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MGM 1930-31, the 1930 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer campaign book ("Your lucky star"), sent to theater owners to encourage them to show MGM movies. The book includes many pages with mostly two-page spreads (sometimes four pages!) on MGM's upcoming movies and top stars. Some of the movies and stars advertised include Good News (with a great die-cut "pennant"), Billy the Kid (King Vidor), Marion Davies, Greta Garbo (in "Red Dust", and there are three pages on this, including a full-color ad, and it makes one wonder just how incredibly different Garbo's "Red Dust" would have been from Harlow's), Madame Satan (Cecil B. DeMille), Ramon Novarro, The Crisis (written by Winston Churchill), Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Trader Horn (8 pages!), Lon Chaney ("The Bugle Sounds", which was to be his second talkie after "The Unholy Three", and it was advertised as "the most ambitious production of Lon Chaney's career", but of course, the movie was never made, because Chaney died unexpectedly!), John Gilbert, a cool page listing all the MGM shorts, with a second page that shows full color images of Laurel & Hardy, Our Gang, a cartoon image of Flip the Frog, and many more! Note that many of the pages have signed artwork, by many different (quite talented) artists, including Vincentini (sp?), Louis Fancher, Illian (sp?), Al Hirschfeld (a great image of a cartoon MGM lion playing a piano with lots of famous composers and conductors sitting on and around the piano!), Galbraith, John Held Jr. (who did the great "Good News" spread pictured at the top center of our image), and most of these artists have at least two or three different pieces in the book. We have included images of the covers of the book and nine of the two-page spreads (and we did not make a big effort to find the best ones!). 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! 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)! 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). 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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