Pressbooks Collection

Starring and Produced by Mary Pickford

World War II on Film

Engaging with Society through Cinema

What's in a pressbook?

Imagine yourself an executive at United Artists in the late 1930s or early 1940s. A significant film has just been produced for your corporation, and it’s now time to reap the box office returns for all the hard work and financial investment put into the production. UA already has its regular network of theaters set up (via block-booking) to distribute the film. However, like most big-budget films of the day, this film is going to be distributed under a percentage-of-profit structure—that is, your profits are directly affected by box-office receipts. You need to make sure that theaters are actually drawing people in to see this new film. Nationwide promotional efforts probably aren’t a sufficient solution; these are still difficult given the variance in dates and locations of film runs. So what strategy can you implement in order cooperate with exhibitors to ensure that everyone profits upon the film’s release? Why, pressbooks, of course!

Pressbooks reveal the multifaceted approaches used by film distributors to work with exhibitors to maximize the reach and profit of their films. Early on, pressbooks tended to be short and focused on pre-written columns that theaters could submit to their local newspapers to promote the film; later, they ballooned in size, were printed (at least partially) in splashy colors, and included advertising images, posters, heralds, ideas for promotional events, and so forth. Before the advent of YouTube trailers or even saturation booking (the practice whereby most theaters across the nation show films during their first run and, thus, can take advantage of national advertising campaigns), the advertising schemes in these pressbooks promoted cooperation with exhibitors and were designed to maximize box-office profits to the benefit of both distributor and exhibitor.

The collection of pressbooks digitized here includes a wide swath of UA films from the 1920s-1950s. This is by no means an exhaustive collection, but it samples some of the most significant films, directors, and stars the distributor worked with during the “classical Hollywood” era. These include Shirley Temple, Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, Lucille Ball, Barbara Stanwyck, Fredric March, Alec Guinness, and of course, the founders of United Artists: Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W. Griffith. Some of these pressbooks are also disconcerting glimpses of our film past and our social ignorance on issues of race, gender, sexual orientation, and beyond. But whether providing further context to these social ills or simply advising exhibitors on how to run coloring contests for young filmgoers, these pressbooks offer insights into the intersection of distribution and exhibition in the age of the studio system alongside infinite entertainment. -- Connor Perkins, 2020.

Thank you to the Mary Pickford Foundation and the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research for making the scanning of these pressbooks possible. These pressbooks and hundreds more have been preserved in the collection, United Artists Corporation: Series 5.4 United Artists Pressbooks, at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.

United Artists Pressbooks: Sortable by Title, Director, and Year