‘Ballyhoo’: Tribute to Film Showmanship

Peter Jones’ “Ballyhoo: The Hollywood Sideshow” is as irresistible as popcorn as it calls attention to one of the film industry’s most neglected aspects: the promotion of its products.

Nowadays, promotion is accomplished by expensive, ultra-sophisticated media blitzes, but this one-hour documentary takes us back to the business’ early connections to vaudeville and carnivals, when movies were a novelty.

Jones rightly pays tribute to the first great showman, P.T. Barnum, who died two months before the first exhibition of “the flickers” but whose reliance on “humbuggery” paved the way for such gimmickry as Carl Laemmle announcing that Florence Lawrence, the very first movie star, was reported dead in St. Louis, reaping the rewards of front-page publicity when she was discovered very much alive.

This well-researched program begins as a brief but accurate gloss on the history of the movies--throughout, the clips are exceptional--to focus on technological developments, themselves a form of ballyhoo, from sound through Cinemascope.

We learn of the evolution of the star-studded premiere by exhibitor nonpareil Sid Grauman, whose Chinese Theater became world-famous for the celebrity handprints in its cement forecourt. Jones then calls long overdue attention to the late Kroger Babb, who, among others, turned out the phenomenally successful “Mom and Dad,” a crude 1945 cautionary tale about teen pregnancy, complete with lectures and scenes of childbirth requiring separate screenings for men and women.

Jones concentrates on the ‘50s and ‘60s, a golden era for movie ballyhoo. It was a time when the drive-in became a major teen venue, with American International Pictures churning out beach party pix--it’s not for nothing that Frankie Avalon is the special’s affable host--and horror movies aimed directly at high schoolers eager to “make out” while the picture unspooled.

Meanwhile, in the same era, producer-director William Castle flourished with his shameless gimmicks--you just might have gotten a mild jolt from a buzzer under your theater seat while watching his 1959 “The Tingler.”

Somehow AIP’s salty Sam Arkoff eluded Jones’ camera, but he rounded up for interviews Mamie Van Doren, Tab Hunter, director Peter Bogdanovich, critic Roger Ebert, historian Neal Gabler, Babb’s widow Mildred, the colorful David Friedman (who worked for Babb and whose film career has encompassed both a stint in Paramount distribution and the formative years of the adult film industry) and writer-director John Waters, a Castle admirer who from time to time has kept the spirit of ballyhoo alive.

* “Ballyhoo: The Hollywood Sideshow” airs at 7:05 and 11:05 tonight on AMC cable.