Producers have been advertising the films they produce by every means conceivable since the first producer decided to splice his footage together, load it onto a projector, set up a screen and some chairs and sell tickets. Film trailers, handbills, heralds, radio and TV spots, sneak previews and the revered publicity stunts of the great showmen of the past have all played a role in getting the attention of the public when a film needed selling. But for film fans all over the world, one area of film advertising remains specially connected to the heart of filmmaking: movie posters. Posters go right back to the beginning of movie exhibition a century ago. The evolution of advertising movies on posters was inevitable; in the previous century almost anything you could buy had been advertised on posters. Posters were colorful and they were ubiquitous. They were cheap to produce and they really did get one's attention. So it was natural that filmmakers would turn to posters as a means of arousing curiosity. The modern one sheet posters of today, offset printed on translucent "lightbox" paper, fulfill exactly the same function as did the stone lithographs which announced exhibitions of cinema by Lumiere and Edison. By the exploitation and juxtaposition of image, text, and color they attract the public's attention and invite people to reach for their wallets at the boxoffice.

But aside from this primary function, film posters have another quality. They are at once momentos -- memorabilia, if you will, of the experience of attending a film. In this they are artifacts of our culture. Is something extraordinary or banal? The poster that you see at the the cineplex for a film like JURASSIC PARK or HOWARD'S END could have the same appeal in fifty years that a poster for THE WIZARD OF OZ or IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT has for us today. It's hard to say for sure. The possibility that it might is the essence of the charm and allure of collecting. The ability to see something special in a poster is the hallmark of a talented collector. A collector may have great posters and yet have a lackluster collection. Collections with verve are amassed by collectors with vision. That is true in collectibles generally and it is likewise true with film posters. Happily, this is what makes collecting fun. Not everyone can have a KING KONG one sheet. Not everyone has the money, but even if they did they still couldn't have one. There just aren't that many. But anyone interested in collecting can have a wonderful collection. That is to say, a collection filled with wonders.

Movie posters were made in different sizes, sometimes in multiple styles (different posters in the same size), so that they could be used in different situations. The most common size, the one sheet poster, 27 inches wide by 41 inches high, is today triumphant over the other sizes which are, largely, no longer manufactured. The one sheet poster is what one sees when attending a theater today. But in the past, as recently as the 1970s and 1980s, posters were made in several configurations. Classically, from the smallest to the largest they are:

1) Stills . Usually 8 inches by 10 inches, stills are glossy black and white or sometimes color photographs produced on the set of a film by the film's still photographer. They are not, strictly speaking, a poster, although at movie houses they might be displayed in groups like lobby cards. They are not, usually, strict frames from a film enlarged on to a photograph although in some rare cases they may be. They are tableau or scenes from the film set up and photographed in such a way as to look as if they are lifted from the film. In the old days the film's still photographers used 4x5 cameras that would create razor sharp stills for better newspaper reproduction.