One of our knowledgeable friends out in Bloggywood maintains an amazing Flickr photostream — and it’s high time you were all introduced to it.
His name’s David Raynor from Stoke-On-Trent, Staffordshire, England, UK. He’s been uploading his collection of film stills, posters, handbills, scans and personal photographs — as TheBrinkswayBoy — providing us all with an incredible resource and hours of obsessive fun. David was a projectionist, so he’s not only got a ton of film paper, but he knows how these pictures were exhibited. (For instance, he solved the mystery of how Davy Crockett, King Of The Wild Frontier played theaters: 1.66. He knows because he ran it.)
A couple examples, chosen almost at random. Above, Rory Calhoun in George Sherman’s The Treasure Of Poncho Villa (1955), is a scanned frame from a Technicolor SuperScope print. (Be sure to read his comments for a lesson in anamorphic processes.)
Below is Rhonda Fleming in Bullwhip (1958). In his notes on this one, David even tells you when and where he saw it. By the way, Bullwhip was scored by the great character actor James Griffith.
There’s plenty more where these came from.
Thanks for the glowing write up, Toby. I don’t know a tumblr is is relation to flickr, but it’s nice to know that there are those who think the captions and pictures on my flickr photostream are worth looking at. I do try to make them interesting, while some flickr members upload images without any descriptions for them at all.
By the way, in the old days, I used to keep a film diary of all the films I went to see, with cinema names, dates and so on, the details of which I still have. So that’s why the dates are accurate…it’s not because I have a super memory for dates.
David (The Brinksway Boy).
The Tumblr reference was a mistake, related to something else I’m working on. It’s been corrected.
Growing up in the 70s, I saw 50s Westerns on TV, at film conventions or via 16mm prints that passed through my dad’s collection. Still, I wish I’d kept a diary of what I saw. I can still remember the eye-popping Technicolor of the Universal Westerns in 16mm.
David,
I dont know if you get PICTURE HOUSE magazine published by
the Cinema Theatre Association. (www.cinema-theatre.org.uk) but the
just published 2011(!) issue has a complete list of the UK circuit releases
of 1960. This is a follow up to 1952 and 1956 in past editions.
What really amazed me was how few Westerns were released in the UK
in 1960!
I have written to them saying that they should do a separate publication
covering the whole of the 1950s.I wish, like you, I had recorded every double
bill I saw as i am always wondering what I saw on with what.
As I have mentioned elsewhere your Flickr site is fantastic.
Hi, John,
No, I don’t get “Picture House”, but I am lucky to have a complete list of cinema programme listings from the Today’s Cinemas columns of my local paper for Stoke-on-Trent, The Sentinel, over half a million presentations shown between 1929 and 1979. I used the copies of the paper on microfilm at the reference library and used a huge pile of exercise books and very many Biro’s. I started doing it in 1982, just finding out when certain films were shown where in the city and got so interested in it that I decided to do the lot. It took me fourteen years to do the project, working a few hours a day in the library. Many had tried to tried to do this before, but all had given up after a few months when they realised what a lot of trouble it was going to be. I was the only one who had ever started it and actually finished it. It was a lot of work, because, well into the 1950s, there were over 30 cinemas in the city. But by the 1970s, most of them had gone, so it was easier for me by then.
Uploading images on flickr is the easy part. The hard part is typing in all the descriptions for the images, which I do first in Microsoft Word, ready for pasting in later. That’s why a group of images may suddenly appear on the pages, followed by a lull of a few days while I get the other ones ready.
Wow! David what a fantastic (and time consuming) project.
Have you ever considered finding a publisher; at least perhaps, for the
Forties and Fifties.This would cover the peak of cinema-going in the UK
to the start of the sad decline in audiences;and of course many fine
old cinemas having to close down.
I am so glad Toby has provided the link to your Flickr site so many others
can share the experience..
No plans to have them published, John. It would take me years to type them all down and, as I’m 65 now, I don’t have enough time left to do that. But finishing my project did make me something of a local celebrity and I got roped in by The Sentinel to do a monthly film column for them in their glossy nostalgia magazine “The Way We Were”. My column, in colour and spread over two pages, was called “At the cinema 40 years ago this month” and each month I would review the new films showing in Hanley (that’s the city centre of Stoke-on-Trent) 40 years earlier and use posters and stills from my vast collection to illustrate it. I did the column for six years, from 1996 to 2002 and it was very popular. As the magazine was read by ex-patriats all over the place, I even got letters from readers as far away as California, which was amazing.
A lot of people seem to look at my pictures on flickr, but not many make any comments about them on there. Some pictures have had hundreds of views without one comment. One picture has had over 2,000 views without one comment.