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A Texas boy who was graduated from the State University at 16, Birdwell has always had a feeling for the sensational. The great work of his life was keeping Gone With the Wind in print from the summer of 1936, when Selznick bought the book, until late 1939. when the film was released. Birdwell turned the trick largely by centring attention on the casting of Scarlett O'Hara. He still had GWTW in the news last week with an "anniversary premiere" in Atlanta celebrating its first year. He dispatched Vivien (Scarlett O'Hara) Leigh, Husband Laurence Olivier and Director Alfred Hitchcock by plane to lend glitter to the event; but luck turned on him when fog closed the airport and they failed to arrive.
Usually his tricks contain more splash. To advertise Nothing Sacred, he hired a young lady to ride horseback down Los Angeles' busiest street wearing only a flesh-colored G-string and a long yellow cellophane wig.
Harry Brand, whose province is 20th Century-Fox, takes things easier, but his results are as good. First he pampers the press into pliability with his genial hand-pumping personality; then he showers them with copy and stills of the forthcoming production. Thanks to Brand—and to the Fox commissary press room, where the food is the best of any studio in town—Fox is the most popular studio in Hollywood with reporters. Harry's office is always open to them; his invariable procedure is to crack a few jokes, pat them on the back, roar: "You're my pal. Let me know if there's anything I can do for you." When the time arrives for the correspondents to do something for Harry, they find it easy to reciprocate.
Charlie Einfeld considers himself more a merchandiser of photoplays than a press agent. At Warner Brothers he is an executive—in charge of advertising and publicity. A good part of his time is spent supervising advertising in Manhattan, where he was born 39 years ago, went to school and college (Columbia). But Einfeld keeps his finger deep in the publicity pie, and it was he who originated Hollywood's favorite exploitation stunt: the out-of-town premiere.
Einfeld considers his greatest junket the one plugging 42nd Street, a Warner's musical released in 1933. With the U. S. deep in depression. Einfeld loaded his 42nd-Street Special with a bevy of the prettiest girls he could find, swept them across the country with 28 stops. Incidentally, the trip plugged Southern California's climate and General Electric's products (he fed his beauties from an electrically equipped kitchen, tanned them under a G. E. sun lamp set up in a Malibu Beach wagon).