Old movie lobby cards at the Free Library

Back in the days when making and marketing movies were a movie studio's only business, the studios were far more into marketing than they are today. Of course, the world was a less wired together place than it is at present, and you learned about movies either by flipping to the entertainment section of your daily paper or by actually attending the neighborhood movie house.

Once inside, the studios had several ways of luring you back for the next presentation. There were the Previews of Coming Attractions; there were glass slides— which functioned as a sort of paralyzed coming attraction, no movement or sound, just image— and there were the lobby displays.

As with the on-screen advertising, the lobby displays also came in several varieties. There were long thin posters that could be mounted to the inside theater doors, as a sort of last-ditch reminder as you exited the house— these were called insert cards— and there were lobby cards.

As the studios grew.…

Lobby cards were a sort of "hard copy" Preview of Coming Attractions. They were normally printed in sets of eight 11-by-14 cards. The first card was most usually a miniature poster for the film (very much like the glass slide you might see projected on the theater screen), and the remaining cards showed scenes from the film itself. Usually they were a mix of posed portraits of the stars and "action-packed" scenes.

Lobby cards had been around from the earliest days of film. At first they were fairly simple affairs— title cards bore the title of the film and maybe the cast; scenes were black-and-white photographs, or sometimes sepia. As time went on, and the studios grew larger and more prosperous, lobby cards became more elaborate full-color lithographs, and various "house-styles" began to emerge.

Paramount, for instance, eschewed the title card in favor of a formal portrait of the film's lead players. Universal was fond of crafting cards-within-cards by using oval or circular inserts within a given scene, usually to highlight one of the film's stars. Warner Brothers created starkly dramatic title cards that always played up the film's major star. Mighty Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer used captions under the card to further highlight the drama.

Decline and glorious comeback

Title cards from the 1930s are especially prized for their often-striking Art Deco artwork and designs. Wartime restrictions made title cards from the 1940s mostly bland, photographic affairs. But in the 1950s, title cards staged a glorious comeback with full-color artwork by some of the best illustrators then active.

That renaissance was short-lived. By the 1960s, most studios had dropped the use of title cards; colors became sloppier (as in: They colored outside the lines) and by the late 1960s color photographs became the rule. By the early 1980s lobby cards were pretty much a thing of the past, although they still appear infrequently for some "prestige" releases— usually for use outside the U.S.

Deceiving the audience

For students of film today, lobby cards have several uses. They show how costumes and decor were used— but not how the film actually looked on the screen. Very few lobby cards were colored frame enlargements from the film itself. Most were based upon still photos taken by a studio photographer after the actual scene was filmed. In some cases they show how studio marketing departments cleverly tried to misdirect audiences.

M-G-M.'s lobby set to the Robert Montgomery/Phillip Marlowe mystery The Lady in the Lake, for example, capitalized on audience expectations that Lloyd Nolan would play a tough but honest G-man or cop, thus disguising the fact that Nolan was a villain of the piece— a very corrupt cop up to his neck in murder.

Bypassing Richard Widmark

Fox appeared to produce its lobby sets while its films were still in production, thereby immortalizing scenes that were re-shot or completely eliminated. Thus Fox's lobby card set for Fallen Angel shows Dana Andrews, the film's feckless hero, struggling with brutal small-town cop Charles Bickford for possession of a gun inside an automobile. But the film's climax as it now exists takes place indoors at a roadside diner.

About half the scenes in the lobby set to Fox's The Brasher Doubloon are nowhere to be found in the released film. Studio chief Darryl Zanuck ordered massive re-shoots when he didn't like what he saw, but apparently his concern didn't extend to publicity materials.

No one in 1947 thought that a radio actor imported from New York was going to turn in a career-making performance in Kiss of Death, so Richard Widmark was included in only one of seven scene cards— a shot of the back of his head!

Outer-space aliens

Lobby sets are also useful to film scholars for identifying emerging trends. For instance, since The Thing from Another World (1951) was the first alien-invasion movie, the publicity folks at RKO had no clue as to how to market it. Thus the set of eight scene cards suggests that the film is a thriller, with a small group of Americans fending off some hostile force. It could be anything from Soviet paratroopers to an intelligent blood-drinking carrot.

Similarly, no one at Warner Brothers realized that the auto chase in Bullitt would change the way police thrillers were made, so they didn't bother to include a shot of it. What the cards do show are lots of people talking to each other.

Not even James Bond was immune. The 1962 card set to Dr. No looks like it comes from any low-budget Caribbean thriller. (As an interesting sidelight, although the original cards showed several shots of the first Bond girl, Ursula Andress, in her tiny white bikini, when the film was reissued in 1965, the publicity folks at United Artists airbrushed the bikini bottom, raising it waist high!)

One overlooked area

All of this is by way of introducing a vastly entertaining display of 75 rare lobby cards from the Free Library of Philadelphia's Theatre Collection. The exhibit tends to be thematically organized, so there's something for everyone, with everything from singing cowboys to "juvies" (juvenile-delinquency-themed films with actors in their 30s doing their best to emulate troubled teens). The only area missed was the "sword-and-sandal" epic.

For casual viewers, the show will work as a trip down memory lane. Beautiful title cards to classics like The Kid (with Charlie Chaplin) and Now, Voyager (Bette Davis) will take you back to a time when stars were stars, and the thematic organization will remind us anew of just how varied and creative a place Hollywood's oft-maligned studio system really was.