Page 16 - CinemaRecord #83

THE BRISBANE REGENT Mike Gillies

This is an excerpt (part of Chapter 8) from the forthcoming new book The Regent – Brisbane’s Motion Picture Cathedral by Michael Gillies,
due out Sep/Oct 2014. The book will be hard-cover, printed on quality art paper, with many full-colour illustrations about the history of the
Brisbane Regent Theatre. The author has spent over seven years researching the book. Details on its release etc. will follow soon.

Exploitation was showmanship. Being adventurous and a
risk taker were important, as were unusual and
oday the word, exploitation, has negative timely stunts to grab the public’s attention.
Tconnotations, but in 1929 it was the term Billy Maloney, the first publicity manager at
used to describe what we now call marketing the Regent, was a respected and brilliant
and publicity. A substantial part of a cinema operator. When it came to getting the Regent’s
circuit’s annual budget was allotted to selling name in the papers or the attention of everyone
their product, and Hoyts were one of the best from young children to senior citizens,
in the trade when it came to exploitation. Maloney was an expert.
Each large theatre had its own publicity team Newspapers in the inter-war period carried
led by a manager who was answerable to the large daily advertisements for local theatres on
theatre manager. The team included a page three. Cinema’s esteem with the public
commercial artist or ticket writer, several ensured its prominence in the papers up until
junior staff who put up posters around town World War Two. Large graphics and elaborate
and a number of theatre staff who were often headlines meant that the advertisements for the
involved in performing a publicity stunt in the big theatres were prominent. The artwork for
theatre district of inner Brisbane, based on a many of these advertisements was often
theme for a forthcoming movie.
tongue-in-cheek, designed to emphasize the
message that that week’s movie was not to be
An essential ingredient for managing publicity

missed. A few pages over, there were full-page
reviews of new films and Hollywood gossip
columns.

Hoyts produced a weekly Regent booklet given
out free to patrons. It was purely a promotional
guide to forthcoming movies and Hollywood
news, funded by local businesses who ran paid
advertising inside. From 1929 until mid 1930,
it was a substantial publication of up to 32
pages with a full-colour cover, but as The
Depression took hold, it was reduced to just a
dozen or so pages with a single-colour cover.
By World War Two, it was further simplified
to be just a folded single-colour brochure to
save on printing and paper.

One of the first great exploitation events for
the Regent occurred on 16 May 1930 when a
small plane dropped imaginary bombs on the

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