Poster Rig

 For The City and The City, at Lifeline Theatre we had the interesting challenge of attaching fliers and posters to the walls over the course of the show, and then needing to take them down halfway through. We experimented with various poster putties and sticky dots, but they either didn't reliably stick to the walls (nothing like pieces of paper randomly falling during serous moments to distract actors and audience members), or they stuck too well and took paint with them when they got pulled off quickly.

 For our final solution we ended up using magnets. I purchased these tiny, super-strong magnets at Michael's.

 We printed the posters on card-stock so that they could last the abuse of the run without getting destroyed

 And I attached the magnet to the back of each poster by placing it underneath a large strip of clear packing tape.

 I added slightly larger silver screws to the walls in the places I wanted to hang the posters.

 The magnets were strong enough that as long as the actor started by lining up the poster close to the correct spot, the magnet would grab the screw and leave the poster easily hanging in position.

 From a distance the screws completely disappeared on the textured "concrete" wall.

And here it is filled with posters

 I was a bit worried about how to do the same trick on the brick side wall of the theatre, but as it turns out, there had been plenty of concrete anchors installed in the wall for various shows over the years.

 I picked to anchors in spots roughly where we needed posters, and screwed in a washer to make the spot visible to the actor.

They were able to stick posters to the brick wall just as easily as the built set wall.