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File:The Letter 1940 Davis.jpg

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Summary

Description Warner Bros. publicity photograph of Bette Davis in The Letter (1940), published in The Sunday Star (The Washington Star), page F-3
Date publication
Source The Washington Star via Chronicling America, Library of Congress
Author

Warner Bros., no photographer credited

  • George Hurrell is identified as the photographer in John Kobal's Hollywood Glamor Portraits (1976), page 111. That source also identies Orry-Kelly as costume designer.
Permission
(Reusing this file)

This is a publicity photo taken to promote a film actor. As stated by film production expert Eve Light Honthaner in The Complete Film Production Handbook (Focal Press, 2001, p. 211.):

Publicity photos (star headshots) have traditionally not been copyrighted. Since they are disseminated to the public, they are generally considered public domain, and therefore clearance by the studio that produced them is not necessary.

Nancy Wolff includes a similar explanation in The Professional Photographer's Legal Handbook (Allworth Communications, 2007, p. 55.):

There is a vast body of photographs, including but not limited to publicity stills, that have no notice as to who may have created them.

Film industry author Gerald Mast, in Film Study and the Copyright Law (1989) p. 87, writes:

According to the old copyright act, such production stills were not automatically copyrighted as part of the film and required separate copyrights as photographic stills. The new copyright act similarly excludes the production still from automatic copyright but gives the film's copyright owner a five-year period in which to copyright the stills. Most studios have never bothered to copyright these stills because they were happy to see them pass into the public domain, to be used by as many people in as many publications as possible.
Kristin Thompson, committee chairperson of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies writes in the conclusion of a 1993 conference with cinema scholars and editors, that they "expressed the opinion that it is not necessary for authors to request permission to reproduce frame enlargements ... [and] some trade presses that publish educational and scholarly film books also take the position that permission is not necessary for reproducing frame enlargements and publicity photographs.
  • Note that the uploaded photo is larger and of higher quality than the cropped version published in the newspaper (see original upload).
  • No copyright notice is present. A search for copyright renewals by Warner Bros. and by George Hurrell found none for photographs in the years 1967 and 1968.

Licensing

This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published in the United States between 1929 and 1977, inclusive, without a copyright notice. For further explanation, see Commons:Hirtle chart as well as a detailed definition of "publication" for public art.
Note that it may still be copyrighted in jurisdictions that do not apply the rule of the shorter term for US works (depending on the date of the author's death), such as Canada (50 p.m.a.), Mainland China (50 p.m.a., not Hong Kong or Macao), Germany (70 p.m.a.), Mexico (100 p.m.a.), Switzerland (70 p.m.a.), and other countries with individual treaties.

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Captions

Bette Davis as Leslie Crosbie in "The Letter" (1940)

Items portrayed in this file

depicts

File history

Click on a date/time to view the file as it appeared at that time.

Date/TimeThumbnailDimensionsUserComment
current02:24, 23 December 2023Thumbnail for version as of 02:24, 23 December 20231,266 × 1,600 (779 KB)WFinchhigher quality version
02:23, 23 December 2023Thumbnail for version as of 02:23, 23 December 20235,561 × 7,786 (22.92 MB)WFinch{{Information |Description=Warner Bros. publicity photograph of Bette Davis in ''The Letter'' (1940), published in ''The Sunday Star'' (''The Washington Star''), page F-3 |Source=''[https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1940-11-10/ed-1/seq-83/ The Washington Star]'' via Chronicling America, Library of Congress |Date=1940-11-10 publication |Author=Warner Bros., no photographer credited * George Hurrell is identified as the photographer in John Kobal's ''Hollywood Glamor Portraits'...

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