Fan Magazines Research Articles

Screen-Struck: The Invention of the Movie Girl Fan

This article examines questions of agency, identity, and fan-industry collaboration underpinning the fabrication of an exclusively feminine personification of excessive film fandom. Dubbed “the screen-struck girl,” this white, adolescent figure was presented in American fan magazines and popular newspapers of the 1910s as a pathological consumer and a self-erasing aspiring star. However, in autobiographical letters to the press, girl fans proudly self-identified as movie bingers and aspiring actresses. Investigating girl fans’ willing and public adherence to such a pejorative stereotype, I complicate our understanding of early twentieth-century female fan agency and its relation to Hollywood’s burgeoning press machine.

Beverly Lyon Clark. The Afterlife of “Little Women”

Beverly Lyon Clark. <i>The Afterlife of “Little Women”</i>

A Selection of Italian Science Fiction Novels and Short Stories Translated and Published in English

NOTE: This bibliography does not provide individual listings for stories published in collections. Where the information is available, translators are named, but in some cases the text does not indicate a translator. Except in a few cases, Italian short fiction that has been translated and published in fan magazines and on websites, such as Different Realities, Bewildering Stories, InterNova, and International Speculative Fiction, has not been included.

Go West, Young Women! The Rise of Early Hollywood

In this intelligent, thoughtful and well-written study, Hilary A. Hallett focuses on women working in early Hollywood to interrogate dominant narratives about US cinema's masculine origins and cultural significance. In the process she revises the history of the American West, reconsidering how it generated modern feminine archetypes (such as the New Woman) more typically associated with the urban centres of Europe or northeastern America. Hallett links the film industry's colonization of small-town Southern California and its attraction for women migrants to the development of Hollywood's iconic western-influenced independent modern femininity. Combining bohemian impulses, traditional family ties and an investment in fashion and glamour, this form of New Womanhood drew on the allure of a more public life. Such archetypes attracted female audiences and would-be workers hoping to replicate cinema's promise of independence. Each of the book's two parts traces historically distinct forms of early female stardom: a pre-World War I incarnation based on intimacy and emphasizing work, and a later emancipatory form of postwar glamour that culminated in a backlash, exemplified in press coverage of the Virginia Rappe/Fatty Arbuckle murder trial. Hallett makes an utterly convincing case throughout for young women's centrality to the rise of Hollywood, both as audiences and on- and offscreen Hollywood celebrities, while emphasizing modern femininity's foundational role in the medium's development. Indeed her work makes us question why Hollywood's clear institutional, social, cultural and textual links to more progressive forms of modern femininity have so often been eclipsed. Arguing that fan magazines were probably more responsive to the fantasies of their female readers, she traces their accounts of active, desiring and independent femininity compatible with relationships, work and fame. Commenting on the remarkable number of fatherless female stars in early Hollywood – many of whom, like Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish, had sisters – Hallett suggests that these figures created a ‘safe’ place for female accomplishment, associating the search for fame with ‘professional, rather than sexual freedoms’ (p. 47). Like earlier stage archetypes such as the renowned Charlotte Cushman, these screen stars incorporated masculine vitality and adventure into images of resolutely feminine independence. Hallett traces similar accomplishments offscreen in the careers of celebrity journalists like Louella Parsons, directors like Lois Weber, screenwriters like Frances Marion, and the numerous female stars of the 1910s like Pickford and Ruth Roland, who acted as producers, screenwriters and/or directors. Such activities appealed both to female audiences who lived vicariously through their accomplishments and to those who hoped to follow in their wake (something she links to the advertisements for professional correspondence courses and screenplay submissions found in the period's fan magazines). Such discourses of self-improvement defined Hollywood's female-oriented stardom during the 1910s, along with the promise of intimacy and the homosocial pleasures of looking at other women – with the attendant implications of a more public femininity.

Picturing uplift: Cartoon commentary in early American film journals

During the 1910s, film trade journals and fan magazines documented cinema’s expanding economic and cultural significance, celebrating actors, studios and motion pictures with evangelical enthusiasm. These journals also inadvertently archived the film industry’s growing pains, allowing us to trace both the growth of celebrity culture and the motion pictures’ industrial formation. Central to this formative period was the relentless discourse of uplift, which focused on ways to assert cinema’s cultural legitimacy yet at the same time highlighted the industry’s own perception of its precarious social standing. This article examines the use of editorial cartoons in fan and trade journals to track the cultural aspirations of the film industry. This article traces how cartoon commentary deployed the visual signifiers of class and social status to assert cinema’s cultural legitimacy.

Modernity, femininity and Hollywood fashions: Women’s cinephilia in 1930s French fan magazines

Abstract My broad aim in this article is to explore the reception of Hollywood fashions in French mass circulation film magazines of the 1930s as it intersects with specific ideals of modernity, femininity and national identity. These magazines allow for a case study exploring the nexus between the global and the local in the construction of particular models of modern femininity in consumer culture. I want to suggest that these publications offered a key site for French women’s negotiation of modernity and were a key locus of a popular, feminine cinephilia neglected in existing accounts of cinephilia.

