Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research
Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research

WCFTR Receives NEH Grant for “Project Ballyhoo”

Posted on

Ben Pettis

National Endowment for the Humanities logo

The Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR) has received a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for a project titled “Project Ballyhoo: Analyzing Publicity Text and Promotional Image Reuse across 20th Century Digitized Periodical Collections.” This $148,428 project, along with support from UW-Madison, will study the reach and effect of movie publicity in the 20th century.

Project Ballyhoo draws on the strengths of two large and independently significant online repositories: The Media History Digital Library (MHDL) and the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America collection. With the support of this NEH grant, the WCFTR will use computational methods, supported by the UW-Madison the Center for High Throughput Computing (CHTC), to explore the re-use and circulation of text and images from Hollywood pressbooks throughout newspapers across the United States.

Pressbook for The Gold Diggers of 1933 (Warner Bros.)
The pressbook for the Depression-era musical Gold Diggers of 1933 (LeRoy 1933) contains the Warner Bros. studio’s recommendations for how theater managers should promote the film.

From the 1910s through the 1980s, Hollywood studios promoted their movies through the creation and dissemination of pressbooks—bound pamphlets containing publicity materials, advertising layouts, accessories for sale, and exploitation ideas. These promotional booklets were sent to exhibitors and press outlets, making them vital nodes within the wider networks of film circulation and culture. The MHDL’s pressbook collection allows for broad public access to these historical records. No study has yet explored the reach of these publications: who used them, how, and whether the publicity text, promotional photos, and ads from the pressbooks permeated American newspapers and magazines as intended. Documenting these patterns of dissemination could lead to discoveries about the impact of strategic cultural communication on American society and culture.

Our project team has already identified examples of text and image reuse from pressbooks in historic newspapers, which are encouraging early results for the project’s next phases.

The pressbook for the Depression-era musical Gold Diggers of 1933 (LeRoy 1933) contains 48 black-and-white pages, filled with the Warner Bros. studio’s recommendations for how theater managers should promote the film. In addition to a story synopsis and the film credits, the pressbook also includes numerous photographs, pre-written radio advertisement scripts, and newspaper articles intended to be printed before and during the film’s release window. These articles range in length from short half-column pieces to full-page features. This lengthy pressbook also includes multiple promotional “stunts” for theater managers to run as well as merchandise to order, including vinyl records, sheet music, and even chocolate coins!

By manually searching for the title “Gold Diggers of 1933” in the Chronicling America collection and manually reviewing the results, we identified one pre-written article from the pressbook’s “complete day-to-day advance publicity campaign,” that appears in multiple historic newspapers. The same passages of text (“an all-star dramatic musical spectacle, said to be even greater than ‘42nd Street!’”) appeared in The Indianapolis Times in July 1933 and nine months later in The Daily Alaska Empire, gesturing toward the era’s prolonged film distribution patterns. Interestingly, The Waterbury Democrat, a politically oriented paper, reused that same pressbook text of Gold Diggers of 1933—an explicitly pro-New Deal musical—while the African-American newspaper The Plain Dealer (Kansas City) ran a very different story, highlighting a young African-American actress’s performance in the film.

This example shows how the knowledge generated from this project will shed light on the pathways by which publicity campaigns and expressions of culture traversed the country, with variations tied to region, political affiliation, and social identity. Significantly, the Gold Diggers of 1933 publicity text was found serendipitously, and required one of the project team to manually browse the Chronicling America search results. Project Ballyhoo will enhance methods for text and image reuse detection by developing methods to perform such searches and comparisons automatically and at large scale. By the end of the grant period, the project will generate documentation for how they can be applied to other research projects.

Keep an eye on the WCFTR blog as we share updates on this project throughout the year. Please be sure to also follow along via our social media to keep up with all of the WCFTR’s news and events!