Landmark’s colorful Ken calendar, that staple of refrigerator doors and office cubicles throughout San Diego, has gone the way of the hand-drawn matte painting.

The folded one-sheet has been a company trademark for as far back as memory serves. My first introduction came in the winter of 1979 when Landmark decided to extend its exhibitor’s hand to the Windy City.

Located at Clark and Diversy, the center of Chicago’s Boy’s Town, The Parkway was a dilapidated 700-seat grind house, complete with a balcony, that had fallen on hard times. The chain came in and spruced up the place the best it could by transforming it into a revival house that changed double bills daily.

For two years, I had the privilege of managing the dump.

Home video was just making its way into the marketplace and there was a demand to see films on the big screen. The theater was wildly popular due in large part to its innovative program calendar.

Each schedule had three colors and was printed on inexpensive newspaper stock. The line up consisted of approximately two months worth of programming. The front was designed to look like a standard calendar with each date box containing titles, times and a couple of small images. The back page had an identical layout, only the grid consisted of two- or three-sentence film descriptions.

It was the hottest handout in town. Before close each night, ushers would stuff boxes outside the theater with a couple hundred fliers. Come dawn they were gone. It was a superb selling tool that pretty much remained a constant for the chain until a few years ago.

For decades, The Ken Calendar was more dependable than Dana Andrews. No matter how many weeks of programming involved, it always held true to its showtimes. All this changed when Brokeback Mountain rode into town.

The film hit big, so big that it filled four of Hillcrest’s five screens. Due to prior contractual commitments, Landmark couldn’t afford the luxury of devoting one-fifth of its most popular theater’s screens to one movie.

Brokeback was moved to the Ken, and for the first time in the theater’s history, the sacred calendar went off schedule. For the past two-and-a-half years, the bi-monthly herald has proved to be more and more unreliable.

The last schedule is now a collector’s item. Landmark will still publish a program, but instead of keeping its exclusivity pact with the Ken, it will also showcase films at Landmark’s other two local outlets, Hillcrest and the La Jolla Village. As opposed to the traditional one-sheet format, the upcoming films will now be presented in a small, folded booklet.

Frequently, Landmark would hold critics’ screenings before the Ken Calendar went to press; I barely had use for the program. The same can be said for many of you who now turn to your computers to find what’s playing.

Old copies of the Ken Calendar are almost certain not to retain the same eBay value as vintage lobby cards and posters do. Nowadays, if you can hold it in your hand, it’s not marketable. The calendar’s death marks another example of the lost art of ballyhoo.