Whether you watch them on the big screen or on Twitter, trailers are a fixture of the modern movie-watching experience. But when the film industry began in the early 20th century, trailers were nowhere to be found. Instead, audiences flocked to peek at lobby cards.
Each one barely bigger than a sheet of letter paper, lobby cards were displayed in sets of eight or more in the lobbies of movie theaters. The first card typically displayed a film’s name and crew, which was followed by scene cards that gave viewers a glimpse at the plot. While lobby cards were particularly important in the industry’s early days, they survived until the 1980s, writes librarian Josie Walters-Johnston in a Library of Congress blog post.
Today, lobby cards are crucial for another reason: In some cases, they are the only surviving evidence of a film’s existence, as so many early films have been lost or destroyed. That’s why lobby card collector Dwight Cleveland has teamed up with Dartmouth College’s Media Ecology Project to digitally preserve his collection of over 10,000 lobby cards from the silent film era.
“There’s so much media that is in danger of disintegrating, just literally turning to dust,” Cleveland tells Kathy McCormack of the Associated Press (AP).
Cleveland, a real estate developer by day, first became interested in vintage film cards and posters as a high school student in the 1970s, per the AP. Collecting and celebrating those “historical, vulnerable, ephemeral [and] extraordinary” materials has become a passion for Cleveland, who published a book called Cinema on Paper: The Graphic Genius of Movie Posters in 2019.
Preserving and expanding film history is also a passion for Mark Williams, a film and media studies expert at Dartmouth who is overseeing the digitization project. With the help of a team of students, he is seeing that Cleveland’s lobby cards get carefully scanned and cataloged.
“Part of what is exciting about this project is that we can make available, both to the public and also to scholars, extremely rare material about the earliest days of cinema,” says Williams in a statement. “Many films from that era are gravely endangered, and the vast majority are considered to be materially lost.”