“Fan Magazine Trouble”: The AMPP, Studio Publicity Directors, and the Hollywood Press, 1945–1952

Files from the Studio Publicity Directors Committee of the Association of Motion Picture Producers (AMPP), housed in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Margaret Herrick Library (MHL), reveal that studio publicity directors in the postwar era considered many articles in fan magazines to be “unfriendly and destructive” to the industry. This essay examines the perspectives of both studio publicity directors and members of the Hollywood press on what constituted “fan magazine trouble” in postwar Hollywood, the relation of that trouble to studio controls in place over these publications since 1934, and how fan-magazine editors and newspaper reporters and columnists conceptualized their coverage of Hollywood stars, studios, and productions within ongoing developments in reporting practices and their relation to the professionalization of journalism.

Between Fantasy and Reality: Sexploitation, Fan Magazines, and William Rotsler's “Adults-Only” Career

Encouraged by crumbling censorship strictures, sexploitation fan magazines evince a symbiotic relationship between the adults-only film and publishing industries of the 1960s. Although largely sold for their nude photos, lurid publications like Adam Film Quarterly also critically commented on a transitional period in which men’s unfulfilled erotic fantasies gradually gave way to more explicit evidence of sexual permissiveness, both onscreen and off.

Leo Rosencrans, Movie-Struck Boy: A (Half-)Year in the Life of a Hollywood Extra

Leo Rosencrans, an Ohio native who came to Hollywood for four months in 1916–17 to pursue a career in filmmaking, left behind a record of his experiences in a series of letters that he wrote during his time in California. Inspired by the achievements of directors like D. W. Griffith and stories of fame promulgated by fan magazines, Leo sought employment as an extra. He proved largely unsuccessful and left Hollywood bitter and disillusioned. His letters provide a fascinating glimpse into the life of an extra, an existence framed by gender and class dynamics, labor struggles, and studio politics. As an addendum, this essay also reprints and examines one of these letters sent home to his family in Ohio.

Rome, Open for British Production: The lost world of ‘Britalian’ films, 1946-1954

It may be that the war has forced some of us British producers to be too insular in our outlook. We have failed to realise that Europe can provide an ideal location centre, not for completing parts...

Bruised and Confused: Helen Morgan and the Limits of Pathos

As a singer, actress, vaudeville performer, recording artist, Ziegfeld star, and nightclub hostess, Helen Morgan was ideally positioned to make the transition to sound film. Two films made in New York in 1929, Applause and Roadhouse Nights , illustrate Paramount’s attempts to build a screen persona based on Morgan’s established reputation. Newspapers, fan magazines, and accounts from contemporary media establish how the Depression led to rapid changes in public taste, undermining the popularity of genres in which Morgan excelled—vaudeville, melodrama, and the torch song.

“You are no stranger to me”

“You are no stranger to me”

The History of Popular Print Culture, Volume Six: U.S. Popular Print Culture, 1860-1920 ed. by Christine Bold (review)

