Motion Picture Posters
name: label: Creator
content: Rosen, Martha
label: Collection Creator
content: Archives Center, National Museum of American History
acqinfo: label: Provenance
content: Donated to the Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution by Martha Rosen, 2001.
creator: label: Creator
content: Rosen, Martha
setName: label: See more items in
content: Archives Center Poster Collection
bioghist: label: Historical
content: Motion pictures have been exhibited in the United States since debuting at the Columbian Exposition in 1893.  The public's love affair with the movies has never waned.  Beginning with silent films with simple plots the motion picture industry has grown into a multi-billion dollar industry where the small simple film costs millions of dollars and a great portion of a motion picture budget is designated for advertising.  Movie posters have been an integral marketing tool for the motion picture from its inception.  Movie posters attempt to capture the essence of the film in one clear defining image and image that will hopefully remain in the consumers mind.  Early movie posters boasted original artwork with bright colors and bold lettering.  Beginning in the 1950s, movie posters began to use actual photographs from the movie itself as the primary artwork for the movie poster.  In the latter 20th century almost all movie posters were photographic in nature.  With the expansion of motion pictures into the home video market from the early 1980s onward, movie posters became not only a marketing tool for the movie theatre but for the video store as well.

Donor did not want to have her name in collection title so the donation was added into this artificial collection.
physdesc: label: Extent
content: 107 items in 9 folders Items
unitdate: label: Date
content: 1963-1998
dataSource: label: Archival Repository
content: Archives Center, National Museum of American History
identifier: label: Identifier
content: NMAH.AC.0751, Series 3
objectType: label: Type
content: Archival materials
processinfo: label: Processing Information
content: Processed by Franklin A. Robinson, Jr., archivist, June 2002.
scopecontent: label: Scope and Contents
content: This collection was collected from movie theaters and video stores in the Washington, DC metropolitan area and with few exceptions, exclusively covers the decade of the 1990s.  The collection contains movie posters from a wide range of motion pictures; animated, children's, adult, studio, and independently made films and consists of full size, six-sheet posters with two small four-sheet size posters.  The collection is arranged alphabetically by motion picture title.