Another chick flick
Hollywood’s Golden Year. Some of their greatest movies were made in 1939. GWTW even had a part for TV’s “Superman”.
I’ll add to this Stanley Crouch’s latest column entitled, “Shut Up, Scarlett !” more about his indignant grandmother’s uproarious reaction to seeing Vivian Leigh and Butterfly McQueen’s slapfest.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-12-19/shut-up-scarlett
It was eagerly anticipated by 58,000,000 people according to Gallup and few were disappointed. A truly great film set in a lost culture, filmed in a lost civilization.
She sat on her daddy's shoulders so that she could see Leigh and Gable walk into the theater. It was a Big Deal for a little town, as Atlanta was then.
Astor with reserved seating
matinee $0.75 to $1.10 which is $11.51 to $16.88 in today's dollars.
evening $1.10 to $2.20(?) -> $16.88 to $33.76 in today's dollars.
weekend matinee $0.75 to $1.65 -> $11.51 to $25.32
Capitol
matinee $0.75 to $1.10 ->$11.51 to $16.88
evening $1.10 to $1.65 -> $16.88 to $25.32
Those were not cheap tickets. Were $0.75 to $2.20 typical movie prices in 1939, or were they higher than normal because the film was so long, it was a "spectacle" and because those were New York prices?
The golden age of Hollywood is long gone.
bump
(From Wikipedia)
The Music Goes ‘round
The music was written by Edward Farley and Mike Riley, the lyrics by Red Hodgson, and was published in 1935. It was included on the 1961 Ella Fitzgerald album Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie (Verve). The song was recorded by Tommy Dorsey and became a hit in 1936.[1] The song was the musical interlude for the Columbia movie “The Music Goes ‘round” in 1936.
“The Music Goes ‘round” (1936).
Notes for the Record on “Music Goes ‘round,” at the Capitol, and Other Recent Arrivals. New York Times. February 22, 1936.
“If we really wanted to be nasty about it, we could say that this Farley-Riley sequence is the best thing in the new picture. At least it makes no pretense of being anything but a musical interlude dragged in by the scruff of its neck to illustrate the devastating effect upon the public of some anonymous young busybody’s question about the workings of a three-valve sax horn. Like the “March of Time,” it preserves in film the stark record of a social phenomenon—in this case, the conversion of a song hit into a plague, like Japanese beetles or chain letters.”
HJS, thank you for posting this. I loved all the pictures that I had not seen before. Brought back a lot of memories.