The Genius of Exploitation Film Marketing

 

From 1919-1959 exploitation films ruled underground & sometimes even mainstream theatres. Many exploitation classics were created, and the marketing genius behind these films was outrageous but should be celebrated. 

The marketing and storytelling practices revolved around a strict code:

1. The movies were limited to adult-only showings.
2. Performances used to be segregated by gender.
3. Age restrictions.
4. Lectures & clinical nurses would be in attendance.

The films plot & storyline would revolve around:

1. The Innocent: Young man or woman who either gets addicted to drugs, booze, sexual disease, pregnancy, gambling, cigarettes, abortion. Sets up the story to prove that the innocent lacks and needs an education in such a subject.
2. The Corruptor: The person who leads the young innocent astray and down a path of destruction. Pimps, homesexuals, theatrical agent, drug pusher, seducer, prostitute. They will entice the innocent to ''try'' something.
3. The Parents: They are represented as either being good because they educated their children about vice, or bad because they were selfish & too ignorant to teach their kids about the corruptors.
4. The Crusader: Usually is a teacher, cop, physician, public health officer or reporter who comes to the rescue. They are usually having to fight petty moral codes & the status quo of closed minded society. They are the underdog and they address both the characters and the audience.
5. The Charlatan: The physician, snake oil salesman, back alley abortionist, televangelist or any other quack motivated by greed. The crusader works to expose the charlatans evils.

Education is at the center of these early trash exploitation films, the need to protect the youth from nudists,high-flying hop heads, strippers, vice lords, mafia, bad high school girls.

Most of these movie campaign adverts covered the major appeals and bases that drew people to them such as sex & vice:

1. The aftereffects of heterosexual bonding, ''I was an innocent virgin, now a victim of desire.''
2. Blatant sex & nudity. Images and referencea to sex & catch lines, ''See the queens of burlesque in their sensational strip tease dances.''
3. The unusual, aberrant, or forbidden, ''Sex maniacs, murderers, hookers, victims of passion.''
4. Timelines or expose, ''Scoop! The picture that dares expose the naked & shameless truth about the scarlet street of sin. Timely as todays headlines.''
5. Veracity, ''See & know the truth.''
6. Pedagogic appeal, ''This could be your daughter, why shohld she suffer for your ignorance, dont let it happen.''

Film producers like Kroger Babb, Dwain Esper, William Castle, George Hilriman, Raymond L. Friedgen, Edward L. Alperson, Edgar G. Ulmer, George McCall,

James M. Doane, J. G. Sanford, David F. Friedman, Samuel Z. Arkoffs and Joseph E. Levines, Bob Shaye used all the tricks & tactics in the book to get people into the cinemas. 

"ONCE IN A LIFETIME Comes A Presentation That TRULY PULLS NO PUNCHES! Now YOU Can SEE The Motion Picture That DARES DISCUSS and EXPLAIN SEX AS NEVER BEFORE SEEN and HEARD! THE ONE, THE ONLY, THE ORIGINAL...MOM AND DAD...Truly The World’s Most Amazing Attraction! NO ONE UNDER HIGH SCHOOL AGE Admitted Unless Accompanied By Parents!! EVERYTHING SHOWN! EVERYTHING EXPLAINED!"

If you lived in a small town in the 1940s or ’50s, it was virtually impossible not to know about a film called Mom and Dad. Sooner or later a flamboyant publicity man would drive into town, the ads would appear, and the tempestuous debate would begin. Plastered on every available storefront, barn, bus bench, and shoeshine stand was a poster seducing you with an attractive couple in mid-kiss and black bold-faced ballyhoo exploding all around them. And in a black box in the lower left-hand corner:

"Extra! IN PERSON: ELLIOT FORBES, ‘THE SECRETS OF SENSIBLE SEX.’"

Alarmed letters to the editor would appear in the newspaper. Clergymen would express opinions from the pulpit. If you were Catholic, you’d be banned from attending. In some towns the police would send men to check the film for violations of the obscenity statutes. And as soon as the first women-only matinee was screened, at 2 p.m. on a Friday afternoon, the town would blaze with Mom and Dad gossip. Though all but forgotten today, Mom and Dad was so heavily promoted that Time once remarked that the ad campaign "left only the livestock unaware of the chance to learn the facts of life."

Kroger Babb, who billed himself as "America’s Fearless Young Showman," ruled over a vast army of Mom and Dad "roadshow units" from his headquarters in Worthington, Ohio. He used a form of exhibition that has all but disappeared today, called "fourwalling." Instead of booking his film into theaters for a percentage of the box office, he would simply rent the theater outright and take it over for the week or, in smaller markets, just one or two days. He would pay for all advertising and promotion, put his own banners and marquees out front, and turn the theater into a midway attraction, complete with lobby curiosities designed to lure customers. But because he was a pariah in Hollywood, he had to use independent mom-and-pop theaters that weren’t part of the big chains like Paramount and RKO, and he had to fight censorship boards, police forces, judges, clergy, and outraged newspaper editors everywhere he went. The film was in 400 separate court proceedings during its run.

The Blowoff

Babb was an expert at creating a kind of mob psychosis that peaked at the moment the projector started to roll. Watching the film today, it’s all but impossible to recreate the atmosphere of a capacity audience waiting breathlessly to see things they knew were forbidden and probably shocking. It was Babb’s peculiar genius that he was able to evoke the emotions of a horror movie using what is actually one of the blandest, most formulaic stories ever concocted. 

At this point the film would stop entirely and the house lights would come up. Elliot Forbes, an "eminent sexual hygiene commentator," would stride onto the stage and deliver a 20-minute lecture on the need for openness in sex education, the morality of the times, the biology of the body, and what the community can do to avoid the ruination of its youth.

If anyone checked the credentials of Elliot Forbes, he would have discovered that the speaker was the busiest man in the history of the lecture circuit, appearing 78 times a day in cities scattered from Maine to Oregon. There were actually 26 Elliot Forbeses, one for each roadshow, and Babb hired most of them from the ranks of retired or underemployed vaudeville comedians. They knew how to work crowds with a combination of earnestness, humor, and downhome "just folks" patter that would always crescendo at the moment when they held up two paperback books -- one called Man and Boy, the other called Woman and Girl -- and made a spiel for "a set of these vitally important books to be read in the privacy of your own home." Two women in nurse uniforms -- supposedly stationed in the theater to take care of people who fainted or had heart attacks -- would then pass among the crowd collecting money and distributing the volumes.

The books themselves were rehashes of venereal disease and pregnancy information that could be obtained at any public health agency. The Elliot Forbes speech was what is known in the carnival world as a "blowoff," long used in 10-in-one freak shows to hustle additional money from people who had already paid an admission price. In any good blowoff, there’s the constant implication that the "good stuff" is in the attraction you haven’t paid for yet -- in this case, the book. Forbes’ main job was to sell the books, which frequently augmented the box-office take by as much as 50 percent. In 1957, for example, at a four-week showing of Mom and Dad in Baltimore, the box-office gross was $82,000, but 45,000 copies of the books were sold, resulting -- 

By the time Kroger Babb came along, the formula for a sex hygiene movie was so well established that all he did was incorporate every element of every sex hygiene movie in history into a single film. But in search of even better profits, he changed the rules slightly. Many of the old sex-hygiene films had played in grindhouses or marginal theaters or even bars and restaurants. He wanted to break through to the biggest theaters in the country.

Howard W. Babb had gotten the nickname "Kroger" from the name of the grocery store where he worked as a boy growing up in Lees Creek, Ohio. Born in 1906, he was a sportswriter, a newspaper reporter, an ad manager, and, by his late 20s, publicity manager for the Chakeres-Warners theater chain, where he distinguished himself with publicity stunts such as having a man buried alive in front of a theater. He got the exploitation roadshow bug when he hooked up with an outfit called Cox and Underwood, which was peddling an aging sex hygiene film called Dust to Dust that was actually a 1935 film called High School Girl with a live-birth reel slapped onto the end. Proving that he was born to be in the business, it’s the same plot Babb would use in Mom and Dad. (The Forty Thieves frequently quarreled over territories, but they never sued for copyright infringement. Of course, many of them were carnival men, who regarded all cons as ancient and passed down from generation to generation, but they may also have simply sold stories the same way they occasionally sold sideshow acts.)

