eMoviePoster.com

As many of you know, I, Bruce Hershenson, owner of eMoviePoster.com, have collected pressbooks (and related movie paper like studio yearbooks) for over 30 years, and I have the world's foremost collection of such material. I thought I would share one item with you each week, the type of items you almost surely have never seen before, and which might not come up for sale for DECADES!

This week, I have the pressbook from "The World's Champion", the 1922 Phil Rosen silent romantic boxing sports melodrama starring Wallace Reid, Lois Wilson (she somehow managed to direct and star in a movie when she was 21, and she made a lot of movies between 1915 and 1936, and I would love to know more about her!), and Lionel Belmore. Note that Wallace Reid was a major star of the early 1910s, who fell in love with Dorothy Davenport, who was a young starlet. He married her, and they made many movies together in the middle 1910s, marrying in 1913. In 1917, Davenport had their son, and she made few movies after the birth of her son, but he remained a top star. In 1919, Wallace Reid was making a movie "The Valley of the Giants", and he was injured, and took morphine to enable him to finish filming. He became a major drug addict, and made 24 movies over the next 3 years, but died in 1923 at the age of 31, and it is unclear exactly how large a part drugs and alcohol played in his death, but certainly this was one of the first great Hollywood drug scandals. The following year, Davenport produced "Human Wreckage", an expose of Hollywood and drugs, credited as "Mrs. Wallace Reid", and she made a total of six movies after "Human Wreckage", always billed the same way. In 1934, she retired and she died in 1977 at the age of 82.

Here is an image of the front cover and the back "poster page" (see larger images by clicking on these thumbnails):

Note that as was common in the early days of movies, the studio spent the extra time and effort to create completely different poster images for all the different size posters. It is interesting that neither of the one-sheets and one of the three sheets did not have a boxing image at all!

Each week I will showcase a different pressbook (or related item) from my collection (so in just 25,000 weeks or so, I will have shared the entire collection with you!).