Boxoffice-Febuary.1998

tie lEis IPicture
don't necessarily believe
Wein omens, but it struck us as
more than just an interesting
coincidence that, at roughly the same
time as our own recent management
transition took place, a substantial
piece of our own editorial history
landed right in our laps.
In the wake of the passing this past
Shlyen, who was
summer of Jesse
BOXOFTICE magazine's managing
editor from the
'30s to the late
'70s, we received a series of packages
in our Hollywood office from Jesse's
son, Steve. Steve had been in discussion
with our recently departed editorin-chief
Ray Greene since 1995 about
his father's "papers"—random documents
spanning the various periods of
Jesse's involvement with BOXOF-
FICE dating all the way back to the
1920s. For the last 10 years of Jesse's
hfe, Steve had been selflessly caring
for Jesse, who was in declining health
after a series of minor strokes. After
Jesse's death, Steve moved ftom the
home they had shared and took a personal
inventory of Jesse's possessions,
some of which he felt would be
better served as part of the magazine's
permanent archives.
Jesse's BOXOFFICE effects arrived,
unannounced, in nondescript
boxes sent by regular mail. In our
Hollywood offices, opening those
containers felt like Christmas in October
Because much of the Hollywood
office's collection of its historic materials
had been donated to the American
Fihn Institute a number of years
ago, our staff has had only occasional
opf)ortunities to see anything other
than reproductions of BOXOFFICE's
early output. The first volume we
opened was therefore a revelation: a
bound set of perfectly preserved back issues dating all the way back
to 1924, when the magazine was called The Reel Journal and the
movies had yet to learn how to talk.
The second volume was, if anything, even more precious. Its lead
item: A mint condition issue dated May 4, 1933—our first national
edition. The picture on the cover was familiar to us; we had
reproduced it on the back of our 75th anniversary issue in 1995 by
having a photostatic negative sent out to Hollywood courtesy of the
BOXOFFICE archives at our Chicago home office. But holding that
very i.s,sue in our hands and seeing in "the fu^t person" the beginning
of the long and ongoing journalistic journey that has been passed to
as was something else again: A truly moving experience is the
sentimental but accurate and therefore only way it can be described.
So many other objects of interest were packed into that handfiil
of cartons. There were letters to our founder, Ben Shlyen, from
famous movie and exhibition personalities, signed in their own
hands. There were Barometer annuals spanning the '30s, the '40s,
the '50s, the '6()s and the '70s. The whole history of exhibition and
moviegoing has passed through these pages—a fact we're proud of,
and of which we're intellectually, if not always emotionally, aware.
UNCLE BEN: This never-before-published photo of our founder, Ben Shlyen,
is Just part of the rich collection of BOXOFFICE materials recently bequeathed to us
by longtime managing editor Jesse Shlyen via the kindness of his son Steve.
In those boxes, so kindly sent to us by the son ofone ofour founders,
that history lay sleeping, ready to Uve again.
Ws
re live in a world that is forever in transition. Permanence,
to paraphrase Larry Gelbart, at times seems like something
that holds up just twice in a row. Excitingly, our own fiiture
is now a work in progress: For the first time in half a decade,
BOXOFFICE finds itself in a period of reinvention, with new
editorial blood on the masthead and old hands graduating to new
responsibilities they are more than ready to assume. How
strange, then, that— precisely as that transformation begins to take
place—a vital connection with the journalistic traditions in which
this publication is grounded arrived at our door.
Call it karma, fate, dumb luck or what you will. We call it a rich
reminder that, whatever we achieve here, we are standing on the
shoulders of giants. And, as we move through the changes that the
next thousand tomorrows may bring, the history in those boxes as
well as the history you and we are making right now le;ids us to offer
you this pledge: Now and for keeps, we'll do our very best to
continue to live up to the view.
—
Elliot Forbes
66 BoxomcE