ALL ABOUT THE ROXY'S
THEATRE CALENDARS

Show calendars were once an important part of every small theatre's movie marketing. The first Roxy calendars were a simple list of the movies on plain paper, with a description of the story, the cast and the show times.

In later years, the calendars became more elaborate, with actual movie graphics being used.

While there were several companies in the business of producing theatre calendars, one of the biggest was the Victor Cornelius Company of Eastland, Texas. The calendars were made in several sizes. The smallest was just slightly larger than a postcard, while the biggest was 11 by 17 inches.  The biggest Roxy calendars were the size of a piece of standard typing paper. Most of our calendars were printed by Victor Cornelius, but from 1979 through 1981, our summer calendars were printed by Steve Jessen at the Forsyth Independent. Our last calendar was produced for August, 1981.

The biggest problem with theatre calendars was the printing schedule. The theatre was required to send its bookings to the calendar people up to seven weeks ahead of time. With the advent of cable TV and videotapes in the late 1970s, movies began to move through the distribution pipeline faster than ever before. Our booker always strives to get the biggest movies fast, but with things moving so much more quickly these days, a long lead time usually isn't possible. We often do not know until Monday what movie will be playing that Friday. This makes using calendars impractical, since there's no way to know for sure what movie is coming next week, let alone six weeks down the road.

So in 1981, the difficult decision was made to discontinue theatre calendars. And we obviously weren't the only theatre making that move, because Victor Cornelius went out of business in 1983.

We still get requests for calendars today, over 20 years later. But with our website, our weekly e-mail, and the ever-reliable newspaper and answering machine, we've made it easier than ever to find out what's showing.

Our calendar collection is far from complete. If you happen to run across an old calendar that isn't listed at the left, we'd love to add it to our collection.