Now showing in the theater lobby

LOS ANGELES

During the early years of motion pictures, theaters across the country shunned studio-produced promotional displays and instead hired their own artists to paint movie posters that would better entice ticket buyers.

Because they had to work ahead of the film’s schedule, most of the artists never saw the movies they depicted and had to rely on publicity photographs — or their own imaginations.

Then, after the movies finished their runs — usually in a week — new posters would appear and the old ones would disappear, never to be seen again by the public.

Until now.

This weekend, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is releasing “Now Playing,” an oversized coffee-table book jammed with full-page reproductions of the best of lobby art.

An exhibit containing original versions of the posters also has opened for limited showings at the academy’s Mary Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study in Hollywood.

One display features the notable work of O.M. (Otto) Wise, who painted a poster for the dark 1931 drama “The Man Who Came Back.”

A studio-produced poster for the film shows a smiling Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell taken from one of their romantic comedies. It was a common gambit by studios to honey-coat movies that might not appeal to pleasure-seeking ticket buyers.

However, Mr. Wise — working for a theater chain — painted Mr. Farrell with a sallow face and Miss Gaynor as a dope addict, depicting the actual roles they played in the film.

“It seems as if every theater in America had its own in-house poster artist,” says Anthony Slide, author of “Now Playing” and publisher of 73 books about Hollywood, while discussing the theater-commissioned artworks, which started in 1915.

“All the theater chains would have artists designing posters for that chain, the English-born Mr. Slide says.

Yet, he notes, the practice didn’t “make much sense [economically] because all the studios were sending out picture posters, which [the theaters] could buy for 10 cents or 25 cents.

“But the theaters didn’t want those posters,” Mr. Slide explains. “They wanted somebody in-house who understood what the local market wanted, what the audiences wanted, and could sell it to them. Theater owners and managers didn’t feel the studio posters could serve that purpose.”

Mr. Slide adds that certain stars were considered box-office poison because some audiences reacted negatively to their screen personas. “Lillian Gish was really despised,” he says, because of her willowy performances. “So the poster artist would eliminate her name.”

The artists would paint on “canvas, wood, cardboard, anything that was cheap,” Mr. Slide recalls. Oil paints were used initially; watercolors were more popular later because they dried faster.

The results often were remarkable: the late Rudolph Valentino with half-closed eyes in the title role of “Son of the Sheik” — “HIS LAST PICTURE,” the poster reads — or Boris Karloff as “The Mummy” — “It comes to life! To find his lost love!” — or an alluring Joan Crawford in “Our Dancing Daughters.”

The decline of theater artists began in the late 1930s, when the National Screen Service made deals with the studios to exclusively supply coming attractions, posters and other publicity materials to the theaters.

“Now Playing” is dedicated to Jane Burman Powell, widow of publicist and academy board member Charles Powell. She and Lori Goldman Berthelsen undertook the chore of tracking down theater posters and their artists.

In an introduction to “Now Playing,” they remark: “We knew we were not just telling the story of poster art and artists, but we were opening a door to another time, to another era when the moviegoing experience was different — perhaps richer — than it is today and when selling the movies was more art than science.”