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RKO Radio Pictures 1943-44, the 1943 spiral-bound campaign book ("The showmanship company") sent to theater owners to encourage them to show RKO movies. The book includes 80 pages with one and two-page spreads on RKO's upcoming movies and their best stars. Some of the movies and stars promoted include "Walt Disney's Let's Go Latin" (which was the working title for "The Three Caballeros"), "They Creep By Night" (Val Lewton; with incredible art, and this seems to have been an intended sequel to "I Walked With a Zombie" that never came about!), "Experiment Perilous" (Cary Grant), "The Robe", "Up In Arms" (Danny Kaye), "One Girl in a Million" (Jean Arthur), "Tarzan's Desert Mystery" (Johnny Weissmuller), "The Curse of the Cat People" (Val Lewton), and much more! Note that many of the pages have signed artwork, by many different (quite talented) artists, including Lewis Daniel, Al Hirschfeld, Gustavson, and several other unsigned pieces. Note that, because RKO at this time did not have the biggest name stars, they relied on movies with very lurid and sensational material, and they created images for this campaign book that are both extremely colorful and often downright sexy! We have included images of the front cover of the book and many of the two-page spreads (but we wish we could have photographed the entire book, because there are so many great images!). This is one of the nicest of the studio yearbooks produced in the 1940s, both because of the great content, and because of the wonderful color artwork (RKO had made some of the absolute best full-color campaign books in the early 1930s, but by the late 1930s they were economizing and their campaign books were mostly black & white or sepia, but with this year, they returned to their earlier glory, and this book is filled with artwork that is every bit as nice as those early 1930s ones, likely because they not only had great movies this year, but they had just had a couple of big comeback years with several Disney features, Val Lewtons, Citizen Kane, and more!). In addition to the wonderful artwork, they actually stapled (to the first interior blank page) a set of 11 double-sided [6" x 9 1/2"] portraits of all their top stars (a total of 22 portraits) and they also tipped in an amazing small flip book to the fifth interior page that can be flipped so you see Fred Astaire Dancing with Joan Leslie! We have only pictured a small portion of the book, but many of the ones that are not pictured are just as nice as the ones that ARE pictured!. Note that even though this campaign book was sent to many theater owners, it appears that very few examples have survived. I have been a collector of campaign books and related material for many years, and I know for certain that this campaign book is extremely rare! Note that studios almost always spent far more money preparing campaign books than they did preparing movie posters (often hiring very talented and well-known illustration artists), because campaign books directly benefited the studio in getting theaters to book the movies, whereas posters more benefited the theaters, rather than the studios (although of course, what was good for the theaters was ultimately good for the studios as well). Also note that, as was often the case with these campaign books, some of the movies advertised were either never made, had their titles changed before they were released, or were made with different casts than those announced in the campaign book (I do not have time to research the titles in this campaign book to see which had changed titles or were never made, but if anyone has more information about any of these, please e-mail us and we will post it here)! Finally, note that campaign books in general are extremely rare, and the best of them have often sold for hundreds of dollars, and in the case of the very finest, thousands of dollars!
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