CLASSIC HOLLYWOOD
PUBLICITY STUNTS

Today, Hollywood promotes new movies with an onslaught of TV advertising, billboards, bus ads, and online “viral marketing.” But before those things were invented, movie studios hired impresarios to stage elaborate publicity stunts. These outlandish events would then get covered by newspapers…generating a lot of attention for a film. Here are some of the weirdest from the golden age of Hollywood.

MOVIE: Gone With the Wind (1939)

STUNT: Margaret Mitchell’s epic 1936 Civil War novel Gone With the Wind was a best-seller, Pulitzer Prize–winner, and landmark book in American literature. The film version was highly anticipated, and filmmakers drummed up publicity for it for a full three years before it hit theaters in 1939. The biggest publicity stunt for the movie had to do with making the movie. Producers held widely publicized auditions across the entire United States, searching for the perfect actress to play lead character Scarlett O’Hara. And as every city’s newspapers wrote about this traveling road show, they were building up anticipation for a movie that hadn’t even started filming yet. Producers interviewed more than 1,400 women for the role, but all of that was for show. In the end, they didn’t even pick an American for the part—they chose British stage actress Vivien Leigh.

MOVIE: Teacher’s Pet (1958)

STUNT: Clark Gable plays a hotshot newspaper reporter forced by his editor to take a newswriting class, only to end up falling in love with his instructor, played by Doris Day. It’s set in newspaper offices, and to play the dozens of extras in newsroom scenes—reporters typing away at typewriters—Paramount hired about 50 actual reporters. (A few of them even got a line or two.) When the film came out, those same reporters happily gave the film nice write-ups in their newspapers.

MOVIE: Down Missouri Way (1946)

STUNT: This musical is about an agricultural professor (Martha O’Driscoll), who falls in love with a movie producer (John Carradine), who gives a film role to the professor’s ultra-intelligent mule. The animal is the real star of Down Missouri Way, and so a publicity agent for Producers Releasing Corporation took that mule—Shirley—and marched her down Fifth Avenue in New York City (with a sign bearing the movie’s title on her back) and into a high-class restaurant that looked out onto the ice rink at Rockefeller Center. The agent demanded a table for the mule and himself, and staff would not oblige. So he lodged a complaint and alerted the media… which dutifully reported on Shirley the Mule, star of Down Missouri Way.

The pointy tip of your elbow is called an olecranon.

MOVIE: The Outlaw (1943)

STUNT: Legendary (and legendarily quirky) tycoon and movie mogul Howard Hughes directed this Western about Billy the Kid, but he knew exactly what the film’s biggest, um, assets were: Jane Russell and her prodigious chest, which Hughes emphasized with tight, low-cut costumes. He also made Russell’s figure the focus of the film’s ad campaign. Posters depicted Russell lying on a hay bale with a skimpy shirt with the caption “What are the two greatest reasons for Jane Russell’s rise to stardom?” Pretty salacious stuff for 1943, but that was only part of the stunt. When the film was released, he hired a skywriter to spell “THE OUTLAW” in the skies over Hollywood. After the words, the pilot was instructed to draw two giant circles…with little dots in the center. (Get it?)

MOVIE: The Revenge of Tarzan (1920)

STUNT: Veteran Hollywood publicist Harry Reichenbach rented a room at the Hotel Belleclaire in New York, not under his own name, but as “T. R. Zann.” Reichenbach worked up a character for this T. R. Zann, claiming to be a world-renowned concert pianist who insisted on traveling with his own piano. That piano, he explained to the hotel (and reporters), would have to be hoisted up to his room, from the outside of the building and into his room window. The Belleclaire staff actually did use a system of ropes and pulleys to get a giant, piano-sized wooden crate into his room. But there wasn’t a piano in that box…there was a lion, which staff found out about when Reichenbach called for room service to deliver a special breakfast: ten pounds of raw steak. They were startled, and a few bellhops called a number of New York newspapers, which all reported the story of this man called T. R. Zann…or “Tarzan.”

MOVIE: The Egg and I (1947)

STUNT: To generate interest in the film version of Betty MacDonald’s best-selling memoir about her move from the city to life on a chicken farm, publicity man Jim Moran sat on an egg. And he continued to do so for 19 days. He went to the Los Angeles Ostrich Farm and, with the help of a special wheelchair he could sit in without having to squat for most of three weeks, remained above an egg in a basket. For 40 cents, visitors could look at Moran up close, a sight to see when he’d put on a feathered headband and a matching pair of pants covered in feathers. When the ostrich egg hatched, Moran was on his way.

Each second, your fingernails grow about one nanometer longer.