considered their rarity. Things have changed greatly as the studio have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent years trying buying back the same movie posters that they sold for pennies. |
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