Anxious to go out on his own, Babb got 20 investors to put up the money to make Mom and Dad. The script was written by Mildred Horn, who would later become his wife, and who would also write Man and Woman and Boy and Girl. To direct he hired William "One Shot" Beaudine (so named because he never did a second take), who dated back to the Bowery Boys serials and had made over 200 B movies. He made the whole film in six days in 1944.

Perhaps the most revolutionary thing Babb did was to give his film such a bland and praiseworthy title. Who could object to a movie called Mom and Dad? This wasn’t a movie about crazed sex maniacs or loose women or pregnant girls or the vice rackets. It was a movie about the education of all the moms and dads in the world, and, in fact, he wanted every mom and every dad to see it. His principal weapon, when he came under attack, was the very ordinariness of his story.

End of the Hygiene Era

Babb was not just prepared for the inevitable censorship battles he would face. He egged them on. He stirred up the Catholics at every opportunity, capitalizing on the church’s "C" rating (for "condemned") of his film. He wrote fake letters to the editor in advance of the film’s arrival in town, hoping there would be controversy. His most successful letter was supposedly written by the anonymous mayor of a small town. The "mayor" explained that he had opposed the showing of Mom and Dad in his town, too, but then the 17-year-old daughter of a local churchgoing couple found herself "in trouble." He saw Mom and Dad with a friend, and as a result had the courage to tell her parents about her predicament. They were shocked, but forgave her. The girl gave birth to a healthy boy, which was adopted by a childless couple. The girl then completed high school and is now engaged to a fine young man. The mayor goes on to thank Babb for having the courage "to tell young people what their parents didn’t." And the letter ends: "P.S. That girl was my daughter."

Babb’s company, Hygienic Productions, sent out an advance man to place letters like this, buy advertising, do mailings, and hold screenings for town fathers and religious leaders. (If the town’s leaders liked the film, a "soft" campaign would be used. If they didn’t like it, a "hard" campaign, advertising it as "the movie self-styled moralists don’t want you to see," would be used. Both campaigns worked.) The advance man would be followed a week later by a crew of four -- including "Elliot Forbes" and two "nurses" -- to actually manage the film during its run. The crews would stay on the road for 20 weeks at a time. Babb even had one all-black crew for black theaters, with Olympic champion Jesse Owens substituting for Elliot Forbes.

As the Mom and Dad exploitation scheme evolved over time, it attracted imitators. By 1950 there were so many sex-hygiene roadshows that they were starting to get in each other’s way, and after a town was "scorched" by a promotional campaign, it would be spoiled for any film arriving later. So four of the films -- Mom and Dad, Street Corner, Because of Eve, and The Story of Bob and Sally -- banded together to form Modern Film Distributors, carving out territories and agreeing not to steal markets.

"He was the greatest showman this country ever saw," says one still awed associate. "People talk about Mike Todd, but Todd needed an expensive item to promote. Krog could take any piece of junk and sell it."Imagine for instance a 1948 filmed passion play out of Lawton, Okla., where telephone poles were visible behind the Cross and the were so thick, on the order of "When're y'll gonna betray me?" that it became known as "the only film that had to be dubbed from English into English."

That picture, you couldn't giveit away, but I said "Nothing's hopeless if it's advertised right,'" Babb remembers now. "I told them to give me a bottle of gin and let me see what I could come up with overnight."

After retitling the film "The prince of Peace" and creating an ad campaign with lines like "Be Brave bring your troubles and your family to history's most sublime event" and "You'll find God - right in there. Babb ended up with a movie that had crowds ilined up even in sinful New York, where The Daily News bannered its success as "The Miracle of Broadway." "We killed 'em." Babb says with satisfaction. "The thing took off like a turpentined pup."

Babb today is in his 70th year, a heavy-set man with slicked-back white hair and still sharp, hooded eyes peering out of a beefy face. He is semi-retired and recovering from a stroke - "Doing nothing the hardest job I ever had in my life - but neither his living in Palm Springs nor his 3.8-carat diamond ring in a gold and platinum seting particularly denote current wealth. "Money never worried me," he says with enviable simplicity. "I could always make it."

Born in the hamlet of Lees Creek, Ohio, Babb still likes to refer to himself, with artful modesty, as "just a country boy with a shoeshine." Called Kroger as a nickname because of his father's fondness for the B.H. Kroger brand of coffee, Babb had that wild variety of jobs that characterizes so many American entrepreneurs. Among things he refereed enough football and basketball games to make Ripley's Believe It Or Not, and staged Depression-era stunts like burying alive one Digger O'Dell right in the center of Wilmington, Ohio. It started one night in 1943 when Babb attended a town meeting in tiny Burkburnett, Tex., called because local high school girls were being impregnated in large numbers by men from a nearby Army Air Corps base. "It was a hell of a meeting, you had all these old biddies squabbling and roasting everybody, they wanted to declare the whole Air Corps off limits," Babb remembers. "Then the idea hit me, that would make a hell of a movie." 

Undaunted, Babb made the film for his own Hygenic Productions company for a bargain-basement $62,000 invested by 20 individuals. Each investor, Babb claims, made back $63,000 for each thousand put in, except for one fellow who pulled out before the film was made and ended up a suicide. Such was the power of "Mom and Dad." Its international grosses have been estimated at anywhere from $40 to $100 million, and even Time Magazine claimed in 1949 that one out of 10 people in the world had seen it. "Mom and Dad" did not flourish because of its birth footage, featuring normal, breech birth and cesarean section, or because of its puerile plot, which Babb himself disparages as dealing with "this dumb high school girl, very beautiful, who wanted to know more about her body, about sex, but every time she asked her mother a question, the mother said, 'Tut, tut, you're too young to know.' So then she went to a party, danced with a good-looking stranger, and she got pregnant."

The success flowed, rather, from Babb's extraordinary promotional abilities. Working from the premise that "You've got to tell 'em to sell 'em." Babb would simply overwhelm a town with exploitation material, even pioneering the use of direct mail "Krog would spend more money on promotion than the theater would normally gross, but our returns would be sensational," remembers K. Gordon "Cagey" Murray, a former Babb associate. "Sometimes we'd find some old wino somewhere, dress him up to look like a streetcorner preacher and stand him on a corner talking about the terrible evils of this movie. People would grab the handbills and head for the theater," where separate shows for men and women, to avoid unsightly embarrassment, were the rule. The result, wrote Time, "left no one but the livestock unware of the chance to learn the facts of life." Even today, Babb's eyes glisten when he says, "We packed 'em!" The piece de resistance here were Babb's newspaper ads, still stirring models of enticement. "It Happens Somewhere Every Night!" roared the copy. "One mistake . . . can ruin an entire lifetime of happiness. So bold - it's shocking! So human - you'll both laugh and cry! So wonderful - you'll be lucky to get in!" And the real clincher, "You May Faint But You'll Learn Facts!"

Patrons of "Mom and Dad" got more than a movie, they got "Two Nurses in Attendance" plus a lecture by "Elliot Forbes, Fearless Hygiene Commentator," strategically placed midway in the film. The purpose of the lecture was to sell books, either "Father and Son" or "Mother and Daughter," depending on the audience, antediluvian sex manuals that cost next to nothing to print but a whole dollar to buy. "They made you feel you had to buy this thing or you were the most ignorant person in the world," remembers one spectator. And this didn't happen in just one city at a time, oh no. In his salad days Babb had 300 units on the road at the same time, each complete with its own nurses and its own lecturer, and to this day he continues to run into men who tell him. "You don't know me Mr. Babb, but my name was Elliot Forbes."

In today's carefree, enlightened times, when films like Mom" and Dad" could probably be shown on television - "Oh, it'd be nothing, very tame, it'd be a Sunday school picture," Babb himself says - it is hard to imagine what a fuss its showing stirred up in the late 1940s. Yet grown men were known to faint at the "clap opera" sections, medical reels exhibiting the aftereffects of venereal disease - "In Minneapolis, we had 'em laying there by the dozens on marble benches in the lobby, like slabs in a morgue" - and by Babb's own count the film was taken either to court or before local censorship boards 428 times. "Oh, my God, you don't have any idea of the vigor with which opponents pursued this film, it was absolutely fierce," remembers Henry Fox of Arent, Fox, Kintner, Plotkin and Kahn, Washington's second-largest law firm, who supervised some of "Mom and Dads" litigation. "Its almost incredible as you thing back, but censors called it salacious, obscene, they swore they'd die before they'd show the thing."

