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"View Slideshow\n\nCinema is an illusion. By the time the images are projected onto a screen in a theater, the experience for the moviegoer is pure fantasy. Many artists contribute to the fantasy\u2014directors of photography, editors, set designers\u2014but from the days of the silent films on, there were also artists who proclaimed the arrival of the film and bolstered the fantasy in their own way: They created the posters that hung alluringly in glass cases outside the movie palaces in every town and city.\n\nUnlike most theaters, which used printed posters sent to them by the movie studios, Loew&amp;#39;s Grand Theatre on Peachtree Street in Atlanta\u2014which showed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer films almost exclusively\u2014kept two artists on staff, Charles Reese Collier and Sid Smith. They made posters\u2014unique works of art, really\u2014with chalk and paint for each new film.\n\nLoew&amp;#39;s hosted what was perhaps the greatest premiere in the history of cinema\u2014the opening of Gone With the Wind on December 15, 1939. The exterior of the Grand was transformed into Ashley Wilkes&amp;#39;s Twelve Oaks, the plantation where Scarlett O&amp;#39;Hara first meets Rhett Butler at a barbecue. Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable, Leslie Howard and many other stars\u2014with the notable exception of Hattie McDaniel, who would win an Oscar for playing Mammy but who, as a black woman, was not invited to the premiere, located deep in Dixie\u2014arrived in their Hollywood glory to the acclaim of some 300,000 Atlanta citizens.\n\nHerb Bridges was a 10-year-old boy at the time, living in Sharpsburg, Georgia, near Atlanta. Although he was not at the premiere, Bridges was taken by an aunt to see the film shortly thereafter and conceived a lifelong passion for Gone With the Wind and movies in general. When he was 15 or 16, he rode into the city on a trolley every day to work as an usher at Loew&amp;#39;s Grand. One of his duties was to change the painted posters each week in the glass cases at the front of the theater.\n\n&amp;quot;I knew the artists in their domain,&amp;quot; Bridges says. &amp;quot;You be careful with those posters,&amp;quot; they would shout at the young usher when he carried them to the display cases. Bridges was fascinated by the fact that the artists based the vibrant, almost glaringly bright posters on black-and-white movie stills.\n\nHooked on films\u2014and Gone With the Wind in particular\u2014Bridges became a collector of memorabilia associated with the movie and the book, as well as its author, Margaret Mitchell. At one point he had first editions of the novel in more than 40 different languages. Ultimately he sold a portion of his massive collection at Christie&amp;#39;s in New York in the mid-1990s for $350,000.\n\nHe wasn&amp;#39;t able to let go of his enchantment with film, however, and his interests broadened. &amp;quot;When you get known as a collector,&amp;quot; Bridges says, &amp;quot;people call you up with all sorts of things you might like.&amp;quot; One day he was contacted by the owner of about 70 of the original posters from Loew&amp;#39;s Grand, who said they were for sale.\n\n&amp;quot;They had been in storage for over 60 years,&amp;quot; he says. The posters, which he stores in the 1905 house in Sharpsburg that his grandfather built, glow with the allure of the romantic, the forbidden and the tender.\n\nThe poster for Love on the Run, a 1936 black-and-white romantic comedy starring Joan Crawford and Clark Gable, is done in sepia tones, with Crawford&amp;#39;s hair gleaming with chalk highlights as she gazes into Gable&amp;#39;s eyes.\n\nLady of Burlesque, 1943, was based on the novel G-String Murders, written by that smart burley-que queen of all time, Gypsy Rose Lee. Barbara Stanwyck starred. The New York Times&amp;#39;s review remarked, &amp;quot;Miss Stanwyck takes to scanty gowns like fish to water.&amp;quot; The poster shows her with a come-hither stare, wearing a halter top and a slit skirt.\n\nThe poster for The Outlaw, the notorious film, also from 1943, in which Jane Russell&amp;#39;s bosom was all but bared, has her surprisingly covered up, leaning against the torso of Jack Buetel (Billy the Kid).\n\nFor the 1946 film The Yearling, from Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings&amp;#39;s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the Florida backwoods, a poster shows the young Claude Jarman, Jr., who starred with Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman, holding his pet fawn.\n\nA man of enthusiasm and energy, Bridges doesn&amp;#39;t mourn the past. Two Atlanta museums have pieces of his Gone With the Wind memorabilia, and there was a program on PBS about his collection of posters. &amp;quot;I would like to do exhibitions of the posters,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;and I would like to have collaborators in restoring them.&amp;quot;\n\nIn Herb Bridges&amp;#39;s beguiling poster collection, the golden era of Hollywood lives on."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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