Pressbooks were great for giving theatre owners ideas for local promotions but they also gave them several choices of ad slicks for newspaper promotions based on their clientele. In other words, you could present the standard studio promotional choice for the ad or chose something a little more customized for your audience if they tended to respond to the more sensational approach. Take for example these alternate newspaper ad teasers for THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE (1972).

Variations on this teaser ad coupled Gene Hackman with most of his co-stars in duo mug shots but the clear winner is Hackman and Borgnine, both of them screaming their fool head’s off. Second favorite is the one with Shelley Winters. The ones with Red Buttons, Roddy McDowall, Carol Lynley and Stella Stevens weren’t as “intense.”

New World Pictures, a Roger Corman brainchild, released countless “professional women” movies in the early seventies (a golden time for pressbooks) but their Nurse movies hardly needed any promotion. Any movie with Nurse in the title was a guaranteed hit at the drive-ins. Here are some smashing ideas for a lobby promotion for CANDY STRIPE NURSES.

Who wouldn’t want to visit a “sexual therapy clinic” near the concession stand where usherettes were dispensing “love pills”?

ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968) is often considered Sergio Leone’s masterpiece but the pressbook promotional ideas for it seem very uninspired and disconnected from the film.

A Claudia Cardinale lookalike contest? A quick draw sketch artist competition? Why not take the high road and have the local symphony present a concert of the evocative Ennio Morricone score? Or at least take the low road and have the neighborhood Italian restaurant offer “spaghetti western fare” for a limited time only.

THE OTHER (1972) was an offbeat horror offering, based on the novel by Tom Tryon (I Married a Monster From Outer Space), that was a difficult sell for theatre owners. There was no monster and no way to easily exploit the horrific aspects of the film. So…what to do?

Can you imagine if all of the identical twins in your town showed up at a promotion for THE OTHER? It would be so much scarier than the movie.

PEEPER (1976), a relatively obscure Michael Caine private eye parody, clearly stumped the pressbook writers who probably never saw the films for which they were creating promotional copy. I suppose you could consider detectives voyeurs to some degree but isn’t this being a little too literal?

Here’s a creative approach from the pressbook for SYLVIA, the 1965 melodrama starring Carroll Baker who was red hot at the time. She had just appeared in Seth Holt’s underrated STATION SIX-SAHARA and the Harold Robbins’ potboiler THE CARPETBAGGERS. Her next film – and the one that lead to the undoing of her Hollywood career – was HARLOW. But I like the approach here. It’s all about the deconstruction of her image before she had a real breakdown and ran off to Italy for a second film career.

Last but not least we have one of my favorites – the pressbook for the obscure drive-in thriller THE STRANGE VENGEANCE OF ROSALIE (1972 – what was in the water that year?) that was usually exhibited with the British chiller WHAT BECAME OF JACK AND JILL? ROSALIE was a stark three character melodrama that starred Bonnie Bedelie, Ken Howard and Anthony Zerbe and was a forerunner of Stephen King’s MISERY. The pressbook, however, positions it as a genuine horror film.

I just love the frightening trio concept to sell the show – “Rig up two attractive girls and a boy with novelty store fright wig (hair standing on end or teased hair) and plastic bulge-eyed pieces, and tour them on walks around town. Hello? For what movie? Give me some of that juice you’re drinking! I won’t even go into the “loose clothing” idea or the “Frightened Grannies” concept.

Ah, Those were the days.