Advertising Psycho in 1961 in New Zealand

The first advertisement for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho in NZ's paper of record, The New Zealand Herald was a long column on May 25 1961:

Psycho had opened in the US a full year before, in June 1960, so presumably the NZ movie-going public was absolutely ravenous to finally see the new sensation, and possibly ticked off at having had to wait so long. The second Herald notice (May 28, 1961) appears to acknowledge that situation:

although the rumors referred to may also be to censorship possibilities/worries (NZ's censors followed the UK's in imposing cuts on Psycho's shower sequence).

The third Psycho ad. repeats the savagely chopped and inserted title/logo, but also dramatically announces and imprecates!

The fourth ad., now directly underneath the ad. for the current occupant (The Sundowners w/ Kerr and Mitchum) of the St James cinema announces that tomorrow there'll be a big announcement:

The (possibly anti-climactic) announcement turns out to be that bookings will now be taken:

On June 7, 2 days before Psycho opens, Hitchcock the showman returns:
Psycho does different things to different people! And no one but no one will be admitted after the film begins.

The same day, the evening paper in Auckland, The Star announced the winners of its various Psycho-related competitions including its Hitchcock-look-alike:

Come on down Mr H. Pietry to the most terrifying, shocking, and generally incredible film experience of your life!

One day to go and the Herald can barely control itself:

Thursday evening's Star and Friday morning's Herald indirectly hail the grand opening:

Friday night's Star, however, takes the biscuit:

It's now Psycho time and DO NOT KILL YOUR FRIENDS' (enjoyment by telling them the ending). Note the specification in the ad. of exactly when the main feature will start, i.e., after roughly 40-50 minutes of shorts (including travelogues features such as 'Ports of Paradise' and short documentaries from Rank films' Look at Life series. Water shortages in England before Psycho - who woulda thunk it?!)

As in North America, Psycho played in NZ with no previews so both the Herald and the Star reviewed Psycho on Saturday June 10. Both reviewers act very wise about Hitch's marketing savvy. Neither mentions Herrmann.

After Psycho is released the ads become a parade of Alfred Hitchcock Presents drollerie sometimes with two Hitchcock representations to drive the point home:

Even William Castle would be proud of "Pay no attention to the rumour that this film may send you completely berserk!' or "If you can't keep a secret keep away from people after seeing Psycho". Most tho' not all (e.g., not the rumor of speechless wives) of this schtick was drawn from an acclaimed media/marketing package of teaser ads prepared by Paramount:
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A couple of post-release ads are worthy of special note.

I thought that use of supposed infra-red footage of audience reactions in advertizing began with '70s mega-thillers such as The Exorcist and Jaws, but here it is as part of Psycho's ad. frenzy. Was Psycho then the first with this?
And, finally, a reference to shows packing out:

Psycho was a well-deserved, monster hit world-wide, the showbizerry of which left an imprint on a whole generation.

Facebook is doomed

How Facebook plans to make money (commensurate with and justifying of its current valuations) according to today's NY Times:

Among the most promising of those efforts, from a marketer’s point of view, is Facebook Exchange, which is intended to track the behavior of Facebook users when they are visiting other sites and serve up tailored advertisements when they return to Facebook.
Orbitz, the travel company, is among the advertisers that are trying Facebook Exchange. If it sees a consumer looking for, say, a business hotel in New York, Orbitz can place an advertisement for New York hotels on that user’s Facebook page, with the hope that the user will return to the travel site and make the booking. Chris Stevens, senior director of retail for Orbitz, said it was too early to determine the impact on sales. [Our bold.]

Earlier in the article, Facebook's head advertising/adsense/tech guy, Gokul Rajaram is described/quoted as follows:

Part of the challenge is that advertisements, as Mr. Rajaram once put it, should not feel like advertisements. “You would much rather hear a message from your friend than hear a message from a brand,”

So explicit appeals/pitches from advertisers are regarded as unwelcome, but having Facebook stalk you across the web and hand the data it collects about you to advertisers so they can 'see' you and then abuse your Facebook home-space as they see fit is going to fly/not provoke revulsion and resistance? Ha ha ha. Facebook is doomed: the return of the underpants gnomes.

