Harold Lloyd Ad Uncovered in Vancouver

[Brooksie]

Here's a nice picture that is currently circulating online - some construction work in Vancouver has uncovered a partially complete billboard for Harold Lloyd's 'Grandma's Boy'. No word on whether it will be preserved, although if the building adjacent was demolished for a new development, the chances seem slim ...



A larger picture can be accessed at http://i.imgur.com/iRo3y.jpg

[Gagman 66]

HOLY SMOKE! Bad time for this to be out of print. Thanks for posting.

[CoffeeDan]

HOLY SMOKE! Bad time for this to be out of print.

The Kino DVD is still in print.

[Gagman 66]

Coffee man,

The Kino DVD is hardly the same. Doesn't even have the original title-card design.

[Rollo Treadway]

They should preserve it for at least another ten years — then they could use it to advertise a 100th anniversary screening of the film.

Here are some pics of the now demolished Capitol theater, which the hand in that ad points to:

http://www.pstos.org/instruments/bc/van ... apitol.htm

I wonder if they considered making use of that big clock on the building in the background for advertising Safety Last...

[Penfold]

It must be unusual for the billboard to outlast it's cinema. Any chance they could show it at The Orpheum??? Week of October 2nd would be nice....

[silentfilm]

http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Gh ... story.html" target="_blank

Ghost signs from Vancouver’s past spring up to haunt us still

Ninety years after it was covered up by a building, a “ghost sign” for a 1922 movie has reappeared at Granville and Robson.

By John Mackie, Vancouver Sun February 23, 2012
The demolition of a few buildings in the Granville/Robson block has unveiled a “ghost sign” advertising a Harold Lloyd movie at the Capitol Theatre.

Photograph by: Jenelle Schneider , PNG
VANCOUVER — Ninety years after it was covered up by a building, a "ghost sign" for a 1922 movie has reappeared at Granville and Robson.

The sign promotes the Harold Lloyd comedy Grandma's Boy, which played at the Capitol theatre Oct. 2-7, 1922.

The sign is painted onto the north wall of the Power block at 817 Granville, across the street from where the Capitol opened in 1921. Hence the sign includes a red circle reading "Capitol over there," and features a wonderful disembodied hand with a finger pointing across the street.

The sign reappeared during the demolition of the three-storey Farmer building at 801 Granville. The Farmer building was constructed in 1922, so the Lloyd sign would have been covered up almost immediately after it was painted, and hidden for nine decades.

Signs like this are called ghost signs, because of their ghostly faded beauty and/or because they advertise long-dead businesses.

Several ghost signs have cropped up in recent years in Vancouver, including a lovely ad for Shelly's Bakery on Victoria Drive and a bunch of long-hidden painted signs on the Woodward's building. Part of an old painted sign for the Pantages theatre showed up on the side of the Regent Hotel when the 1907-08 theatre was being torn down.

Still, heritage expert John Atkin says he's never seen a painted sign for a movie, which would have had a short shelf life.

"You can certainly see movie posters and billboards [in old photos], but not [signs] painted on the wall," he said.

"I think the management of the theatre took advantage of the brief period when a building [on the corner] was demolished and before construction started on the new one."

Harold Lloyd is largely forgotten today, but he was one of the giants of the silent screen, a comic genius whose popularity once rivalled Charlie Chaplin. Like many silent stars, he cranked out movies at a breathtaking pace - he made 205 films between 1913 and 1947, including 40 short films in 1919 alone.

By 1922 he was doing longer features such as the 60-minute Grandma's Boy, which an ad in the Oct. 1, 1922, Vancouver Sun called his "first five-reel comedy."

The movie was released a month before it hit Vancouver, and was already a huge hit. The Sun ad boasted Grandma's Boy "holds the world's record for continuous comedy run in one theatre - over 450,000 people have seen it in one house in Los Angeles and it's still running!"

It played the Capitol for only a week before moving to the Dominion for a week and then leaving town. A painted sign would have cost the owner of the Capitol much more than hanging a poster, but would have grabbed attention away from competition like the Tom Mix movie The Big Town Round-Up that was showing at the Rex, or the Cecil B. DeMille movie Manslaughter at the Dominion.

The full glory of the painted ad for Grandma's Boy may be unveiled over the next few days as the building that covered it up comes down, brick by brick. But it won't be visible long, because the building it's on is also coming down, save for the facade.

The Power block dates to 1888, with a distinctive art deco facade that was added in 1929. It originally housed a saloon, later became a bank and in recent years was the location of Charlie's, a used CD/DVD dealer.

Both 801 and 817 Granville are being redeveloped into a five-storey building that will have two floors of retail on the bottom and three floors of office space above. The new building will have a contemporary glass facade, but the deco facade from the Power block will be incorporated into the new structure, because the facade was designated on the city's heritage register.

The rest of the Power block will come down, however, including the wall with the ghost sign. The city will be documenting the sign with photographs.

Another historical quirk unearthed during the demolition is an old "areaway" under the sidewalk along Robson. An areaway is a room under the sidewalk that merchants used to expand their premises in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. You can often tell where they're located because there are small purple glass bricks in the sidewalk that were installed to bring light into the space.

The original Capitol theatre was torn down in the mid-1970s and replaced by the Capitol Six multiplex. That in turn was torn down in 2006, and replaced by a condo tower, the Capitol Residences.

[email protected]" target="_blank

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

[Kelly]

OH MAN that COOLLLLL

[Brooksie]

And here is the advertisement that the article mentions:



I couldn't figure out how to get it any larger - the whole thing is at http://tinyurl.com/7aqty9g.

As the article says, this would have to be something extremely rare and possibly unique, both at the time and now. A shame that the disease known in Sydney as 'facadism' - demolishing almost of all of a heritage building, constructing a hideous new building around it but claiming that this still represents some sort of meaningful preservation - is alive and well in places other than here.

[Harlett O'Dowd]

http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Gh ... story.html" target="_blank

The rest of the Power block will come down, however, including the wall with the ghost sign. The city will be documenting the sign with photographs.

Well, if that wall is coming down too, it would be nice if the ad part of the wall could be preserved and moved elsewhere.

[Cole Johnson]

Can someone come up with a better picture of the wall? This one is very dark.

[Brooksie]

Follow the link to the Vancouver Sun article, there's a better picture there.

[gjohnson]

So you people want to preserve a billboard??
You do realize we have the movie preserved that the billboard was advertising.

[Brooksie]

So you people want to preserve a billboard??
You do realize we have the movie preserved that the billboard was advertising.

So every original programme, advertisement, or piece of memorabilia from this film should go in the bin?

What odd logic.

[Joe Thompson]

The Vancouver sign is gone.

http://ghostsigns.posterous.com/grandma ... o-more-rip

[Rollo Treadway]

In a perfect world, each brick would have been painstakingly removed and reassembled at the Museum of the Moving Image or some such institution — but I imagine it would be a tad expensive.