Muggs Illuminate History of Reporting Box Office
New York, April 21, 2021
The twisted history of public reporting of U.S./Canada box office—the grosses!—gets a look in a story that cites Variety as the historical pace setter, and quotes muggs Marie Silverman Marich, the late Larry Michie and Peter Besas’ book Inside Variety (Ars Millenii, 2000)
Summary box office has been provided to the press since the mid-1990s, but before that time getting a count of ducats from the wickets was difficult, patchy and inconsistent.
Marie was one of the journos who wrote the “L.A. Box Office” at Daily Variety in the 1980s while Larry wrote the notoriously difficult Washington D.C. box office stories starting in the mid-1960s. Both pieced together raw box office numbers from local theatres to create a mosaic, as was the custom in that era.
Pulling the historical recollection together, Peter’s book Inside Variety recounts the full history, starting with the Bible of Showbiz coaxing figures out of the then-biggest theatre chain in the period around World War I (that goes back to silent films!).
The website MarketingMovies.net, which just published the analysis article, is connected with Robert Marich’s book Marketing to Moviegoers (in three editions). So Bob relied on no-less-an-authority than his wife, Marie, for eyewitness recollections.
Variety just published a story speculating that national box office summaries may go hush-hush again to some degree, since Hollywood has been patchy in reporting to the press during the pandemic.
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