This combination of outraged decency and lusty curiosity led to startling crowd scenes for "Mom and Dad," scenes which Babb cannily photographed and used to stimulate further throngs. And while riots were not exactly commonplace, things did tend to happen. "In Hamilton, Ohio, they came like a stampede of wild animals," Babb remembers. "They took the box office right off its foundation, they moved it clear through the glass doors into the lobby, and the girl inside with it." And in Phoenix, "They had to bring the fire department and flush men out the front of the theater because the cashier had gone berserk, berserk, and had sold 2,000 tickets for a theater that had 800 seats." But most astonishing of all was what happened in New Orleans. "The first time we played there, the priests from the various parishes came down early that morning and put themselves in a chain by locking arms, they put a complete chain around the front of the theater and no one could get through, it was like a football line," Babb says, still sort of amused.

"Well, various women said they weren't Catholics and went up to the line of priests and demanded to get through. When they refused some woman hauled off and slapped one of the priests and it started a real fist fight. It was a sort of knock-down, drag-out situation and the priests finally yielded."

Or so it seemed until the next time "Mom and Dad" showed up in town and Babb got a call from his theater manager. "He said we can't open and I said "Why" and he said. 'We have no street in front of the theater.' 'No street, what do you mean no street?' Well, during the night they had come in there with bulldozers and they had scooped up the entire street, the sidewalk, everything, right up to the building's edge and there was like a 6.8, 10-foot drop there in front of the theater," Babb, ever undaunted, built a quickie box office in the alley behind the theater, sent people in through the exits and ended up playing to capacity for "I don't know how many weeks." 

Babb never quite duplicated his success with "Mom and Dad" with the other films he promoted, but he did create a group of splendid ad lines that even today have a touch of poetry about them. "Karimoja," an African documentary, was advertised as "They wear nothing but the wind," while "Kipling's Women" was hailed as "He had a way with woman: the only way."

And then there was a film "by this foreign director, he became famous, I can't think of the fellow's name," that Babb was called on to promote. The director was Ingmar Bergman, who saw "Monika" become his first American success after Babb tagged it with one of his immortal lines, "The Story of a Bad Girl." Yet though films whose campaigns he worked on still turn up at an occasional theater, Babb has pretty much taken himself out of the movie business. "The pictures just got so bad, so filthy, they call 'em sexy but that's what I call 'em," says the man who once outraged America, shaking his head, "I just didn't have any taste for 'em."

What Kroger Babb does retain, however, is his absolute, almost religious faith in the all-conquering powers of salesmanship. "He had a theory," explains attorney Henry Fox, "That if there was a crowd of at least three people standing around, you ought to be selling them something. It was an absolute sin if you didn't." 

By releasing movies of questionable quality that were propelled by the invention of marketing techniques that leaned into sex, shame, women of ill repute and nudity that made the films irresistible to repressed moviegoers.

Among the films Babb released were Monika, the Story of a Bad Girl – Kroger bought the American rights to an Ingmar Bergman film and cut out all the meaningful stuff to wind up with a crisp 62 minutes worth of sex scenes; She Shoulda Said No!, a cautionary tale of sex and marijuana use; and the Christ story Prince of Peace that was made so cheaply that telephone poles could be glimpsed in shots of the crucifix. 

Babb was a salesman his whole life.  As a young man he had invented gimmicks to promote films, like giving away bags of groceries to raffle winners.  In Babb’s vision of humanity, you had to “Tell ‘em to sell ‘em.”  He became a specialist in buying the rights to grade-Z films about prurient subjects, then creating buzz about them to increase ticket sales.  He repackaged a 1938 film called “Child Bride” and was opposed in print by an Indiana film critic named Mildred Horn.  His solution?  He made love to her, and Mildred became his partner for life.  She wrote the screenplay for the 1945 film “Mom and Dad”, one of the most profitable films of all time. Press kits supplied by Babb provided a template for creating controversy weeks before the film would be shown in each town.  Babb and his employees would write emotional letters to the editor of local papers using pseudonyms, about how seeing “Mom and Dad” had changed their lives or saved them from unwanted pregnancy.  Leaflets were given free to local churches to distribute.  Some were in support, and others portrayed moral outrage that the film would be shown.  It created tremendous local interest in whether or not SEX (gasp) was going on between young people, innocent and ignorant of the risks of pregnancy and disease. Or you might see Olympic Medalist Jesse Owens, who gave the talk to black audiences.  They sold sex information pamphlets (written by Mildred, Babb’s wife) similar to the pamphlets shown onscreen.  It must have been an amazing carnival ride.  I wish I could have seen it in theaters, but I was about eleven when the show stopped touring.  Babb was sued for obscenity more than 400 times over this film, and he won again and again on the basis of “educational value”.

"They cannot be obtained on newsstands or at booksellers, or anywhere else. No, these books are offered exclusively to the patrons of this presentation at a slight charge over the actual costs of printing and distribution. That price -- on dollar ... Now think of it: for less than the cost of a carton of cigarettes, you can have a set of the vitally important books to be read in the privacy of your won home, and I believe with all my heart that a set of these books belongs on the bedside table of every home in this great land..."

 -- Eliot Forbes

If you bought that load of crap, then you bought yourselves a copy of The Digest of Hygiene for Mother and Daughter or The Manual of Hygiene for Father and Son (-- penned by Babb's wife, and Mom and Dad co-screen-writer, Mildred Horn). Now, I have no idea if those editions were segregated like the audiences were (-- anybody else remember the day in High School Health class when the girls had to go watch a film in the library while the boys had to go and watch one in the cafeteria?). Either way, most of the information in these pamphlets was outdated before they were even printed, and the fact that Babb had 25 different touring companies roaming the country at the same time, each with their very own Eliot Forbes to stump for safe sex never discouraged sales all that much. "Nothing's hopeless if it's advertised right."

 -- Kroger Babb

Lightning never did strike again for Babb after Mom and Dad, though. His more famous follow ups include trying to cash in on actress Lila Leeds' drug bust (-- along with fellow actor, Robert Mitchum,) with She Shoulda Said No (1949); Karamojia (1954) -- kind of a proto-mondo movie about a blood-drinking tribe of Africans; The Prince of Peace, a truly atrocious religious film out of Oklahoma with the promise of a new Bible for every paying customer; he also chopped-up Ingmar Bergman's Summer with Monkia (1953) and re-packaged as the nudie-flick The Story of a Bad Girl; and last, and least, a badly dubbed Italian version of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1965).

During the intermission of his films and after the showings, books relevant to the subject of the film were sold. Mom and Dad's distributor Modern Film Distributors sold over 45,000 copies of Man and Boy and Woman and Girl, written by Babb's wife, netting an estimated $31,000. According to Babb, these cost about eight cents to produce, and were sold for $1 apiece. While Modern Film was able to sell 45,000 on its own, Babb estimates sales of 40 million, citing "IRS figures." This sort of companion selling would become common practice for Babb: with the religious film The Lawton Story (AKA-Prince of Peace), he would sell Bibles and other spiritual literature; and with his fidelity film Why Men Leave Home books featuring beauty tips. With other films, Babb would try different approaches. For She Shoulda Said No!, an anti-marijuana film of the 1950s, he highlighted the sexual scenes and arranged "one-time-only" midnight showings, claiming that his company was working with the United States Treasury Department to release the film "in as many towns and cities as possible in the shortest possible length of time" as a public service. David F. Friedman, another successful exploitation filmmaker of the era, has attributed the "one-time-only" distribution to a quality so low that Babb wanted to cash in and move to his next stop as fast as possible. At each showing of a film, a singing of "The Star-Spangled Banner" was also required.

As well as being at the forefront of the battles over censorship and the motion picture censorship system, the exploitation genre faced numerous challenges during the 1940s and 1950s. It was estimated that Babb was sued over 400 times just for Mom and Dad. He would often use the supposed educational value of the films as a defense, also recommending it to theater owners; in his pressbook for Karamoja, he wrote, "When a stupid jerk tries to outsmart proven facts, he should be in an asylum, not a theater." Despite the criticism that Babb drew for Mom and Dad, in 1951 he received the first annual Sid Grauman Showmanship Award, presented by the Hollywood Rotary Club in honor of his accomplishments over the years.

