{"id":12638,"date":"2025-01-14T09:00:25","date_gmt":"2025-01-14T15:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wcftr.commarts.wisc.edu\/?p=12638"},"modified":"2025-01-14T10:43:47","modified_gmt":"2025-01-14T16:43:47","slug":"wcftr-receives-neh-grant-for-project-ballyhoo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wcftr.commarts.wisc.edu\/index.php\/2025\/01\/14\/wcftr-receives-neh-grant-for-project-ballyhoo\/","title":{"rendered":"WCFTR Receives NEH Grant for “Project Ballyhoo”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ben Pettis<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"National<\/a><\/p>\n

The Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR) has received a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities<\/a> (NEH) for a project titled \u201cProject Ballyhoo: Analyzing Publicity Text and Promotional Image Reuse across 20th Century Digitized Periodical Collections.\u201d This $148,428 project, along with support from UW-Madison, will study the reach <\/em>and effect <\/em>of movie publicity in the 20th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n

Project Ballyhoo draws on the strengths of two large and independently significant online repositories: The Media History Digital Library<\/a> (MHDL) and the Library of Congress\u2019 Chronicling America<\/a> 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<\/a> (CHTC), to explore the re-use and circulation of text and images from Hollywood pressbooks throughout newspapers across the United States.<\/p>\n

\"Pressbook<\/a>
The pressbook for the Depression-era musical Gold Diggers of 1933<\/a> (LeRoy 1933) contains the Warner Bros. studio\u2019s recommendations for how theater managers should promote the film.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

From the 1910s through the 1980s, Hollywood studios promoted their movies through the creation and dissemination of pressbooks\u2014bound 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\u2019s pressbook collection<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s next phases.<\/p>\n

The pressbook for the Depression-era musical Gold Diggers of 1933<\/a> (LeRoy 1933) contains 48 black-and-white pages, filled with the Warner Bros. studio\u2019s 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\u2019s release window. These articles range in length from short half-column pieces to full-page features. This lengthy pressbook also includes multiple promotional \u201cstunts\u201d for theater managers to run as well as merchandise to order, including vinyl records, sheet music, and even chocolate coins!<\/p>\n

By manually searching for the title \u201cGold Diggers of 1933\u201d in the Chronicling America collection and manually reviewing the results, we identified one pre-written article from the pressbook\u2019s \u201ccomplete day-to-day advance publicity campaign,\u201d that appears in multiple historic newspapers. The same passages of text (\u201can all-star dramatic musical spectacle, said to be even greater than \u201842nd Street!\u2019\u201d) appeared in The Indianapolis Times<\/em><\/a> in July 1933 and nine months later in The Daily Alaska Empire<\/a>, <\/em>gesturing toward the era\u2019s prolonged film distribution patterns. Interestingly, The Waterbury Democrat<\/em><\/a>, a politically oriented paper, reused that same pressbook text of Gold Diggers of 1933<\/em>\u2014an explicitly pro-New Deal musical\u2014while the African-American newspaper The Plain Dealer <\/em><\/a>(Kansas City) ran a very different story, highlighting a young African-American actress\u2019s performance in the film. <\/em><\/p>\n