Boxoffice - May 2019

Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame
has been adapted for the screen many times, and
the best of them was the 1939 classic starring
Charles Laughton as Quasimodo. RKO pulled out
all the stops to produce and promote their blackand-white
epic. Large portions of the cathedral’s
exterior were built to scale in the San Fernando
Valle,y and several full-color gatefolds were placed
in the pages of Boxoffice. The film opened just
two weeks after Gone with the Wind yet was still a
powerful draw at the box office well into 1940 and
received two Academy Award nominations.
Disney decided to adapt the novel in 1993 as an
animated musical with Amadeus’s Tom Hulce voicing
and singing the title role. That adaptation was
featured on the January 1996 cover of Boxoffice,
which you can see on page 86. A few years later,
Walt Disney Theatrical produced a stage version of
the musical in Germany. An epic, serious-in-tone
English-language version was recently produced
and staged in Seattle. Quasimodo was played by
Joshua Castille, a deaf actor, while his songs were
sung by a fellow performer on-stage. Thankfully,
there were no singing gargoyles.
BIG MARIE
One side of the 26 x 12-inch
multipage gatefold special
insert from the December
16, 1939, issue of Boxoffice.
The teaser image can
be seen on page 81, while
the reverse side of the
gatefold may be found on
the following page.
MAY 2019
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