Gene Hayworth works at the university library here in Boulder and has many duties, one being that he manages various subscriptions for the faculty. He recently set up a trial with Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive and I promised him I’d poke around to see if the Film Studies faculty I work with might find it of interest. Given that this particular service costs well over a hundred times what I pay for access to my yearly IMDb Pro account, I was curious what it had to offer. I randomly picked six films, screening throughout the week a month from now on TCM, to plug into the search engine: Papillon, The In-Laws, Along the Great Divide, The Manitou, Spring Fever, and Baby Doll. Included here are some of the results.
Papillon (Franklin Schaffner, 1973)
This first search yielded 123 results, with the earliest entry an article about the bids on the film rights published in Variety (Nov. 26, 1969). The bulk of what follows are reviews and advertisements published around the time of the film’s release, but also includes articles relating to lawsuits, and some essays in independent film journals. The most recent mention of Papillon brings up a page from a 1977 Variety discussing Lebanese distributors, alongside ads from the Virgin Islands Film Commission and the Utah Film Development. The cut-and-paste graphics remind me of a simpler time when layout was done with hot wax on light-tables, and I could see myself easily getting lost amidst endless ephemera. Pulling up a page from Boxoffice (June 18, 1973) one gets decent tidbits relating to location (Jamaica) the film shoot (finished one week ahead of schedule), its planned release (Christmas), and exact number of places where it was filmed (37 different locations). Not super useful to the layperson, but certainly of interest to someone doing research or the serious academic, especially for the wealth of citation it provides (listing publication title, volume, issue, etc., etc.). Reading about the Bids Hot for Pic Rights to ‘Papillon’ one finds out that Henri Charriere was inspired to write about his life “when he read of the success of Albertine Sarrazin’s ‘L’Astragale’ (The Ankle Bone), since made into a hit film.” As of this writing, that piece of information was not available in IMDb Pro‘s otherwise quite extensive trivia section.
The In-Laws (Arthur Hiller, 1979)
Only six results. And one of the hits was a radio-review from 1937 that had nothing to do with the movie, so really only five hits (but, hey, how cool is that… being able to access a legit review for a radio show from the 30s?). On IMDb Pro there are some 80 reviews for the film. Hmmm… But, for what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure that none of the reviews on latter site will let you know that The In-Laws “was slated to begin filming on Monday (16).” For the true muckraker, those details can be important. Plus, having access to actual print ads might be of worth. Surprisingly, both Arthur Hiller or Peter Falk yield less than 20 results when their names are typed in, which seems a bit thin.
Along the Great Divide (Raoul Walsh, 1951)
We are now down to two results. However, it must be noted that there’s something very powerful about reading an actual review from 1951, as opposed to those available on IMDb Pro – of which there are only six, all of which are relatively new. A true historian would value access to raw material of the time.
The Manitou (William Girdler, 1978)
Seven results. I’m including three screen-grabs that I feel speak for themselves. Mainly of interest for the ads and artwork.
Spring Fever (Edward Sedgwick, 1927)
This was interesting because I know nothing about this film and selected it purely on the basis of it being a silent film and I wanted to see how that era was represented. IMDb Pro has three reviews available online. EIMA provided about 18 valid results. Not bad.
Baby Doll (Elia Kazan, 1956)
The first time I put in a query for this title I got a modest mix of movie and theater reviews, with over 20 entries in the latter category. As to IMDb Pro it popped up about 30 external reviews. But EIMA is scanning pages directly from the source material of the time when the film was released while IMDb Pro is an aggregator for available reviews, most of which are current. If you are writing a book, or paper, about a film and would like access to the raw source material, would you pony up some of your research funds to pay for this service? That is the question I’ll be posing my colleagues.
The film selections mentioned above screen on TCM in March: Papillon (Monday, the 23rd), The In-Laws (Tuesday, the 24th), Along the Great Divide (Wednesday, the 25th), The Manitou (Thursday, the 26th), Spring Fever (Friday, the 27th), and Baby Doll (Saturday, the 28th). The trial subscription Gene set up for EIMA expires on March 6th – a couple days before my next post on March 8th. Perhaps readers are curious about other titles for me to look into that are also on the TCM horizon? I’ll gladly take some requests.