What is a lobby card

Created on October 3, 2017

With over one hundred wonderful examples on our website, we thought it high time to give praise to the miniature hero of the poster collecting world – the lobby card. Now scarcely seen in cinemas, the lobby card has been a crucial cog in the movie publicity wheel since the nineteen teens. These days, these beautifully proportioned cards measuring a modest 11×14 inches, are a collectible slice of film history and a great place for a budding collector to begin his or her journey.

What is a lobby card?

As their name suggests, lobby cards were typically located in the lobby or foyer of a cinema. Their purpose was to highlight the key plot elements of a movie and showcase its stars via a series of freeze frames – akin to a modern-day movie trailer shown as carefully selected stills. Lobby cards were traditionally made in sets of 8 – featuring a title card, 6 or 7 scene cards, and in many of the older sets, a portrait card. The portrait card was a studio staged portrait photograph of the film’s leading stars – see Sunset Boulevard as a good example. Barbarella is a wonderful full set available on the website, also see Ghostbusters. Lady and the Tramp bucks the trend as a larger set of 9 – with 8 scene cards.

Are they still in use today?

The gallery cannot find any US lobby cards produced after 2012. It would appear that even lobby cards produced a few years before 2012 were only used in South America, as the ones that have surfaced are only from this location. British lobby cards are very thin on the ground, and the gallery has not come across any after 2007.

How do they fit into the collector’s market?

Lobby cards have unique aspects that movie posters do not, and as such, attract collectors that exclusively specialise in them. Firstly, their size – uniform and compact – makes their display incredibly easy and full of scope. We have known collectors create full galleries covering entire walls or sets carefully sequenced down the side of home cinema rooms. We have also commissioned bespoke albums made specially for the 11 x 14-inch size – and collectors can rotate their collection between album and display as they choose.

Secondly, unlike posters that often take a more artistic approach to the film, lobby cards always feature the stars themselves and are more closely illustrative of the film itself. In some cases, the poster may be a poor or unremarkable design, and collectors will then look to the lobby card for a more attractive option to collect on that title.

Describe the top end of the market?

The record for a title card is in excess of £40,000 for a Universal Horror card for Dracula (1931). The scene card for the same film sold for over £25,000 .

Signed cards can drastically lift the value too and their collectibility.

Tips for amateur collectors?

Their affordably and petit size make them a clever place to start collecting. You also have the added interest of deciding whether to go for full sets, or collect scene or title cards individually. The full sets often get split up because they are easier to sell. We recommend framing lobby cards with a mount – you will notice some of our selection is framed and unframed. The gallery can assist with all your framing needs.

Lobby cards also make exquisite gifts, as they are easy to wrap and transport – ideal for lovers of a particular title featuring the movie stars and the action in glorious technicolour.

View all lobby cards by clicking here.

Lobby Cards were issued to cinemas to promote the film showing. Most Lobby Cards were numbered and had a different scene in colour appearing on each Lobby Card.Sometimes older movie Lobby Card sets included what was called a 'Title' Lobby Card which would be a ninth card. In older Lobby Card sets the cards usually were printed on heavier and more durable Lobby Card stock and displayed the film credits.Lobby Cards made for today's films are often on not as durable stock and don't always have the film's credits.Sizes of Lobby Cards vary but the most sort after are 11" x 14" (standard) followed by 8" x 10" (mini) and the more modern day 14" x 17" (jumbo).Movie Lobby Cards are economical to frame and offer more of an insight into the film with the different movie scenes.Check out our Lobby Cards below and if you don't see what you are after,contact us.

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Lobby Card sets were issued to cinemas to promote the film showing. Originally most Lobby Card sets were numbered and had a different scene appearing on each Lobby Card.Sometimes older movie Lobby Card sets included what was called a 'Title' Lobby Card which would be a ninth card. In older Lobby Card sets the cards usually were printed on heavier and more durable Lobby Card stock and displayed the film credits.Lobby Card sets made for today's films are often on not as durable stock and don't always have the film's credits.Sizes of an individual Lobby Card within the sets vary but the most sort after are 11" x 14" (standard) followed by 8" x 10" (mini) and the more modern day 14" x 17" (jumbo). Can't find what you are after from the range below, contact All About Movies.

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The Lobby Card was a form of advertising that revolutionized the look of graphics. Lobby Cards were sent out by the publicity departments of the Hollywood studios in sets of eight to twenty images reflecting the content of a newly released movie. Their purpose: to lure the movie-going public into theatres across the country.