Babb cheaply acquired the rights to what would become "She Shoulda Said No!" shortly after Robert Mitchum and Lila Leeds were arrested for marijuana use. Its original producer had struggled to get it distributed as Wild Weed, and Babb quickly presented it as The Story of Lila Leeds and Her Exposé of the Marijuana Racket, hoping that the title would draw audiences. When it failed to stir up much interest, Babb instead focused on the one scene of female nudity, using a photo of Leeds in a showgirl outfit, and retitled it "She Shoulda Said 'No'!", with taglines such as "How Bad Can a Good Girl Get . . . without losing her virtue or respect???" According to Friedman, Babb's midnight presentation of the film twice a week made more money than any other film at the same theater would earn over a full run; Friedman proceeded to use the film in his own roadshow double features. Another film, Karamoja, was marketed as a shocking portrayal of a tribe from Uganda who wore "only the wind and live[d] on blood and beer". Scenes included "the bleeding of cattle and drinking of the warm blood, and self-mutilation as a form of ornamentation", as well as a full-color circumcision scene. Karamoja proved less controversial than many of Babb's other films and grossed less.

Babb suffered from various ailments toward the end of his life, including a stroke. He retired in 1977, at 70, and died of heart failure (due to complications from diabetes) on January 29, 1980, in Palm Springs, California. His gravestone reads, "His many trips around and all over the world began in Centerville and end here in Lees Creek."

Alfred Hitchcock's techniques and symbolism in creating suspense

“There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.” -Alfred Hitchcock

In a nutshell, he gave the audience information of danger that the protagonist did not have, he would show the viewer what might happen. But there was a lot more to it than that Hitchcock often made use of subjectivity for a lot of voyeuristic purposes. Hitchcock’s characters had the uncanny ability to mimic the movie audience by a basic instinct to ogle an unassuming subject. But this technique is not one of Hitchcock’s creations and in fact named Lev Kuleshov as his inspiration. This technique is known as “The Kuleshov Effect.” Apparently, the basis of suspense always revolves around the fact that the film audience is constantly anticipating what can happen next in a given narrative situation and can manipulate the spectators in such a way as to generate suspense. When the audience is repeatedly reminded of the possibility of an event, this fact allows the building of suspense and more importantly the maintenance of tension throughout the narrative so that the identification of the audience with a relevant story does not decrease.

Subjectivity

By rhythmically repeating this technique, Hitchcock was able to cultivate suspense in a lot of his movies. He periodically switched from the ogler to the ogled which led to building the action. What resulted from this was a feeling and anticipation of utter helplessness as you watch the character observe a dangerous situation unfold and you see he or she proved incapable of preventing the spectacle.

In the movie Rear Window, Hitchcock can build the suspense the audience feels by building the one felt by the character. This way the audience feels like they are one with the character or are sharing something personal and intimate together. 

Hitchcock believed that information and suspense went hand in hand, he believed in showing the audience what the character was unaware of. If something was going to harm your character in the future, show it at the beginning scene.

Using information to create suspense

Then you let the scene play like there’s nothing wrong. From time to time, remind the audience of the looming danger. This way you continuously build up the suspense level. Remember, the character is unaware of the coming danger. One method Hitchcock used in increasing the suspense level was by having the camera playfully roam around looking for something or someone suspicious. This way, the audience not only feels like they’re involved in solving the mystery, but they also feel like they’re one step ahead of the character.

His use of montage

Another method Hitchcock applied was in dividing action into a series of close-ups that were then shown in succession. This is a basic technique in cinematography. However, you should not make the mistake of thinking it is the same as throwing random shots together as you would see in a fight sequence.

This is a more subtle approach. First, Alfred Hitchcock starts with a close-up of a hand, then an arm, then you’ll see a face, followed by a gun falling to the floor, all of which are tied together to tell a story. This allowed him to portray an event by showing different pieces of it and gaining control over the timing. You can also use this method to hide parts of an event from the audience so that their mind is engaged.

A simple story

The confusing and overly complex story requires the audience to memorize quite a bit. It’s hard to squeeze out suspense from stories like that. The key to Hitchcock’s raw energy in his movies is the simplistic linear stories he adopts.

They are usually easy for the audience to follow and grasp. Your screenplay should be streamlined, so it offers the highest dramatic impact. Abstract stories tend to bore audiences. This is why Hitchcock mostly used crime stories that were filled with a lot of spies, assassinations, and people constantly running from the police. Plots like these aren’t necessary for all movies, but they are the easiest to play on fear.

No clichés

Clichés are boring and easy to predict. When you create suspense the best characters are those with hard to predict personalities, make decisions on a whim instead of what is expected from the previous buildup. Audiences tend to find such characters much more realistic which makes it easier for something to happen to them.

Many of you might have heard of the term “MacGuffin” floating out there in the ether, but what the is it? The answer is not that straightforward. Legendary director Alfred Hitchcock coined the phrase back in the days of his film 39 Steps and used it throughout his career.When asked what a MacGuffin was Hitchcock told this story:

A man asks, “Well, what is a MacGuffin?” You say, “It’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish highlands.” Man says, “But there are no lions in the Scottish highlands.” Then you say, “Then that’s no MacGuffin.”

In fiction, a MacGuffin (sometimes McGuffin or maguffin) is a plot device in the form of some goal, desired object, or another motivator that the protagonist pursues, often with little or no narrative explanation. The specific nature of a McGuffin is typically unimportant to the overall plot. The most common type of McGuffin is a person, place, or thing (such as money or an object of value). Other more abstract types include victory, glory, survival, power, love, or some unexplained driving force.

Editing

Hitchcock’s weapon of choice is editing. He intercuts shots of an unaware character with shots of the element of danger. For instance, in “The Birds’ (1963), when Melanie Daniels is riding a motorboat to the bay, she is attacked by a bird. It is a quick shot and we see a drop of blood. With the bird established as the threat, he can go on to create tension in a later scene where Melanie is sitting in a park, smoking a cigarette. Shots of her calmly smoking are intercut with shots of birds crowding on to a jungle gym behind her, one by one. Her shots are longer and those of the birds are quicker, lasting only a few second each. The final shot of her relaxed face lasts almost 30 seconds before she looks up to see a bird. And then when the film cuts to the jungle gym, it is crawling with tens of black birds perched on the bars. It is quietly terrifying. Moreover, we can hear children in a nearby school singing an eerie, monotonous song throughout the scene.

Tracking Shots

Camera movement can provide a much-needed layer of visual storytelling to a scene, but Hitchcock takes this a step further, using camera movement to lull the audience in.   In many of his murderous scenes, Hitchcock starts by moving the camera with the subject throughout the space. As Detective Milton Arbogast (Martin Balsam) in Psycho walks up the stairs of the Bates’ house, the camera moves up the stairs with him. The audience knows that Mrs. Bates is somewhere in the house, and the camera opens up the space behind Arbogast, filling us with terror as we try to anticipate what direction Mrs. Bates will emerge from. After Arbogast is attacked, he falls down the stairs and the camera follows him, bookending the scene with the two tracking shots. 

Another example of this is in the final scene in Vertigo. As Scottie (James Stewart) and Judy (Kim Novak) climb the tower, a dolly zoom (or the Vertigo zoom) takes us to the top. We are following the action while also becoming disoriented in the space. This mimics how both of the characters feel as the suspense of the scene heightens. The camera movement intentionally disarms the audience as we assume it is just a simple shot of someone in motion. On a closer look, the camera works subconsciously, manipulating space to reflect the state of mind the character is entering. When the character is firmly in a specific state of mind, Hitchcock’s genius locks in with a static camera.

Static Camera

While a camera in motion can feel naturalist and familiar, the static camera creates an eerie language that forces us to watch what is unfolding on screen, after Hitchcock lulls his audience into a false place of familiarity. 

In The Birds, the camera stops tracking Melanie (Tippi Hedren) as sits down near a playground. The camera remains static as it watches her, cutting to the playground behind her that is slowly being taken over by birds. As more and more birds appear in each shot, the audience begins to fear for the unaware Melanie, becoming desperate for her to simply turn around. The lack of movement mimics one of the ways we respond to a threat: freezing. Hitchcock has complete control over how we interact with a scene, and he forces the audience to watch the tension building while knowing there is nothing they can do about it. The audience cannot flee or fight. Instead, they must wait for something to happen. 

Hitchcock was hyper-aware that he had control over how the audience watched a scene. The suspense is built by his refusal to let the audience look away from what could happen. That is why the audience is relieved when Melanie looks back and sees all of the birds because we no longer have to anticipate what will happen.

Hollywood film coverage

Coverage hasn’t changed much throughout the history of cinema. Classic Hollywood coverage often starts with a long shot that goes to a medium shot, then a close-up, and ends with a long shot. You can find this style of coverage in most films because it works. Why change something that works? 

