The Viva Pressbook

I've just made these great pressbooks that I'm really excited about. I was applying to some European festivals that requested a pressbook and I thought "What is a pressbook?" Usually festivals ask for a press kit, which is just some xeroxes and stills in a folder. So I looked it up and found people selling all of these vintage pressbooks on Ebay from the 60's and 70's. Apparently a pressbook was a glossy printed booklet with anywhere from 2 to 16 pages or so, usually scaled like a newspaper at about 11" x 17", that distributors would send to theater managers to help promote the films. They no longer make them, except in Europe, and the ones they make now are totally different from the vintage ones (the ones now are more like catalogues, very thick, and are only made for very big movies).

I instantly decided that I wanted to make a pressbook like those vintage ones, and although they had great covers, I couldn't get a sense of how they were put together without seeing them in person. I ordered a few, but I was itching to see one right away. I brought it up to my friend Jared and he said he'd just bought a pressbook for the Herschell Gordon Lewis film A Taste of Blood. So we rushed over to his house to get it, and I was completely awestruck by how incredible it looked. The scale was breathtaking, and there was a very stylish design, with only black, white, and orange on the outside, and black and white on the inside. The orange was applied to the black and white photos to look like blood or violence, and the photos on the back were all hacked up in weird shapes, perfect for a horror movie. The inside contained information about the film, such as cast and crew and synopsis, and also ads to be clipped out and sent to newspapers, and different posters that could be ordered. It was gorgeous.

I instantly started to design my pressbook in a similar style, (also incorporating the pressbook cover design for Andy Milligan's The Filthy FIve, which coincidentally I happened to see that evening in a book I was reading), and the result, I have to say, is quite extraordinary. What is amazing is that because of the scale, (12" x 17"), the full-color front and back function as movie posters, and then all the movie information can be placed inside. It's so much less clunky than a folder with stuff inside, and it also can act like a sort of flyer. It's very retro looking, so right away you feel transported back to another time, which is what VIVA does as a movie, so it's perfect.

In the meantime I bought a group of sexploitation pressbooks from the 60's and 70's, and it's obvious how the quality level drops off dramatically after about 1972. They get smaller, are printed on cheaper paper, have less color, and are less remarkable all in all. (Shortly after that they disappeared alltogether). And the ones for sale are mostly for exploitation movies, the kind VIVA was modeled after. It feels very authentic to have the same sort of ad campaign used by the Herschell Gordon Lewis set! This should generate some publicity! Also, I've put clips on the Viva page and the Cast page, and on Youtube. So now it's all public, for better or for worse...