During the period just before and after the first World War, Fort Lee, NJ, served as an incubator, home to the first concentration of motion picture studios in the United States. While the stars and studios eventually went West, Fort Lee is where the movies outgrew their roots and emerged as both an art and an industry.
The nonprofit Barrymore Film Center and Museum—the final commission of architect and theater designer Hugh Hardy—opened in Fort Lee in October 2022. Part of the center’s offerings is a special museum devoted, in part, to film posters. I asked the curator of exhibitions, Richard Koszarski, to shine the spotlight on his contribution to preserving and displaying the printed artifacts of the movie world—arguably America’s most beloved industry.
Does much or any of the museum’s collection come from Fort Lee itself?
The Barrymore Film Center essentially functions as a local history museum whose subject is not, say, immigration or the Civil War, but the growth and development of moving pictures. Like other museums and historical sites, it uses its history to look forward, to link the past with the present through such activities as film screenings, museum exhibitions, publications and public events.
What is your curatorial goal?
Local residents began working to preserve this history as far back as the 1930s, work that was later taken on by the Fort Lee Public Library and Fort Lee Historical Society. I started here in 2000, when the Fort Lee Film Commission was formed to focus on that part of this local history (Fort Lee’s role in the American Revolution was already well-handled elsewhere). At the time I was professor of English and cinema studies at Rutgers University; prior to that I had been associated with the development of the Museum of the Moving Image since 1977, eventually serving as head of collections and exhibitions. My main area of interest is the history of the East Coast motion picture industry, which I explored in books like Fort Lee, the Film Town (2004) and Hollywood on the Hudson (2008).
Is there a criteria for collecting and displaying posters in the Barrymore Film Center?
Hugh Hardy had originally been hired to design a theater space, but as work progressed this vision expanded and what was once a modest lobby display grew into an 1800 square foot exhibition gallery. To date we have designed and installed three exhibits in our museum, each of which manages to celebrate Fort Lee’s (often neglected!) role in a different chapter of American film history. While some materials are drawn from our own collections, most items on exhibit are on loan from a range of public and private collections. We have used the same local design team, E. K. Skrabonja Exhibition Design, for all our exhibitions.
What is the intent or message of your exhibitions?
The inaugural exhibit looked at three members of the Barrymore family, John, Ethel and Lionel, representatives of an acting dynasty whose careers reflect the history of American entertainment, from vaudeville to video. Not only did all of them make films in Fort Lee, but some of the family even lived there. Power Couple looked at the rise of media celebrity through the careers of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, famed as the king and queen of Hollywood, but also veterans of the Fort Lee studios (and in Mary’s case, dozens of short films shot on its streets in nickelodeon days).
We have just installed our third exhibit, Coming Attractions: Classic Film Posters from the Konstantino Spanoudis iKon Collection (April 7–Jan. 5). The 70 items on display date from 1910 through 1981, mainly American, but with a few European examples included for context. The focus here is not on the making of films, but the ways in which they were sold and marketed—specifically, on how producers and distributors, as early as 1910, used posters as their major advertising vehicle. Beyond this, the afterlife of such posters has a story all its own.
From a curatorial viewpoint, how do you explain the primary purpose of film posters as functional and collectable?
Film posters arrived at an unfortunate moment, appearing in quantity just as “postermania” seemed to have run its course. Neil Harris noted in 1998 that, “by 1910 or so the poster as a collectible had all but vanished.” Even those still committed to the form considered film posters of little or no interest. Charles Matlack Price ignored film posters entirely in his 1913 study of Posters, and while acknowledging their numbers in the updated 1922 edition (now dubbed Poster Design) wrote that the number of good film posters was still “deplorably small.” Even in the 1920s and ’30s, as other poster genres flourished and once again attracted both curators and collectors, movie posters were still regarded as anonymous hack work (one reason being that, in America at least, nearly all film posters were, in fact, anonymous). As late as 1968, the published catalog of the Museum of Modern Art’s seminal Word and Image exhibition included no American film posters.
How is the scope of your collection addressing graphic design?
When a significant market for film posters began to develop in the 1970s, it was initially driven by collectors hunting for movie memorabilia. Galleries and major auction sales devoted solely to film posters appeared only later, fueling an appreciation for the history, culture and range of graphic traditions involved in this specific poster genre. But until then individual collectors were very much on their own, and the collections they assembled often had little in common with institutional holdings.
Konstantino Spanoudis was one of those collectors. Spanoudis loved movies, but unlike many others he was not just collecting souvenirs of his favorite films. Graphic design was always the major consideration, often trumping a film’s critical standing or historical importance. A passionate collector, he first found himself attracted by the size and color of the large stone lithographs printed to advertise B-westerns and short comedies in the 1930s, but was soon collecting European posters, classic Hollywood, and the work of Saul Bass. These and other collecting categories ring the walls of the gallery, while the spine of the exhibit is devoted entirely to posters from the golden age of Fort Lee film production, when John Barrymore and Theda Bara were making movies just down the street.
When the Hollywood studio system still dominated the industry, the useful life of a movie poster could be measured in days. Films rarely played any single location longer than a week, and the poster for last week’s film was useless, quickly replaced by the next new thing. Thousands were printed, very few survived. Some studios did manage to save many of their films, but none of them bothered to save the advertising. The posters preserved in Coming Attractions exist today only because collectors like Spanoudis simply fell in love with their graphics.
