Movie theater lobby cards

A number of movie theater lobby cards, posters and inter-office memos from the Toddy Pictures Company during the 1940s. Plus there are hand-written notes, perhaps from Henry R. Arias (Astor Export Corp), detailing plans for the implementation of an exclusive three-year deal for the international rights to many of Ted Toddy's "race/negro" films.
Here are some of the films represented in this marvelous collection of 1940s movie memorabilia (donated by Gary Blevins): Bronze Venus (with Lena Horne), Sunday Sinners, Woman's A Fool, Caldonia, Paradise 'n Harlem, Murder on Lenox Avenue, The Beast of Borneo, Harlem on the Prairie, Voodoo Devil Drums, Beware (with Louis Jordan), Pigmeat Alamo Markham, Mantan Messes Up, Shut My Big Mouth, The Wrong Mr. Wright, Crime Street, Ill Wind, A Night With the Devil, The Corpse Accuses, Fight That Ghost, House-Rent Party, Gangsters on the Loose, Prison Bait, Murder rap, His Harlem Wife, Fighting Americans, Crooked Money, Condemned Man, Gun Moll, Buck and Bubbles Laugh Jubilee, Pigmeat Markham's Laugh Hepcats, Up Jumped the Devil, Night Cub Girl, One Round Jones, Mr. Washington Goes to Town, Eddie Green's Laugh Jamboree, Professor Creeps, and more....
The Bronze Venus with Lena Horne

BACKGROUND: Ted Toddy was a movie executive, entrepreneur and showman. He first worked for Universal Pictures and later for the Southern division of Columbia Pictures before forming what would later become the Atlanta-based Toddy Pictures Company, devoted to the production and distribution of "race" films, in 1940. Archival material relating to the Toddy Pictures Company was presented to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1999 by actor Giancarlo Esposito, and is deposited in the Special Collections of the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy, located in Beverly Hills. Toddy was running a carnival in Atlanta in 1952 when he purchased the 1934 Ford Model 730 Deluxe Sedan in which famed bank robbers Clyde Barrows and Bonnie Parker had met their deaths, and he exhibited it both at the carnival and on the road for a number of years. When Bonnie and Clyde (1967) came out in 1967, Toddy got the car out of storage and exhibited it nationwide as the "True Bonnie and Clyde Death Car." It's currently exhibited at the Primm Hotel & Casino on I-15 on the Nevada-California state line.