Well, Hitchcock does classic coverage with a twist. The twist comes with the final long shot which is often positioned from a high angle. The camera, sometimes moving away from its subject, puts the audience at arm's length from the subject to show the character's emotions or state of mind in the scene. The effect can be used as a release from the suspense, but Hitchcock also uses it to build tension in the space, manipulating a character's size in the space, often making them look small and insignificant

The Mis en Scene

The way that things like the set were set up also created suspense.  For example, the way that Hitchcock chose to have the Bates’ residence over looking the motel, eliciting an ominous feeling.  In addition, the house is just downright creepy with a (supposed) human silhouette standing by the window, where one could assume nothing good is happening inside. also particularly enjoyed the way Hitchcock situated the Mis en Scene so that the audience did not know that Norman was the one committing the murders, dressed as his mother. For example, the above shower curtain blocking the view of Norman. Psycho only proved more to me Hitchcock’s abilities to create horror and suspense not only through his storylines, but also through the way he shot most of his films, and how he directed them.

Let the audience’s imagination create the shock and horror

The human imagination is a funny little thing. It can take information, and create something far more terrifying than what is happening on screen. This is why so many movie monsters are hidden in the shadows until the end of the film. Keeping the creature out of frame builds a specific type of fear that is unattainable if the creature is shown. 

Certain elements in storytelling can transfer into the mind of the audience, forcing them to participate in the film. Many films treat the audience as a spectator, but doing this will eliminate any chance of suspensefully engaging with the audience. Be subtle and picky about what the audience does and doesn’t see in the frame, and let their minds do the work for you. These three lessons in suspense from Hitchcock will help you hone your ability to create genuine suspense in your screenplay. Don’t be afraid to play with audience expectations when you deliver specific information in a scene, but make sure that the information being presented has weight in the overall story.

The “bomb under the table” analogy

Hitchcock believed that a simple scene about four people sitting around a table, talking about anything until a bomb went off unexpectedly creates ten seconds of shock. What if that same scene took place but the people around the table knew that there was a bomb under the table the entire time?

The emotional response of the audience will be different because you’ve given them a little bit more information about the scene. When the audience knows something that the characters don’t know, that otherwise mundane sequence of dialogue becomes much more enthralling because the audience knows what is going to happen. 

Suspense forces the audience to engage with the story. The audience wants the people at the table to stop talking about their meaningless topic of conversation and see that there is a bomb about to blow them to smithereens. If you want to be particularly cruel to your audience, then that bomb under the table shouldn’t go off. You’ve suspended the audience in suspense and they are waiting for the explosion, but nothing happens. This will send the audience into a frenzy because they were denied proper relief. It doesn’t matter if the bomb goes off or not, but you’ve given the audience the information needed to keep them on the edge of their seats. Just because they’ve pieced a story together with the information presented doesn’t mean that you have to follow the story.

Limiting information

Rear Window is full of suspense and it definitely doesn’t disappoint. There are many effects that Hitchcock has used but there are a few that stand out more than the rest.

One of these effects would be when Lars Thorwald is removing items from his apartment in a large case in the early hours of the morning. Soon after he returns then leaves again with the case. We know that Thorwald is acting suspicious but and we want to know why. Hitchcock has purposely limited our information by confining our point of view to that of Jeff. Hitchcock has drawn us into to participating through intellectual participation. This builds the suspense and engages us more in the film and particularly what Thorwald is doing.

In a different scene, Hitchcock uses parallel editing to build suspense. Lisa is rummaging through Thorwald’s apartment trying to search for clues. In this scene we have two views from Jeff’s point of view. One of these is Lisa searching the apartment and another of the hallway leading to Thorwald’s apartment. Thorwald had previously left the apartment after Jeff making a fake phone call to Thorwald telling him to meet him in a restaurant. After he leaves, Lisa enters his apartment via the window and after looking for a few minutes, she finds Mrs Thorwald’s wedding ring. As we see this, we also see Thorwald coming up the hallway towards his apartment and we know that neither one knows the other is on the opposite side of the door. This captures the perfect parallel editing while building up suspense. We are helpless as an audience to helping her and so is Jeff because of his broken leg but luckily Jeff has called the police and they arrive just in time.

In another scene Jeff is waiting in his apartment as Thorwald attempts to enter. The suspense was built up very effectively by using cross cutting. The way the camera cuts back and forth between Thorwald who is slowly getting closer to Jefferies while Jefferies is frantically trying to reload more camera flashes to blind Thorwald is incredibly effective when trying to build suspense. Not only does the camera cut back and forth but also the actions of the individuals in the shot build’s up suspense even more. Cross cutting is a brilliant way to build suspense and Alfred Hitchcock does it with excellent precision. In this scene as well, Hitchcock uses sound to build up suspense. After the police leave with Lisa, Jeff loses sight of Thorwald. This happens after he realises that Jeff has been spying on him. At this point he does not know Thorwald is or what he’s doing and then suddenly Jeff’s phone rings. He answers and there is no sound on the end of the phone and the absence of sound builds up even more suspense. Soon after we hear the loud footsteps of someone, most certainly Thorwald. Next, we hear the sound of someone attempting to open the door.

As can be seen by these examples given, Hitchcock lives up to his nickname “The Master of suspense”. He shows this by the cinematic techniques he uses.in his shots. He uses the point of view of one of the characters to limit our information, parallel editing, cross cutting and sound all to create suspense.

Patterns of Suspense; Suspense as a Narrative Process

Another device Hitchcock uses is patterns of suspense, used the whole way through his narratives, through the juxtaposition of local suspense with a global suspense. This technique involves adding strands of suspense throughout a narrative, within the overall suspense pattern of a film, Hitchcock devises clearly identifiable phases of suspense, nodes of localized suspense. It is the transition from these back to the main line of suspense that both involves, and shifts the audience. Hitchcock varies the patterns used- creating a different tension in audiences each time. Timing plays a lot of importance in this– in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1965), “Hitchcock has realized that suspense cannot be produced in an instant, but must be built up carefully. We are ensnared gradually via curiosity, suspicion, apprehension and worry.” (Hitchcock; Suspense, Humour and Tone; p.26) I found a few other examples of how he creates suspense. 

Rear Window is a prime example of how Hitchcock works with cumulative, multi-levelled suspense. This is the pitting of one suspense situation against another – the effect can be “…to complicate the notion of suspense as a method for obtaining audience involvement by constructing a rather bifurcatory centrifugal trajectory into, and viewpoint upon, the narrative worlds.” (p31) The ‘Miss Lonelyhearts” storyline in ‘Rear Window’ starts out as self-contained unit in the narrative whole. As the main line of suspense builds (that regarding Thorwald murdering his wife), her storyline becomes a source of distraction for both the film’s characters and the audience. In the film’s final sequence it is Jeffries’ phoning of the police for Miss Lonelyhearts suicide attempt that endangers Lisa as he misses seeing Thorwald return to the apartment.

This local suspense competes with the main suspense by literally delaying the progression of that main narrative line – increasing the audience’s tension at seeing it resolved. By slowing action down almost to a stopping point, Hitchcock draws our attention to the “…waiting , delaying tactic on which all suspense depends….and consequently realize suspense’s potential ability to produce narrative stasis if the flow of information and the trajectory towards resolution are thwarted to an abnormal degree.” 

We see a similar device in ‘Psycho’ – where Hitchcock pulls the viewer away from the film’s true dramatic centre. He uses the film’s opening moments to establish a ‘red herring’ storyline, where the localized storyline of Marion stealing the money is falsely set up as the main suspense storyline. This is reinforced by the opening title sequence and first moments of the film – which also set up a ‘false’ sense of dread (echoed again when Marion is in the car) – which quickly dissipates. “The film therefore mixes up and reworks the various stages of suspense in a way that is much more disruptive and unsettling than a gradual, predictable build-up of tension.” The effect of starting the film with this heightened, almost hysterical tone is that we can never really return to a baseline of normal tone – after the film’s true horrors start to occur. By starting at an advanced stage of suspense, the film has nowhere to go but beyond suspense to even deeper fear and horror. Hitchcock maintains fine control – the fact that these ensuing moments of horror are intrusive and quick only contributes to audience anxiety by denying us the chance to absorb the shock. The overall effect of Hitchcock’s patterning of suspense storylines in “Pyscho” is to create a powerful tension that never really gets resolved. 

Suspense and Point of View 

Hitchcock uses a technique through the identification of the audiences and their viewpoint- getting them involved in the scene itself. The protagonists viewpoint is one that most audiences strive to be part of- Hitchcock uses this to undermine the spectators stability and therefore evoke responses to narrative.

