Here's something kinda interesting: David Grudt sent me an image of an ad that ran in the Hollywood Citizen-News on Thursday, November 7th, 1963. It ballyhoos the premiere that evening of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and offers tickets by mail order, which is how many tickets were purchased for "roadshow" movies in those days.
For those who don't know: A roadshow movie was one that debuted in one theater only in a given city and it ran at that theater for a long time, often more than a year. Mad World ran at the Pacific Cinerama Dome for fifteen months.
You bought tickets for them the same way you bought tickets to a Broadway show — reserved seats for a future date purchased by mail or at the box office or through a ticket agency or one or two other ways. These tickets cost more than admission to your local movie theater that was showing a double feature…and as you can see, a seat to Mad World could run you as high as $3.50!
Roadshow films were usually long, big budget productions with intermissions and they usually sold a souvenir book in the lobby. They also cleared the house after each showing because the next showing didn't start immediately and someone else had bought a ticket that would put them in the seat you have to vacate.
The ad would make you think that seven days a week, they had one showing at 8 PM except on Sundays when they started at 7:30. Then on some days, they had a matinee starting at 2 PM and on some nights, a midnight showing at Midnight. But I have here a schedule for this theater that's dated two days before the premiere and it specifies four showings a day — at 11 AM, 2:30 PM, 6 PM and 9:30 PM — though it doesn't say that they did this every day. Nothing on it about midnight showings, no showings starting at 7:30 PM or 8:00. I have no idea why this does not match up with the ad.
The list of celebrities attending the premiere — some of whose names were misspelled — is interesting because there are forty-six stars named but only four of them were in the movie — and two of those were the masters of ceremonies for the evening. There's plenty of news footage and many photos showing other actors from the film at the L.A. premiere and I think there may have been two evenings promoted as premieres.
Also I note that Peter Falk, who was then relatively new to the business, got his name in the ad but Eddie "Rochester" Anderson didn't even though Falk had pretty much the same prominence in the picture. I don't think that's a racial thing. Falk just probably had a better agent.
And that's about all I have to say about my favorite movie on this, the 60th anniversary of its opening. I wish some theater in Los Angeles — especially the Cinerama Dome — was showing it tonight. I can always watch my Blu-Ray (or my DVD or my VHS copies or my Beta copy and if my Laserdisc player still worked, I could watch my Laserdisc, plus it's on a couple of streaming channels…) but as I often say, the way to see this movie is on a big screen with a big, enthusiastic audience. I don't seem to have either in my den at the moment.