The earliest known Lobby Cards, dating back to 1908, were part of a weighty bundle of advertising material provided by the early film companies to theatre owners with their two-reelers. These cards - sepia or duo-tinted, 8x10” in size - were mounted on easels beside the box office window or inside the lobby. They were little more than murky reproductions of stills, the result of a brown and white rotogravure process that lacked any clear-cut whites and browns. Unlike the stills, the images were selected to give a sense of the story line of the movie and to supply the credits. The rotogravure process used in printing the Lobby Cards made them more durable than the fragile photographic stock on which movie stills were printed. Even then, some of the cards would have faint coloring applied by hand or by stencil; these give little indication of the splendors to come only a few years later.

As movie-making and movie-selling became more sophisticated (even before sound), Lobby Cards became more lavish, imaginative and dimensional, using kinetic designs that surrounded images; often these border designs were more interesting than the photographs they decorated. A typical set of early cards promoted ROMANCE! DRAMA! TERROR! LAUGHTER! TEARS! (‘Hurry, hurry, hurry - see lovely Mary Pickford in the arms of her boyfriend, Jock! See her cry! See her tortured by the Huns!’)

The cards grew to 11X14” (this became the standard size) and were offered in sets of no less than eight exciting scenes for the average film, and as many as sixteen for the new super productions.

As printing techniques evolved, so did the flair and imagination with which these cards were designed. Film historian David Chierichetti has described the process thus: “In the early 1920s Paramount developed a new and distinctive style for its cards. Printing on very white stock and using an offset image with dense blacks and sharply detailed halftones, Paramount’s publicity department cut out the figures … and surrounded them with completely non-realistic highly stylized drawn sets rendered in the most brilliant possible colors.”

During this time the selection of the images, the imaginative artwork bordering the images, the creatively hand-tinted subjects and the brilliant colors, combined to create a piece of artwork that conveyed the mood of the film more eloquently than the images selected for use. While it might seem ironic that these Lobby Cards were produced in blazing colors for what were after all, with a few rare exceptions, black and white films, the point of the posters and Lobby Cards was to convey the excitement of the product they were selling.

The Lobby Card in blazing colors (many, like Fairbanks’ magnificent Thief of Baghdad, employing gold and silver tints in their lettering, created the illusion of Persian miniatures), became an exciting amalgamation of poster art and photograph, with the borders following the same fanciful artwork that was used for the even more elaborate and stylish one-sheet posters. What made this possible was the emergence of the photogelatin or heliotype process. David Chierichetti writes: “…it used a metal plate covered with photosensitized gelatin that was exposed to light through a regular photograph negative. The gelatin hardened in varying degrees according to the amount of light received, the darkest parts of the image turned hardest. Photogelatin printing was best suited to the smaller cards because it was almost as fine-textured as a photograph, lacking the grains or dots of lithography. The cards were meant to be viewed closely and usually contained much more written material than the posters.

While the title (or main) card in each set was often identical to the 22x28” one sheet, and in some cases was one and the same, the men employed to select for the lobbies the eight or so images out of the hundreds of stills taken, as well as doing the specially composed art, were creating ever more fanciful artwork and evocative montage effects. These could be used in combination on one card with several shots of the star, or various scenes from the film.

Executive or star approval was required at each stage of the lettering and design. The memo from the main office to the boys in publicity usually requested only that the selected stills run in succession with the plot, but the actual choice of images was left to whatever underling was available; this accounts for some bizarre selections which sometimes excluded images of the featured player - or played up supporting actors in the film. Of course the great stars, Swanson, Chaplin, Pickford, Crawford, Fairbanks and the legendary bee-stung lipped Mae Murray, who were actively employed in the production of their own films, made sure that they saw all the material about them before the finished artwork was sent out to the poster company where the color separations were made. Their co-stars had no such luck.

Throughout the years studios employed famous American artists to design their advertising; the forties saw such popular American artists and illustrators as Norman Rockwell (Magnificent Ambersons, Song of Bernadette, The Razor’s Edge), Dan Sayre Groesbeck (Northwest Mounted Police, The Buccaneer), masters of the pin-up like Vargas (Moon Over Miami, The Flame of New Orleans, Ziegfeld Follies), George Petty (The Petty Girl) and others, employed on occasions to design the posters that would subsequently be adapted for Lobby Cards. Thus, Vargas’ drawing of a languorously indolent peek-a-booish blonde Dietrich for The Flame of New Orleans (1941), decorated the borders of the Lobbies. The seventies and eighties have seen a resurgence in the use of famous artists to design movie posters: Frank Frazetta (The Gauntlet, Conan, The Barbarian), Richard Amsel (Chinatown, The Sting, Raiders of the Lost Ark), Peter Max (The Yellow Submarine, Joanna) and their designs have also found their way to Lobby Cards.

Reprinted from Foyer Pleasure: The Golden Age of Cinema Lobby Cards. John Kobal and V. A. Wilson. London: Aurum Press, 1982.

Via the Leonard Schrader Collection.