An example of this, is shown in Rear Window (1954). The viewer’s perspective is linked completely to the perspective of the protagonist who is the ultimate spectator, a wheelchair bound photographer spying out of his window. Hitchcock is making our identification with the hero absolutely self-conscious – drawing attention to a cinematic narrative device that is usually functioning invisibly. The result is a constant tension between what we see and what is actually occurring, “Jeffries functions as author as well as spectator, piecing together (and possibly inventing) the story of the murder.” 

As the hero of Rear Window is ultimately a good guy, this device this is less subversive than it is in a film like Vertigo, where we are being asked to share the perspective of a less stable and attractive character. As in Rear Window, where Hitchcock played with the frame of perspective by constricted Jeffries (and therefore the audience’s) point of view by having the hero physically removed from the action – in Vertigo Hitchcock links us to a protagonist who own vision is impaired by severe bouts of vertigo. As the film progresses the protagonist’s perspective is even further befogged, and his point of view is so severely undermined that the mistaken identities of victim and victimizer lead to the film’s climax.

Feet = safety, dramatic introduction to a character, personality differences, lack of safety, sense of place

Hands = anxiety and shock, interact with objects, objects are evidence of a crime, uneasiness

Eyes = shows thought process, the mind at work, show what they are looking at

Watch the listening

Proximity to the actors faces

Close up - nervousness or suspicion

Behind shot - denial

Side - guilt

Wide shot - emotional distance

High - objective or supernatural

The closer to the face equal more emotion.

Tracking away means its beyond our control

Tracking from wide to close u can find a hidden secret

Cutting from wide to close = shock

Following an actor emphasizes emotion

Moving the camera to the next shot instead of cutting holds onto tension

Long stationary camera shot allows opposing forces to converge within the screen space line in Marnie with the office cleaner.

Fast cutting is impressionistic can stretch out a fast event or evoke things not seen on the screen for the audiences imagination

Rules on How to Survive a Celebrity Scandal & Make a Comback

The most basic strategy follows a tried-and-trusted story arc. The classic scandal begins, of course, with the initial disgrace. This is quickly followed by a heartfelt mea culpa, rehab, some good works, a soft-touch interview on daytime TV, the public support of an understanding spouse and the final triumphant comeback with lessons learnt and a new album/movie/cabinet post in the pipeline. And the public plays their part because, while we love to see the rich and famous fall flat on their faces, we also love a good comeback story.

1 Get Out In Front Of The Story - The really good PR person will find out about the scandal just before it breaks, usually through media contacts. And they will do their level best to get their client's retaliation in first and put the most positive spin possible on the story. The classic way to do this is to use one gossip columnist to rubbish the scandal about to be broken by a rival. The story should be along the lines of "My family have been deeply hurt by these totally unfounded claims that I had an affair with our former nanny who, sadly, we had to let go after she became unstable. "And we are now prepared to help her get the professional help she desperately needs." If a celeb can muddy the waters enough, it might just head off a full-blown scandal. 

 2 Be Ready to Say Sorry -- A Lot - When Ben Dunne flew back from Florida on a grey Sunday morning in 1992, the papers were full of lurid tales of cocaine, call girls and panic attacks. The natural instinct for any person would be to find a deep hole somewhere and crawl into it. But the then Dunnes Stores supremo, possibly with the help of some very good PR advice, decided to invite journalists, one by one, into his home and talk frankly about how he had hurt his family and his friends. The media were shocked to have such open access and the public almost immediately came to see Big Ben as a basically decent man who made a bad mistake. There was no doubting his sincerity (this writer was one of those who interviewed Mr Dunne that morning). But it was also a classic case of the mea culpa defence and a shining example for any future Irish celebs encountering trouble. 

 3 Concoct an Explanation -- No Matter How Ludicrous -- And Stick To It - When Eddie Murphy was pulled over by the Los Angeles Sherriff's Department on a spring night in 1997, with a transsexual prostitute in his car, he was not -- repeat not -- soliciting kinky sex. No, Eddie (as he explained to the cameras later) was actually just being a good Samaritan. "I'm just being a nice guy," said Eddie as he blinked into the camera lights. "I was being a good Samaritan. It's not the first hooker I've helped out. I've seen hookers on corners and I'll pull over and they'll go: 'Oh you're Eddie Murphy, oh my God,' and I'll empty my wallet out to help.' Did anybody believe him? Well, Eddie did have plausible deniability and has gone on to make a string of successful family comedies for Disney. After all, if Bill Clinton could look us in the eye and state: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman", then it's possible we'll believe anything. 

 4 Keep Smiling - Inside, Victoria Beckham must have been harbouring bloody thoughts about a particularly sensitive part of David's body and an electric hedge trimmer. But when the Rebecca Loos story broke in 2004, the Posh'n'Becks PR machine swung into action and the couple were soon pictured cavorting on the ski slopes of Courchevel. Funnily enough, the "We've Never Been Happier" snaps were taken by Posh's favourite paparazzo, who just happened to be driving past their secluded chalet. And while the Beckhams did make lots of noise about suing Ms Loos and various newspapers, their lawyers never did get around to issuing writs. Still, at least Brand Beckham has survived and prospered (which is more than we can say about Posh's singing career).

5 Do Good Works - We're not suggesting Jonathan Ross should spend the next five years running an orphanage in Bangladesh. But we can expect to see the suspended BBC chat-show host appearing -- in a low- key way -- at a lot of charity events over the coming months; walking the red carpet and looking relaxed, confident and in no way desperate to get back on TV. Former British cabinet minister John Profumo was involved in the affair that, for many, heralded the start of the Swinging Sixties and the end of the stuffy empire and the deference that kept the sins of the rich and powerful out of the daily papers. Profumo was genuinely horrified at the scandal he had caused and, shortly after leaving office, he volunteered to clean toilets at a shelter for the homeless in the East End of London. Profumo worked for the charity for the rest of his life and ended up raising huge sums of money for worthy causes. "He had to be persuaded to lay down his mop and lend a hand running the place," said one colleague after his death in 2006. 

 6 Brazen It Out - Also known as the George Michael Defence. If you are caught soliciting a cop in a public toilet, make a song and a video about it and get the public to love you even more. After all, if you are going to go down, you might as well go down singing and dancing to a catchy tune.

7 The number of transgressions matters - A single misdeed can be explained away, especially when the person responsible has built up years of good will. Amber Heard accused Johnny Depp of physical abuse, but his previous partners haven’t reported the same treatment, so some fans have rationalized that she made it all up. Despite troubling photos of her bruised face, Depp doesn’t seem to have lost any jobs. Compare that to Cosby. It was no secret that Cosby had been accused of sexual assault in the past, but who wanted to believe that Dr. Huxtable was a predator? So the news media and the public chalked up one or two accusers to aberrations. But when 60 women stepped forward with strikingly similar stories, it became much harder to ignore. Regardless of what happens with Cosby’s legal woes, his career is over.

8 The justice system doesn’t dictate public sentiment - Long before he was famous, Nate Parker was tried for rape in 1999 and found not guilty. But that wasn’t enough to stop the backlash when allegations against him resurfaced earlier this year, casting a major cloud over the opening of his “Birth of a Nation.” Until then, he had seemed poised to conquer Hollywood as the latest actor-turned-auteur. Now the prospects for his film, and his future as a filmmaker, are looking less rosy. It turns out that circumstances matter. Parker was an athlete at Penn State at the time he avoided charges — the very place where Jerry Sandusky abused kids with impunity for so many years — which placed the old allegations against him into a troubling narrative. Then there was the bombshell that his accuser committed suicide in 2012. In the end, “Birth of a Nation” bombed at the box office. Now the once-surefire Oscar nominee isn’t looking like such a lock anymore. Meanwhile, Roman Polanski was accused of raping a 13-year-0ld girl in 1977. He pleaded guilty to a lesser charge in exchange for a lighter sentence. But when it seemed like the judge was going to renege on the plea deal, Polanski fled the country. He has been living in France for the most part since then. Polanski has released nearly a dozen movies while in exile. His biggest hit was “The Pianist,” in 2002, a movie that also won him the best director Oscar. He was also nominated for an Academy Award just a few years after the scandal, for “Tess” in 1981. It’s hard to square the public’s reaction to Parker and Polanski — in part because they were at different stages of their careers, and their scandals broke in very different eras. It’s also too soon to know whether or how Parker will weather his storm. But it’s also worth noting that.