High GHG Drifters

The original Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) mixes anti-war sentiments with genocidal fascism. Klaatu tells Earthlings to shape up - give up war and immediately start to learn and practice peace - or the galactic robot police will kill everyone:

'This Earth of yours will be reduced to a burned-out cinder.'^[1]

The hapless 2008 remake didn't seem to know what it was saying by the end, but it had two basic novel ideas:

• Extend the galactic police force's powers so that they can kill all the humans without toasting (and in fact pointedly, pristinely preserving) the rest of the planet
• Broaden the aliens' essential interests from galactic order to order down on Earth as well, i.e., the remake's aliens damn humans not just (or even especially) as unrepentantly aggressive and dangerous generally but also as environmentally cavalier/dangerous to other life on Earth specifically

Richard Curtis's ghastly, self-defeating 10:10 campaign film:
expresses the same genocidal fascist fantasy/temptation as the two DtESS films, and even shares the 2008 remake's exact emphasis. Yet reactions to the DtESSs have always been muted, whereas Curtis's film was an overnight, sensational disaster. Why?

On the one hand, the details almost certainly make a difference: we don't see Klaatu and Gort et al. butchering kids. And presumably the lifespan of Curtis's film would have been extended if Curtis had eschewed direct, Cronenberg-style explosion shots in favor of, say, just 'horrified reaction' shots (thereby leaving us to infer what happened), let alone if Curtis had told a much less (or even non-)violent story.^[2] On the other hand, genocidal violence, whether eco-inspired or not, just does seem easier to take when the Final Solution-bearer is external/impartial rather than one/some-of-us. We've plenty of cultural practice with the former case from the Torah and Old Testament generally, but that practice absolutely doesn't transfer to righteous, eliminationist forces that are one/some-of-us. Rather, it's conventional wisdom that some-among-us will always fancy themselves as Jehovah/Yahweh-figures judging and damning us all, and that such people always have to be monitored and, if necessary, stopped. The moral seems to be that while environmentalists can try to point to Nature's judgment on human civilization, say, they can't, with profit, be caught imagining that they are avenging angels of that judgment.^[3] That said:

or even this. Slightly illicit, avenging angel fantasies are big business, and a big part of the business in which Richard Curtis makes a living in particular.

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^[1] Update: imdb's ecarle reminds me that Klaatu depicts his home world as ruled by pervasive terror of summary execution:

"For our policemen, we created a race of robots...In matters of aggression, we have given them absolute power over us. This power cannot be revoked. At the first sign of violence, they act automatically against the aggressor... The result is, we live in peace, without arms or armies"

Dirty Harry raised to the power of Robo-cop on every corner. Very peaceful, no fire-power in that picture, no sir.

^[2] E.g., suppose the 'no pressure' speeches mention the superheated, acidic surface of Venus as a model for a high-GHG earth. When the red-buttons are pushed, people simply disappear. Later it's revealed that they've been teleported to:

INTERIOR OF ROOM ON VENUS

The 20-25 people inside the room, including many of those we've earlier seen disappear, are gathered nervously around the room's single large window. 3/4 of the room is fairly empty, but every few seconds, a new person pops into existence including - Bing! - one of the schoolchildren from earlier.

EXTERIOR VENUS HELLSCAPE

Close up on an external digital thermometer with dual Celsius and Fahrenheit displays. It ticks over from 460 to 461 °C, 860 to 861 °F. Some more droplets of sulphuric acid rain hit the thermometer's exterior, melting part of the Fahrenheit display. Focus drops back (or Cut) to regretful faces of climate change skeptics of various ages pressed up against the large window. We hear the sound of another person popping into existence behind them. Bing! The heavily accented Tottenham Football coach from earlier starts in mid-prattle.

CLOSE UP LOOKING IN THROUGH LOWER HALF OF WINDOW

Faces of horrified school-children, including the child who just materialized pushing in past adult legs to get a view out. Their eyes widen as more sulphuric acid rain and smouldering, dissolving crud spatters and slides down the window in front of them while, from somewhere behind them, the adult, know-nothing, Football coach voice prattles on...

^[3] To be sure, lefties, let alone enviro-lefties in particular, are probably a minority of apocalyptic fantasists, especially in the US. The Timothy McVeigh/far-Right/quasi-secessionist end of US political life is currently booming, much as it did during the Clinton years.

