Okay, this actually going to be two separate requests, but since they're fundamentally about the same thing, I thought it best to make one thread about them both. Hopefully that won't lead to confusion and be a mistake.

Both of these requests are about the faux magazine covers seen in GB1. For reference, you can find screenshots of all of them, taken from the Blu-ray, on Spook Central's Ghostbusters Multimedia page. I just added a high-resolution READABLE black & white copy of the USA Today cover to that page, which will help with the first request.

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REQUEST: THE REAL USA TODAY & NY POST COVERS

I'd like to get copies of the front pages for the original USA Today and NY Post covers that were used to make the mock-ups seen in GB1. My local library doesn't keep copies, microfilm or actual paper, going back to 1984. Maybe if someone here has access to, and a library card for, a big library - like the NY Public library, for example - that WOULD have a huge catalog of old magazines and newspapers, you can get me (and by association, all fans - since I'd post it to my site) readable copies of the real front pages of both newspapers. And, yes, I checked both USA Today and NY Post sites, but they don't go back that far in the archives.

USA TODAY - Although the cover in the movie is dated Oct. 8, 1984, it lists an obituary for The Thin Man actor William Powell, who actually died on March 5, 1984. So I would surmise that the March 6, 1984 USA Today cover was used as the basis for the mock-up. If not the 6th, then the 7th or the 8th, but I doubt that it would be any later than that. The “Ghost Fever Grips New York” article is actually not about the Ghostbusters, but rather about someone named Geoffrey Faux and something about economics. If you read the scan on my site, you'll see that portions of the article text were removed so that the photo of the guys could be on the cover. The article also mentions the name Paul Volcker, so using those two names, I did a Google search and found an article from June 1996 that mentions the two guys. Doing a little more research tells us that Geoffrey Faux (aka Geoffrey P. Faux?) was an economist for the U.S. Department of Labor, and many other economic groups. Paul Volcker was the Chairman of the Federal Reserve under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan from August 1979 to August 1987. The cover also has a small blurb about Jane Fonda on the left, but the image is actually that of Michael C. Gross' wife Glenis who died in 2006. Don't trust the Mike McWillie photo and blurb in the top left, as he's the guy who created the fake covers. I'd bet the Shannon/Anna photo and blurb in the top right can't be trusted either. The only text that will help in locating the actual cover will be The Thin Man actor William Powell obit on the left and the Geoffrey Faux economics article that surrounds the Ghostbusters photo.

NY POST - The cover in the movie is dated Oct. 22, 1984, but let's assume that isn't correct. It would probably be safe to assume that Mike McWillie got all of his covers at the same time, so the real NY Post cover is probably from around March 6, 1984, as the USA Today cover is. There are two articles on the cover, and unfortunately, the Blu-ray screen capture doesn't give us any readable text; and the cover wasn't reprinted in the Making Ghostbusters book. The only thing we have to go on is the headline, “Jury: Doctors marked patients for mercy deaths”.

Anyone who can help, feel free to e-mail me.

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REQUEST: FAN-MADE RECREATION OF USA TODAY (AND NY POST?) COVER

Willie (Facebook username: Will Iam) has been e-mailing me through Facebook about a project he'd like to undertake to recreate the USA Today cover (and the NY Post cover too?) in a large, high-resolution readable color image. Since I'm a little too busy right now to help, and I'm only one person - whereas all of you are MORE than one person :-) - I figured I'd share our e-mail coversation with all of you, and let Willie and you guys try to get this done.

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Willie - February 14 at 1:52pm
While we are on the USA Today thing, I can show you the two best pics of the GBs I found so far. And also, I want to say that a scan or macro-scoped snapshot of the newspaper pic from Making Ghostbusters should be alot sharper than the blu-ray screenshot.

http://cf1.themoviedb.org/backdrops/817/4bc90a29017a3c57fe003817/ghostbusters-original.jpg

http://oi54.tinypic.com/2hx5bub.jpg

I may try to make a good replica newspaper some day by combining a book scan, a color GB pic and the little blurry pics of the screenshot. I would try to combine the sharpness of the scan with the color of the little pics somehow. And have it as a printable file, if not actually printed on paper. But if someone beats me to the punch, that's fine. And I don't have Photoshop. I know I saw a printed replica on the Your Props site. I can't say how good theirs is…. Anyone wanna colorize the pic of Glenis for me?
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Paul - February 15 at 6:12am
I don't even remember there being a pic of the USA Today cover in the Making GB book. I seem to recall - maybe - the Time cover. It was in black and white, if I remember correctly. It's been a while since I looked at the book, so I'm going off memory.