9 The celebrity’s public persona plays a role, but not necessarily how you’d think -   Celebrities on high horses have a longer way to fall. Parker had some lofty goals with his mission to bring the story of Nat Turner’s 1831 slave uprising to the screen: He wanted his movie to prompt national conversations and heal century-old wounds. A noble and worthy goal for a young actor, no? But once people learned of his past, his quest started to look a little grandiose. It didn’t help that his movie portrayed two rape scenes as a way to justify the motivations of the main character — a little tasteless for someone who had once been accused of the same crime. Whereas Woody Allen — well, didn’t people always think he was a little creepy? He can be tasteless and crass. Does that mean we hold him to a different standard? Possibly. Whether or not you believe the claims of Mia Farrow’s daughter Dylan, who says Allen sexually abused her when she was a child, he still emerged from the scandal of marrying Farrow’s other daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, with his career intact. As he told the Hollywood Reporter, “You can see I worked right through that, undiminished. Made films all through those years and at the same rate I was making them. I’m good that way. I am very disciplined and very monomaniacal and compartmentalized.”

10 Time heals (most) wounds -  If there was one person who seemed like he would never be forgiven, it was Mel Gibson, who offended just about everyone at one point or another. First it was the gay community, with homophobic comments during an interview. Then there was his anti-Semitic tirade (“F–ing Jews. … The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world”) after getting pulled over for drunken driving in 2006. (He also called a female officer by a vulgar, sexist nickname.) Then in 2010, he was also caught on tape threatening his estranged wife and spewing racist gibberish. His talent agency dropped him — and so, it seemed, did most of Hollywood. But what do you know: He’s back after serving time in Hollywood’s version of solitary confinement (i.e., taking a role in “The Expendables 3?). This year, he will unveil “Hacksaw Ridge,” his first directorial effort since “Apocalypto” premiered just after his DUI arrest, and it’s getting major Oscar buzz. Perhaps smartly, he stayed behind the camera, letting Andrew Garfield be the face of the military drama. It seems as though Winona Ryder — one of the few women on this list — is forging a similar path to redemption. She took time off after getting caught shoplifting but has slowly re-emerged with buzzy roles in films such as “Black Swan” and, this year, Netflix’s summer hit “Stranger Things.” 

11 The type of transgression matters -  Clearly, some crimes are more serious than others. Hugh Grant had a dalliance with a prostitute, but did that really hurt anyone? Arguably only his girlfriend at the time, Elizabeth Hurley. One cheeky interview on “The Tonight Show” was more or less enough to absolve him and salvage his career. “I did a bad thing, and there you have it,” he said, while the audience cheered and clapped. That was easy. The same goes for Tom Cruise’s wild-eyed antics and couch-jumping. It wasn’t criminal behavior but it certainly startled people, forever saddling him with the label of loony cultist. Even so, it didn’t slow his box office success. It’s obviously harder to forgive something like sexual assault — at least these days, as Parker’s flailing, failed apology circuit shows us. What does all this mean for Billy Bush? In that leaked video clip, he came off as unctuous and pathetic, but he didn’t break any laws. And the things he said in private with Donald Trump weren’t all that shocking to anyone familiar with Bush’s smug on-air personality. Would anyone miss his obnoxious red carpet interviews if he disappeared? Maybe not, but people who refuse to fade from view are often rewarded. (Just look at Anthony Weiner.) Bush may not be long for the “Today” show. But he’s quite possibly one reality show away from being back in the good graces of an ever-forgiving public.

Pr campaign core story central narrative: Reinvention / Redemption / Ressurection / Freedom / Self reflection / Love / Survival

4 Tips for a PR Comeback:

Disappear for a while: earn a living, enjoy some free time, learn a new hobby. Take time for yourself.

Wait for your moment.

Become a thought leader: Write op-eds, make speeches, get booked on podcasts, etc. 

Get a good PR firm to help place your contributor pieces in newspapers/blogs/Medium.

The Song That Became THE Anti-Woke Anthem

 

Over the past year the Woke movement has become short-hand for an agenda that has become more radicalized by the minute. It's turned into a mutated Frankenstein monster for the snowflakes of society, turning people against each other over the smallest micro-aggression, to the point that it has started to impact freedom of speech. 

Just like all the intelligent people in society we are against racism, and are for freedom of choice and life, but tip-toeing though a minefield of woke propaganda is no way to go through life. This is where the song Buttons comes in.

The band Paranoid Alice have released this exciting track (part of the new Punge Rock movement) which features a deadpan recital, ironic lyrics, ''You're still my favourite porn star", "Tell the world that it's going broke'' and "Hey bitch your like Destinys Child.'' Imaginative and with an infectious cheeky beat with a fresh approach. It offers many implications, but no straight answers – an excellent introduction to an intriguingly mysterious band that has dared to call out the Woke Movement. Even coining the phrase ''Drama-geddon''

The songs chorus, ''I was not happy last night TRUST'' is a chant about being trapped in bad scene after bad scene, the vocals lurch and spiral, sidling away from the unrelenting rhythm section and canine guitars like a child going floppy to escape her parent’s arms. Brilliant absurdity, their music is a mix of indie-rock and post-punk and it’s far from mainstream, but this danceable track will push the band and Punge Rock into the spotlight, and elbow Woke into the past, as we all learn how to just get along without complaining too much. 

Paranoid Alice: Facebook / Instagram

The Hysteria of the “War of the Worlds” Radio Broadcast

 

The mind takes the facts, it runs them through feelings and comes up with judgements.  On October 30, 1938 Orson Wells and the Mercury Theatre in New York broadcast over CBS radio H. G. Wells' 1898 novel, The War of the Worlds. The broadcast was heard by 6,000,000 people, some of whom believed that the story of the invading Martians was real. To the extent that a large number of people were deceived by the drama, this may be one of the earliest examples of mass hysteria induced by electronic media. It also was a dramatic illustration of the power of mass media to impact people's fears and feelings.

Orson Welles had walked into the Columbia Broadcasting Building on Madison Avenue knowing it was going to be an interesting evening broadcast. He was scheduled to present the regular series “Mercury Theatre on the Air,” a weekly hour-long broadcast. He had been inspired by a radio play he acted in the year before called “The Fall of the City.” It was a story about a conquerer that comes back from the dead to rule the city, but it was really an allegory on fascism. It made Orson Welles an overnight sensation in radio, and the style was something that was new. This new fad was taking hold that had been made popular by a radio program called “The March of Time”: the idea of telling a dramatized story as a live radio broadcast. Welles experimented with the realistic-sounding radio broadcast storytelling format a couple more times the next year with an “As-it-happens” drama called “Air Raid” and a historical piece about Julius Caesar. But what he had planned for the Halloween Special was something bigger – something special and he knew it would be ground-breaking. He discussed the idea of adapting a piece of Sci-Fi for a radio broadcast with producers John Houseman and Paul Stewart and they decided on a 19th century piece of Sci-Fi set in England: H.G. Wells’s “The War of the Worlds.”

Midafternoon on October 30, 1938, just hours before airtime, Welles arrived in CBS’s Studio One for last-minute rehearsals with the cast and crew. Almost immediately, he lost his temper with the material. But according to Houseman, such outbursts were typical in the frantic hours before each Mercury Theatre broadcast. Welles routinely berated his collaborators—calling them lazy, ignorant, incompetent, and many other insults—all while complaining of the mess they’d given him to clean up. He delighted in making his cast and crew scramble by radically revising the show at the last minute, adding new things and taking others out. Out of the chaos came a much stronger show.

One of Welles’s key revisions on War of the Worlds, in Houseman’s view, involved its pacing. Welles drastically slowed down the opening scenes to the point of tedium, adding dialogue and drawing out the musical interludes between fake news bulletins. Houseman objected strenuously, but Welles overruled him, believing that listeners would only accept the unrealistic speed of the invasion if the broadcast started slowly, then gradually sped up. By the station break, even most listeners who knew that the show was fiction would be carried away by the speed of it all. For those who did not, those 40 minutes would seem like hours. Another of Welles’s changes involved something cut from Koch’s first draft: a speech given by “the Secretary of War,” describing the government’s efforts to combat the Martians. This speech is missing from the final draft script, also preserved at the Wisconsin Historical Society, most likely because of objections from CBS’s lawyers. When Welles put it back in, he reassigned it to a less inflammatory Cabinet official, “the Secretary of the Interior,” in order to appease the network. But he gave the character a purely vocal promotion by casting Kenneth Delmar, an actor whom he knew could do a pitch-perfect impression of Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1938, the major networks expressly forbade most radio programs from impersonating the president, in order to avoid misleading listeners. But Welles suggested, with a wink and a nod, that Delmar make his character sound presidential, and Delmar happily complied.

