Lobby Cards have become a rare sight. These 11” x 14” marketing images are hopelessly out of scale with today’s cavernous multiplexes. But there was a time when these little gems were a vital part of motion picture advertising. I grew up in a small town and our tiny movie theatre had so little street frontage that the manager had to use lobby cards instead of full sized posters to announce coming attractions.
Lobby Cards have been used since the earliest days of commercial cinema:
Tinting the photos soon became popular, even though the idea of a color movie at that time was preposterous.
However some of these tinted cards now seem like a defacement of iconic imagery:
Often they were more interesting than the actual movie:
There was a new Lobby Card for each episode of a serial. For example, in episode 12 of King of the Rocketmen, a wave of disaster strikes when Rocketman’s pants spontaneously combust:
But mainstream films had Lobby Cards as well:
Who can forget the hall of mirrors scene from Lady From Shanghai?
And this offering from Vertigo is a masterful visualization of Jimmy Stewart’s haunting by Kim Novak:
Since the 1970s, Lobby Cards have generally gotten simpler and less concerned with hype: