State Theatre

About the manager’s community service during the Great Depression, and promotional campaign for Frank Capra’s film “Dirigible”:

“(T)oward the end of 1931 theater manager Jay H. Guthrie of Urichsville, Ohio, decided to do what he could to help the poor during hard times. For matinee showings of Capra’s then most recent film, Dirigible, Guthrie asked patrons for canned goods rather than money. Once the cans had been collected, but before they were distributed, Guthrie made a display of the contributions in the lobby of his State Theater, showing to the town’s filmgoers the result of their own good deeds. While the canned goods clearly qualified as charitable giving, they also worked as good ballyhoo for Guthrie’s movie house. Patrons now could view going to Guthrie’s theater as something of a community service—an image reinforced by the display of all the food—and this would certainly help attendance at other screenings that required a paid admission.

But Guthrie also made use of slightly more conventional publicity, that is, publicity tied directly to the subject of Capra’s movie. Guthrie mounted a cardboard cutout of a dirigible on a truck and drove it through Urichsville’s main streets. He also attached another cutout under the State Theater’s marquee, with one-sheet posters for the film placed above. The exhibitor’s trade journal, Motion Picture Herald, which always reported on successful and aesthetically pleasing examples of ballyhoo, commented that these displays “attracted a lot of attention, especially so in view of the new navy dirigible ‘Akron’ making flights over this territory” during the period of the screenings."

(Eric Smoodin, “Regarding Frank Capra: Audience, Celebrity, and American Film Studies, 1930-1960”, Duke University Press 2004, p. 38-39)