Now Playing: Chicago’s history in movie ads

In 2020, movie theaters were one of the first places to shutter, thanks to COVID-19. Theaters everywhere closed, leaving everyone stuck streaming at home.

Albany Park resident Adam Carston went online and got his cinema fix by getting into a time machine of sorts: online newspaper archives. He (virtually) went to closed theaters (remember the State and Lake?) and peeked at grind house and X-rated offerings, playing day and night, through the paper’s movie ads.

“I don’t know if it’s like the repressed Catholicism thing or what, but titillation was really big money here in Chicago,” Carston says. “They all tell a story of what was going on.”

To keep track of his archive dives, he created Windy City Ballyhoo on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. It’s a repository of Chicago movie ads, photographs, and film reviews from the last century. 

“I’ve always been fascinated about how art and media reflect where the culture was and where it is,” Carston says.

Growing up in Oak Forest, Carston was part of the VCR generation.

“People dropped the kids off at a baseball practice. My parents dropped me off at the video store. I’d literally be at the video store for an hour or two,” says Carston, an underage cinema missionary. “I often joke that I was raised by the Three Stooges because [my dad] had like dozens of Three Stooges tapes.”

He also took his growing obsession to school. “Like Taxi Driver, John Waters movies. I watched Blue Velvet in sixth grade and tried to describe it to the kids in class.”

He later went to Loyola and got his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history. Carston calls himself a “jack of all trades,” often hopping from project to project. His work on documentaries includes the recently released Live at Mister Kelly’s. Carston says it was while working on that film that his eyes began to wander.

“Right next to the nightclub ads were movie ads. Sometimes, I’d fall down a rabbit hole of wanting to look at those,” says Carston, giving him the idea for Windy City Ballyhoo in 2020. 

The ads, some dating back to the 1920s, are illustrated with eye-catching images, daring the audience to experience something they’ve never seen before. At any given time, you’ll see pictures of trucks on fire, barreling off the road, almost jumping off the page. Others, from the 1930s, show illustrations of singers and mimeographed pictures of stars. It wasn’t just fun stuff people got to see in the ads. One that’s about 100 years old has the words “BIRTH CONTROL” in bold, in the center of the page, and different showtimes for men and women—presumably to watch the movie separately and not get any immediate ideas. Some theaters had a DIY aesthetic, cutting and pasting images from press kits to make their own ads.

Yijun Pan for Chicago Reader

With countless movie ads from the 20th century, how does Carston decide what to post?

“I take clippings because there’s a major movie or some kind of historical significance. But quite honestly, I just look for a weird story.”

Chicago audiences got more than popcorn and a double feature in those days. 

“During the Depression, a lot of theaters would give away silverware and plates,” Carston says. “It was all this ballyhoo to get people in.”

A “triangle” of theaters in the Loop always drew crowds: The Chicago Theatre, State-Lake Theatre (closed in 1984; ABC 7 now has that space), and the Loop Theater (closed in 1978, demolished in 2005). 

“The Loop, this tiny, little theater, would, per capita, outgross both of them some years,” says Carston, adding that there was one revelation about a Chicago movie theater with an unusual reputation.

“The Woods Theatre was a great movie palace that went into the grind house fare and was really known for its sketchiness,” he says. “People commenting on social media saying that they used to work there, and that they would pre-pop all the popcorn and put it in the basements. And then they would find that rats had somehow burrowed their way through the plastic bag and had their way with the popcorn. And then they would still bring it up to serve people.”

Despite some dinginess, most moviegoing experiences in Chicago were fun events.

“In the 70s, the Congress switched over to a Spanish-language format, and stayed that way for several years. But that’s hardly an anomaly,” says Carston. “In Lincoln Square, the Davis Theater used to show German-language films. These theaters would service their communities.”

Adam Carston’s Windy City BallyhooTwitter: @WCBallyooInstagram: @windycityballyhooFacebook: facebook.com/windycityballyhoo

Another specialty for like-minded moviegoers was adults-only fare, advertised alongside mainstream movies. 

“Pornography was really big business, like hardcore, post-Deep Throat. Hardcore pornography took over mainstream theaters for several years. And we’re talking about a lot of theaters,” Carston comments.

“Michael Todd Theatre and the Cinestage, which is just around the corner from the State and Lake theater—they routinely would play pornography, especially Cinestage became kind of a home for it,” he says, adding that lighter fare, like the Russ Meyer film Vixen!, drew a steady stream of moviegoers.

“It ran for at least a year and a half there and just was constantly selling out and became kind of this, like, sensation in Chicago. And then mind you, that wasn’t hardcore. That was softcore,” Carston notes.

If Carston’s movie theater time machine was actually operational today, he’d go to Chicago’s south side to places like the Regal Theatre. 

“There was Cab Calloway opening for a W.C. Fields film. I’d be down for that in the 1930s,” Carston says. 

One movie had a different kind of marketing campaign for south-side moviegoers.

“There was an Italian film that Roberto Rossellini made called Paisan, and it’s kind of an anthology film with a lot of different stories. And one of the stories is about an African American soldier in Italy after the war and his adventures with this kid,” Carston says. “So when the ads for the south-side theaters where it played came out, they made that guy (Dots Johnson) the star of the movie.”

Windy City Ballyhoo also led Carston to find a new film fanatic friend in a famed Hollywood screenwriter who zoned in on their mutual love for all things weird and wonderful in the world of cinema. Larry Karaszewski (Ed Wood, The People vs. Larry Flynt) grew up in South Bend, Indiana, in the 1970s, and he remembers following the Reader’s Dave Kehr’s reviews religiously.

“The ads became a key part of the movie dream. Looking at the ads now brings back a Proustian memory invoking the essence of the past,” says Karaszewski. He can’t get enough of digital archives.

“I started collecting many old ads myself. Then I discovered Windy City Ballyhoo and found a kindred spirit,” says Karaszewski. “Here were people obsessed with the same goofy crap I was.”

One movie (and Chicago event) Carston is trying to track down is Under Age, from the 1960s. 

“About a Mexican boy or teenager accused of molesting or raping a girl. And there’s a whole trial about it. And supposedly the gimmick was they would have local celebrities on the jury for the film. Here in Chicago, Irv Kupcinet and some other columnists are on the jury and this was at the Loop Theater. I have photos of it. I have ads on it,” says Carston.

“They don’t specify if they prerecorded it or they just put their name on a pamphlet they handed out or yes, they’re on stage. It sounds like a really bizarre scenario.”

Windy City Ballyhoo isn’t just a time capsule of what people were watching; Carston says it presents city history. The film ads show a cultural shift, how times and attitudes have changed, how people weren’t really deterred by ratings or reviews. The ads did the job of social media today: they shout out what you want to see—and what you didn’t even know you wanted to see. They speak to you like they spoke to other Chicagoans who wanted to see a black-and-white image come to life on the big screen.

Carston notes, “I think you can learn a lot about American culture and film history by looking at the movie scene here in Chicago.”

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