How NOT to sell your picture.

Today's blog is an abridgment. There will be an additional entry on Sunday.

Originally I was going to be discussing the original film platter of 1913, but as I was doing research in trades, I came across this and decided to hold that article for next week. This one was too rich for me to pass up and found its way to me through an issue of Motion Picture News from 1923.

'23 was a big year for Hollywood and Exhibitors alike, and particularly the great Buster Keaton, who after some years of making comedy shorts in Hollywood, was finally up to bat for directing a feature-length comedy, largely in part to producer and distant family-in-law, Joe Schenck.

So I was tickled pink when I saw this ballyhoo ad for THREE AGES, Metro's new comedy-feature-debut of Mr. Keaton's, at that time playing at the Loew's Warfield in San Fransisco.


Then my jaw dropped when I looked closer...


Now, I'm anything BUT a politically-correct nut, but it struck me as sort of common sense, even in 1923, that connecting your film with a group of white supremacists, even ever so indirectly, might not be the best way to sell your picture. Looking at the specific details about the campaign struck me as an even more bizarre take on selling a film:


So not only are they attached to the KKK ("Keaton's Kolossal Komedy"???), they've got a professional laugher (ie. an insane man) walking around town laughing at people in order to get them to come to the show. Goodness!