Hailed by Lit’ry Elite for ‘Palooka’ Ads, Horne Thinks It’s Just a Gag

Hal Horne, the man who gave Mickey Mouse the squeak that was heard ’round the world and who all but put the "schnozzle" on Jimmy Durante’s priceless pan, thinks it’s just a gag, that American Spectator award. And the best part of the gag, the advertising and publicity director of United Artists thinks, is the fact that the last laugh is on George Jean Nathan, playboy of literature and and editor of the American Spectator which last week took off its high hat and bowed profoundly in Horne’s direction for having written what is considered the best advertising copy of the year.

Not many weeks before the award was announced-placing the young Bostonian on a pinnacle by himself as the only native American to whom one of the awards had been made-Nathan and Horne met.

"It was the only time I ever met him," Horne said, "and I celebrated the occasion by promptly insulting him. I told him that I couldn’t understand why he went to all that trouble to find such lousy paper to print the American Spectator on."

So the last laugh is on Nathan. It’s a double laugh, too, because George Jean has been in the forefront of the critics who threw pungent, sophisticated raspberries at the movies and the movie ads. Nor have Nathan’s associates (Ernest Boyd, Sherwood Anderson, James Branch Cabell and Eugene O’Neill), who voted unanimously to give Horne the nod, ever been known to hold either the movies or movie advertising in high esteem.

HIGH SASS-IETY CONDESCENDS

The ads that Horne conceived and William Steig illustrated with his inimitable caricatures were so appealing that each of the Spectator editors for the first time in many moons was induced to enter the portals of a movie palace. The picture they advertised was "Palooka." There was laughter in the town the moment those ads were released. As a matter of fact the ads probably got as many laughs as the famed "Schnozzle" got in the picture.

Horne, in his office on the twelfth floor of 729 Seventh avenue, had an explanation of the success of those ads.

"Jimmy," he said, "is essentially a satirist, probably an unconscious satirist." (If Jimmy ever reads this, he’ll be "mortified" all over the lot). "So we decided to sell his picture as a satire on other pictures. We played him up as a lover, the lover that satirized all screen lovers."

In all the ads, Horne always referred to the actor as "James Casanova Beaucaire Durante," or "James Don Juan Casanova Durante, the screen’s new perfect lover."

An explanation. A sketch of Jimmy, arms crossed, eyes shut, proboscis jutting beyond cleft chin, spurning the attentions of a woman who is clutching him around the knees. A caption-"Suave," with the explanation, "A second Don Juan-and twice as good as the first!" And "you’ll how1! You’ll scream! You’ll roar! And otherwise make a general nuisance of yourself!" Another ad showed a Steig sketch of a goo-goo-eyed female seated in front of a table on which is a framed portrait of Jimmy in a tuxedo. Adoration personified. The captain is "Debonaire." The explanation, "James Don Juan Casanova Durante… the new perfect lover of the screen… with a shine on his nose and a melody in his heart." And under-neath the sketch, "it’s colossal right from the start… and gets better from then on!"

AND THEY SLAP STICKS!

If Jimmy satirized all the screen’s lovers that ever emoted on gelatin, then Horne in his advertising of the picture was at the same time satirizing all copywriters who ever filled costly white space with dizzy superlatives. And he did it advisedly, with malice aforethought and so forth, Horne admits.

"When a certain condition becomes so well known that people start poking fun at it," he said, "the safety valve is off. Humor is usually the first sign of rebellion. Superlatives and sex implications had so long been used and abused in the movie industry that they had become common knowledge to the moviegoing public. Thus, the stage was set for satire. The premise upon which successful satire is built is that everybody recognizes the subject that’s being kidded. Thus, it was safe in a movie ad to satirize movie ad superlatives."

An illustration, Everybody has seen, time and again ad nauseam the stock ad phrase "this is positively the funniest picture ever made."Horne used the phrase, but added to it the qualification "but don’t let that keep you away." Then as a legend to an ad captioned "Seductive," showing the "Schnozzle" in shut-eyed adoration of a cluster of grapes (a take-off on Garbo in Queen Christina, by special permission of copyright owners Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), Horne kidded the most recurrent of the movie cliches as follows: "If you don’t say this is the most colossal, stupendous laugh riot of all time, we’ll get awfully, awfully mad!"

The man who has probably done more than any other to take the super out of movie ad superlatives is only thirty-eight years old and a graduate of Harvard. While he still retains some of his Bostonese accent, after several years in New York, all of the Harvard is gone out his speech.

FROM RAGS TO RICHES

While attending Harvard he was a working newspaperman, with particular emphasis on the "working." He wielded a pencil nights on the city desk of the Boston Record. At the same time he wrote a daily short story for the publication. Days he attended classes, probably in pretty much of a daze from lack of sleep, he admits. But he got through.

After graduation he became publicity director for the Boy Scouts of America. Later, while conducting a funds drive for the Federation of Jewish Charities, which he completed in ten days, he was thrown in with Louis E. Kirstein, of Filene’s Boston department store, and a regional director of the drive. Kirstein invited him to become associated with Filene’s to

ONCE INSULTED ITS EDITOR, HE RECALLS; PUT MICKEY MOUSE ON THE MAP

handle publicity and promotion. He stayed on that job three days, telling Kirstein that New York called him and he couldn’t resist. Kirstein introduced him to Max Mitchell, president of the Cosmopolitan Trust Company in Boston and the "angel" who was financing the picture "The Miracle Man," which was being produced at the time by Mayflower Photoplay Corporation. Mitchell hired him and within two weeks, Raoul Walsh, famous director, spotted him and asked him to be his assistant. He accepted and has been in the movie business ever since.

HA-HA BOY MAKES GOOD

Horne’s chief hobby-it amounts to a passion-is collecting jokes. He has what he describes as probably the greatest catalogued collection of jokes in the world.

He has three girls working on nothing else but those jokes, pasting them up on little cards and filling them under various classifications. He says the jokes run into the hundreds of thousands. And he doesn’t use them for after-dinner speeches, either. Some he gives away. Even now Milton Berle, the comedian, is probably telling the latest Horne gave him. "If they think Hitler is bad, wait till they see the picture ("Hitler’s Reign of Terror").

One of the clever promotions in which Horne had a leading part was that around the well-known Mickey Mouse.

It was Horne who made Mickey well-Known. How he did it, together with Kay Kamen, whom he describes as one of the greatest merchandising experts in this country, is a sufficiently engrossing tale to merit a complete volume in the telling. Suffice it to say that when United Artists two years ago took over the distribution of the Walt Disney animated cartoons, Mickey Mouse and Disney were comparatively unknown. Between Horne and Kamen, a promotion and publicity campaign was unleashed that laid the foundation for what is now conceded to be one of the greatest and most successful moving picture enterprises in the entire world.

When Horne entered the picture, Mickey Mouse cartoons were not featured by any of the theatres where they were being exhibited. They were simply billed as animated cartoons, inconspicuously and anonymously. Horne surrounded Mickey with dignity, got the exhibitor into the habit of associating Mickey invariably with Disney and wound up by having the exhibitors feature the cartoons in lobby displays and on screen as outstanding portions of the program.

The result was a popularity unparalleled in the history of the movie industry even by the greatest of human stars. It was climaxed in the frenzied reception given "The Three Little Pigs," a Mickey Mouse-Disney presentation. Making Mickey a producer was another of Horne’s ideas.