You Will 1993/1994

In the US there's an ultra-sentimental stream of TV advertising: many ads are explicitly designed to make the viewer very emotional or even tear up, all in the space of 30 seconds. AT&T’s ads in the '80s and '90s were consistently like this, distilling the essence of Capra, Spielberg, and Zemeckis perhaps, often plaintively imploring everyone to ‘reach out and touch somebody’ and the like. See, for example, this ad from 1988.
The apotheosis of this tendency was AT&T's, sentimental-about-the-future, ‘You Will’ series in 1993/1994, which David Fincher directed:

This blog post clarifies, however, that Fincher himself mainly handled just the visuals, and that another creative group was solely responsible for almost all of the crucial decisions about the V.O. and music, and ultimately, as it happens, played McCartney to Fincher's Lennon.
The 'You Will' ads' had a unique zing at the time (which led David Letterman to parody them), and they're impressively haunting in 2010: they're prophetic but also wildly nostalgic for an original sentiment directed forward at where we stand today. It's plausible that all of that complexity is traceable to the complementariness of Fincher's gifts and those of his collaborators on the audio side. Fincher's occasionally dark, cool, Blade Runner-ish images are progressively warmed by a Solsbury Hill-style, acoustic theme in 7/4. As that musical object rotates smoothly through its nonstandard period, it gathers different timbres, building harmonically towards a luminous crescendo.^[1] That intense moment is over almost before we can grasp it or hear it clearly, which is to say that it embodies musically the inviting, bright future we've just seen. That future isn't here yet, but it's so close; as close as Tom Selleck's voice in your ear. (Typical, basic response in 1993: Holy crap! That moved me. I love this. Can I see that again?)
Note that the ads' prophecy isn't limited to the specific tech they project; the ads also hit the 'You' hard. That's an early tech-commercial use of the grammatical signature of personalization and decentralization that Web 2.0 tech seized upon in the mid-'00s (as, e.g., Time rather gaudily observed). Microsoft tried to strike the same, ahead of the curve, proto-Web 2.0-ish note two years later with 'Where do you want to go today?', but that campaign failed. Convincingly aspirational, sentimental advertising, like a great pop song, isn't as simple or easy as it looks. And timing matters in advertising just as it does in pop. Whereas AT&T's ads arrived just before (or just as) the first useful browser, Mosaic exploded out of the gates (giving us the first draft of the web as we know it today), Microsoft launched its campaign just after it had emerged popularly as an ominous, legally suspect, effective monopolist that was out to crush Mosaic's iconic progeny, Netscape.
Back to the specific vibe of Fincher & co.'s 1993 vision of the future. (I recommend watching the ads again at this point. You know you want to.) The everyday will be exalted and serenely perfected. As members of this new fully digitalized, networked world we will have vaguely God-like, near-magical powers, but we'll think nothing of it. Why would we? We'll still have people to meet, babies to tuck in, and the like (and how often do you think about basic utilities now?). But our Millennial IT mastery will allow us to symmetrize and harmonize gender roles, to transcend racial and ethnic difference, to overcome the opposition between work and life, and to end both the Babel of languages and the tyranny of distance. You personally will see the end of history, and abundance, prosperity, and perpetual peace everywhere. Really.
And the company that will bring all this to you: The Catholic Church.^[2] No, wait.
One last point: Fincher's forthcoming film is The Social Network. Ostensibly about the rise of Facebook, the film's buzz and trailers suggest that it's also a generally skeptical look at 'how we live now', esp. at the forms of sociality that Web 2.0 tech has enabled. The eerie soundtrack to the film's trailer? A version of Radiohead's Creep, one of the songs of (maybe even the song of) 1993.

Maybe it's too much to ask for the ultimate symmetry of I Can't on The Social Network's soundtrack (say in Christopher O'Riley's piano version), i.e., given that Fincher was there for the You Will. In general, however, even though the estimable Trent Reznor has apparently been engaged to construct the soundtrack, it's hard to believe that he'll come up with anything better than versions of Radiohead's various anthems of anomie and estrangement (Motion Picture Soundtrack and How to Disappear Completely, just for starters) and of knowing who your real friends are (The Bends). Radiohead just is the ideal, slightly cerebral, skeptical, musical counterpoint to seductive images of cavorting coeds and of everything that billions of dollars can buy.

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^[1] In roughly half the spots the crescendo features a wailing female vocal that's similar to aspects of Clare Torry's famous vocal part on Pink Floyd's The Great Gig In the Sky (from Dark Side). It's inspired to think of knitting together Gabriel and Floyd musical ideas, and musically executing that thought so well is impressive. AT&T and Fincher alike must have been thrilled.
^[2] Less facetiously, The Great Western Railroad Co.. From 1845, "[T]he ultimate miracles of railways are obvious... The globe is in the course of being inhabited as one city or shire, everything known to and everything touching everybody. The consequences cannot yet be foreseen fully, but there is no reason to doubt that on the whole, the result must be good. It will give force to public reason, and thus give great advantages to civilizations over barbarism, and to truth over error." See Jerome Blum, In the Beginning: Advent of the Modern Age, Europe in the 1840s (1994), Chapter 1, esp. pp. 4-5 for this and many other pie-eyed encomia.