These kinds of ideas only came to Welles at the last minute, with disaster waiting in the wings. As Richard Wilson observed in the audio documentary Theatre of the Imagination, radio brought out the best in Welles because it “was the only medium that imposed a discipline Orson would recognize, and that was the clock.” With the hours and then the minutes before airtime ticking away, Welles had to come up with innovative ways to save the show, and he invariably delivered. The cast and crew responded in kind. Only in these last minute rehearsals did everyone begin to take War of the Worlds more seriously, giving it their best efforts for perhaps the first time. The result demonstrates the special power of collaboration. By pooling their unique talents, Welles and his team produced a show that frankly terrified many of its listeners—even those who never forgot that the whole thing was just a play.

At the press conference the morning after the show, Welles repeatedly denied that he had ever intended to deceive his audience. But hardly anyone, then or since, has ever taken him at his word. His performance, captured by newsreel cameras, seems too remorseful and contrite, his words chosen much too carefully. Instead of ending his career, War of the Worlds catapulted Welles to Hollywood, where he would soon make Citizen Kane. Given the immense benefit Welles reaped from the broadcast, many have found it hard to believe that he harbored any regrets about his sudden celebrity.

In later years, Welles began to claim that he really was hiding his delight that Halloween morning. The Mercury, he said in multiple interviews, had always hoped to fool some of their listeners, in order to teach them a lesson about not believing whatever they heard over the radio. But none of Welles’s collaborators—including John Houseman and Howard Koch—ever endorsed such a claim. In fact, they denied it over and over again, long after legal reprisals were a serious concern. The Mercury did quite consciously attempt to inject realism into War of the Worlds, but their efforts produced a very different result from the one they intended. The elements of the show that a fraction of its audience found so convincing crept in almost accidentally, as the Mercury desperately tried to avoid being laughed off the air. War of the Worlds formed a kind of crucible for Orson Welles, out of which the wunderkind of the New York stage exploded onto the national scene as a multimedia genius and trickster extraordinaire. He may not have told the whole truth that Halloween morning, but his shock and bewilderment were genuine enough. Only later did he realize and appreciate how his life had changed. As we mark the centennial of Welles’s birth in 1915, we should also remember his second birth in 1938—the broadcast that, because of his best efforts but despite his best intentions, immortalized him forever as “the Man from Mars.”

The first two thirds of the program went on like this. To anyone who just tuned in, it would sound like a real news broadcast. There were weather reports and a supposed live broadcast of a musical performance from a local hotel: Ramon Raquello and his Orchestra. In fact, it was Welles’s intention to make these musical interludes last an uncomfortably long amount of time in order to add realism to the live broadcast style. A little bit after talking about the gas explosions on Mars, we hear about a strange meteorite landing. The broadcast was so realistic, we even go on to hear screams and a moment of dead-air, something that was a huge no-no in the conventional rules of radio. Eventually in the radio drama, the Martians are attacking and the broadcast focuses on the military units that are trying and failing. Then the broadcast turns to a supposed reporter on the roof of a building in Manhattan watching giant alien machines attack the city. The drama intensifies and then we hear the reporter become desperate. There are a few moments of silence and then we get the first indication since the program began that this isn’t real. “You are listening to a CBS presentation of Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air, in an original dramatization of The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. The performance will continue after a brief intermission. This is the Columbia Broadcasting System.”

There were only 4 instances throughout the entire broadcast to let listeners know it wasn’t real. The opening, before and after the middle commercial break, and at the very end. The commercial break itself was delayed 10 minutes later than usual to increase the realism of the piece. Later that night, three different times, disclaimers were read on the air to reiterate that the piece was merely fiction.  And the popular story about this broadcast – the reason anyone remembers it from the thousands of other radio plays in history – came about because of the many newspaper headlines that talked about it afterward. Headlines like “RADIO FAKE SCARES NATION,” “FAKE RADIO WAR STIRS TERROR THROUGH U.S.” and a lighted bulletin in Times Square reading “ORSON WELLES CAUSES PANIC.” The broadcast had started at 8pm that night. By 8:32pm, the CBS Executive Davidson Taylor was on the phone taking a frantic phone call. Producer John Houseman said he returned to the studio “looking white as a ghost.” He had been ordered by the higher ups at CBS to immediately interrupt the broadcast to announce that it was a dramatic work of fiction. Luckily for Welles and Houseman, there was a scheduled commercial break less than a minute away. That commercial break carried disclaimers about the program before and after.

But as the show continued on, a few policemen entered the room outside the studio. Then a few more. CBS pages and executives stood in front of the police, begging them to just wait. The police wanted to barge into the studio and stop the broadcast immediately. They, of course, weren’t allowed into the room. The program continued. The final third of the show was a more standard radio drama format without the realism of the news report break-ins and weather bulletins. We learn the rest of the story – that the Aliens have taken New York City and eventually have died of human pathogenic germs. The broadcast ended with Orson Welles once again telling the listeners that they’ve been listening to a radio play and that it was merely a holiday offering for Halloween.

According to Houseman, the next few hours were crazy. Here’s a quote from his 1980 memoir: “The building was suddenly full of people and dark-blue uniforms. Hustled out of the studio, we were locked into a small back office on another floor. Here we sat incommunicado while network employees were busily collecting, destroying, or locking up all scripts and records of the broadcast.” They apparently fielded a call from a small-town mayor who complained that his citizens were rioting in the streets. One of the reasons that is often given for the panic is that people were listening to another program on the radio, and switched to The War of the Worlds after the opening disclaimer. Another reason for the panic that’s cited is that radio broadcasts for weeks had been updating America on the growing war between Germany and Czechoslovakia, so people were already on edge. They were used to hearing important news bulletins interrupting radio shows.

The newspaper headlines followed and the rest became a lasting legacy. Most people today know the story about how this radio broadcast sent Americans into a panic. But there are more than a couple reasons to doubt that it actually caused any sort of widespread panic. Robert Bartholomew, a sociologist who is an expert on mass panic outbreaks, has said that “there’s a growing consensus among sociologists that the extent of the panic was greatly exaggerated.” First, there simply weren’t enough people listening. One of the pieces of evidence of panic is this treasure trove of 2,000 letters mailed to CBS and Orson Welles complaining about the broadcast. But when they were scrutinized, only about 27% of those letters came from people who were listening. It was originally reported that 12 million – or 1 out of 12 homes were listening to The War of the Worlds. But a survey was actually conducted that night during the broadcast. They had a sample size of only 5,000. But out of that 5,000, only 2% said they were listening to it. After all, it was up against the most popular radio show of the time, Edgar Bergen’s Chase and Sanborn Hour Variety Show. Mercury Theater on the Air had horrible ratings. Another survey which was conducted later at Princeton estimated the real number listening was closer to 6 million. When those people were asked if they were “frightened or disturbed” by the show. 1.2 million said they were. But there’s sort of inherent problem with that question. In that era, radio had the power to move people. It had the ability to shock, to frighten and disturb. It would be like asking you about the scariest movie you’ve ever seen and ask if it frightened or disturbed you.

So this brings us to what is the most likely reason for the overblowing of the panic. Newspapers. Newspapers, whose existence was threatened by social media, and before that by online news, and before that by television news, were threatened by radio. It was in their best interest to get the public to have a healthy distrust of what they hear on the radio. So these many newspapers stories talking about the mass chaos and public panic caused by the broadcast could have had a motive, whether conscious or unconscious, of telling the public – “look at this new medium and take it with a grain of salt, because unlike a trusty newspaper, the radio can mislead the public!” Take the New York Times, for instance, who said “Radio is new but it has adult responsibilities. It has not mastered itself or the material it uses.” So while the cultural lore about The War of the Worlds is one of groundbreaking realism and a story about not trusting everything you hear, the truth is probably a story that gives much more credit to the public at large. And proving that nothing is new under the sun, and proving history always repeats itself, the same thing happens today on Social Media. Celebrity death hoaxes are a weekly occurrence on Twitter. Fake News gets spread on Facebook by people who don’t take the time to find out whether or not it’s a true story. And certain news stations don’t cover major news events because of their own political interests. So in that way, what Orson Welles was doing really was groundbreaking. It was one of the first instances of nationwide trolling.