One day I'd like to scan the entire book in and make a PDF out of it. I'm kinda scared not only by the tedious labor it requires, but by how large of a file the PDF would end up being.
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Willie - February 15 at 10:29am
TIME and USA both appear on page 92 in b&w. The lettering is pretty crisp and sharp, even though its so tiny. It's alot more legible than the Blu-Ray screen capture. But - The bottom few lines of print were cropped out in Making GB.

I can can look at the screencap and read most of the missing lines. But some letters are too blurry there for me. hehe. Heck. I just now remembered that I typed up what I could read of those lines. And even made guesses of the rest. ….
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I've probably strained my eyes, but here's some other snippets I could gleam from the USA Today cover:

Wall Street
The Dow Jones industrial average fell 6.28 points to 1145.20. New York Stock Exchange was light but at .87 million . (Complete Murheff Scurneboard. .

Gold and silver highs. Gold was at 8404.50 a . Up $1.50 in New York trading closed at $ up 14 cents.

Jane Fonda
Jane Fonda, left, on tour to promote her exercise clothes, provokes pickets who remember her anti-war stance.

Meese Hearings
Developer submits underwriting loss on some of Attorney Meese's home, giving help getting government job. TA


As for the New York post, you can just make out “Doctors and nurses at (a) Queens Hospital”, and “Grand Jury”. Combining those in Google brings up a Grand Jury case of “death selection” from 1981. I haven't been able to find anything more specific than that.

Kingpin, I think you forgot to click the magnifier on the new Making GB scan of the USA Today. I think you can read those parts well in it. But it's the bottom part from the screencap that is really fuzzy.

Here's what I think I see down there. -



'THIN MAN' DIES: Actor
William Powell, 81, who portrayed
the detective in films, died of old
age in Palm Springs, Calif. 2A

NATION: Wealthy Malibu, Calif. residents evacuat-
```````````````````````````````````````````

No Silver lining dogma or
No Show business stigma or
No charges filed against -(just a guess)
FONDA: Argues that
she's changed.


The ideas proposed by Faux
and his collaborators seem to
run counter to political trends
toward smaller government.
Even in a deep economic
crisis, would Americans wait
for sweeping economic con-
trols in industrial policy
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—
Paul, thanks for making a new scan from Making GB and adding the screencap to it.
~Willie

great research! i wish i could help out… i would LOVE replicas of the mock-ups.

Something that comes to mind is, wouldn't it in a number of ways work out better to digitally recreate the covers with digital logos/lettering/layout rather than go to the trouble of digging around in a newspaper archive in the hope of finding the right cover?

If it's all digitally recreated rather than just pasting the fake article in, then there'll be no “seams” between the original newspaper and the added-in elements… because you'd still have to scan in the paper.

True, one of the main benefits from using the real deal is that then you'd have a full front page, but that may not be neccesary.

It's just that when scanning in a printed document, the dots from the printing process become a lot more prevailant, and the difference between the real newspaper and the pasted in photo will be quite apparant.

Yeah, the floatbox script on my site displays really large images, by default, scaled down to fit your screen. You need to click on it to view it full size. The cursor changes into a magnifying glass over the image, and there's a magnifying glass icon displayed over the upper left corner of the image, both of which is supposed to clue you in to this, but I guess it might not be so obvious. Then you can click on it again to scaled it back down. And click outside the floating window to close it.

All of the text on the USA today cover, except for the bottom seven lines, is very clearly readable in the new scan. Those seven lines were pulled from the Blu-ray, which is rather low-res when it comes to the cover text, and then enlarged to fit the dimensions of the scan.

Just to clear up a misconception your having, Kingpin, I want copies of the original USA Today and NY Post covers for an entirely different reason than the recreation project Willie is proposing. I'd actually like to see what the original covers look like, and show fans how the real and faux covers differ. I suppose the real covers could be used for Willie's project, too, but I'd imagine that any copies that exist are probably on microfilm, which wouldn't give the quality that Willie would want for his project.

Willie - You're welcome for the Making GB scan. Though I should probably thank you for letting me know about it in the first place. It's been a great many years since I looked at the book, so I just simply didn't remember it being in there. I pulled the book out of a box buried on a high shellf just to do this scan