Reviewed by: The History of Popular Print Culture, Volume Six: U.S. Popular Print Culture, 1860-1920 ed. by Christine Bold Georgia Clarkson Smith The History of Popular Print Culture, Volume Six: U.S. Popular Print Culture, 1860-1920. Edited by Christine Bold. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 704 pp. $160.00. Oxford's sixth volume of The History of Popular Print Culture takes as its subject matter English language script and imagery between the American Civil War and the First World War. It is a valuable contribution to book history that is diverse in disciplinary backgrounds, theoretical assumptions, and methodological approaches. Despite the range of methods inevitable in such an ambitious history, the Oxford volume maintains a sense of cohesion, with a materialist theoretical grounding that concerns itself with inquiries into the processes of production, the specificity of forms, and the influence of the popular on readers and reading practices. The collected essays seek to resituate popular texts within the wider economic, cultural, and political contexts in which they were produced and received, and to reconstitute popular readers as active agents who held a variety of positions in relation to mass culture. Moving beyond the mere descriptive histories and single author or title studies that have been symptomatic of popular print inquiry in recent years, the essays in this volume answer larger questions about the operation of power through the analysis of print "networks and movements" (13). Its contributors make a convincing argument for continuing critical "questions about how cultural hierarchy was constructed, in whose interests, and with what ideological effects" (5). The relationship between print and ideology is, for the Oxford volume, non-homogenous and non-linear, a process of struggle between warring economic, political, cultural, racial, ethnic, class, and gender divisions that were played out within and upon the publishing industries. Politics and culture—even individual identities and pathways of representation—both shaped and were shaped by the "profuse, diverse, and powerful" popular print networks of the era (1). Christine Bold's introductory chapter identifies the central assumptions of this volume as an acknowledgement of the ideological diversity of the "popular," which "contains within itself antithetical meanings" that "merge and compete" (3); an acknowledgement of "culture" as a diverse set of practices by which meaning and value is (re)produced; an insistence on unsettling the traditionally constructed boundaries between forms and genres that eschews hierarchies between textual and visual culture, high and low culture, fiction [End Page 188] and literature, public and private media, and print and new media; and, finally, a recognition of the blurring between national, linguistic, regional, and temporal borders that confront the scholar of the "popular." The diversity of the era's print network is reflected in the volume's structure; each section exceeds its spatial boundaries, communicating with those that come before and after. The volume is organized into three major sections: the first establishes the specific practices and patterns of the market, the second provides a generic organizing mechanism for the period's prolific body of texts, and the third deconstructs these organizing principles by attending to the ways in which particular texts and readers circumvented the ideological aims of production, as well as the ways in which ideologies crossed the boundaries between regional, national, and transatlantic presses, raced and gendered audiences, and visual and textual formats. While it is impossible to give adequate attention to all of the contributions in a volume this large, none of which are without their merits, these collected essays together speak to the boundlessness of their subject matter and offer an array of useful histories, as well as some fresh perspectives. Mark Simpson's chapter explores "postcard culture" in America (169); Lydia Cushman Schurman provides a history of reprint libraries; Keith Gandal excavates the era's photojournalism to explore "cross-class encounters between the photographer . . . and the 'slum' dwellers" of the urban poor (573). More directly focused on periodical culture in particular are Richard Abel and Amy Rodger's "Early Motion Pictures and Popular Print Culture: A Web of Ephemera," which includes fan magazines in its discussion of the importance of "intermedial relations" between film and print in creating and sustaining an industry of...

The Listener's Voice: Early Radio and the American Public

The thesis of The Listener's Voice is that radio listeners “participated in the formation of radio” in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s. The book offers a different emphasis in American radio history. It goes beyond business and legal histories, and also audience histories, to show how the latter affected the former previously overlooked ways, perhaps precisely because they were informal and unorganized and thus not explicitly documented. Even so, Elena Razlogova has found them by reading numerous listener letters in a new light. The book documents a range of ways audiences affected the shape of radio in these decades. Razlogova effectively shows that large corporations did not have their way unimpeded. Instead, she describes multiple ways listeners at first countered the concentrated power of radio corporations and networks, as well as the Federal Radio Commission, in efforts to influence radio development. In the 1910s and 1920s audiences provided feedback to experimental broadcasters to help them develop better technologies. In the 1920s local stations welcomed and responded to listener letters about their programs. When the 1927 Radio Act reallocated broadcast frequencies and licenses from small to large stations and networks, listeners wrote to support local stations and protest the changes. Radio magazines for radio amateurs in the 1920s, like local radio stations, forged a mutual relationship with their readers. Eventually, they were displaced in the 1930s by fan magazines published by large “pulp” houses, more interested in leading than listening to readers. Still they retained letter-to-the-editor columns where listeners could voice their opinions. Radio serial writers attended to listener letters and drew from them ideas for scripts. However, Razlogova finds that by the late 1930s radio's moral economy broke down as network concentration and audience measurement took hold. But the story did not end there. After the war, the arrival of television, and the decline of network radio, there was a revival of listeners' voices and of local stations listening to those voices.

Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine: A History of Star Makers, Fabricators, and Gossip MongersAnthonySlide. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010.

Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine: A History of Star Makers, Fabricators, and Gossip Mongers Anthony Slide. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. Modern Screen, Photoplay, and Silver Screen - these titles evoke memories of the golden age of fan magazines. The earliest fan magazine was The Motion Picture Story Magazine, which was first published on monthly basis beginning in February 1911 by Eugene V. Brewster and J. Stuart Blackton. Geared toward female audience, fan magazines emphasized glamor, and most of their writers were women. The rise of the fan magazines paralleled the rise of the star system, with the golden age of the fan magazines occurring during the decades of the 1920s through the 1940s. Likewise, the end of the studio system paralleled the decline in the readership of fan magazines. Independent scholar, Anthony Slide, author of numerous books on popular entertainment, has written the first full-length treatment on the history of the fan magazine genre. He states that the purpose of this book is to provide a definitive history of the fan magazine from its pioneering days, through the golden years, to its decline into sleaze and titillation in the 1960s and later (10). Divided into thirteen chapters, the book examines the origins of the fan magazine and offers decade by decade glimpse at its content and evolution. Slide explores the relationship between the fan magazines and the movie studios, who determined what the fan magazines would publish and write. He notes that, in some instances, the fan magazine writers were also employed by the stars or by the studios where these stars were contract players. Slide provides an analysis of Photoplay, which was the most famous of all the fan magazines and was considered to be the standard by which the other fan magazines were judged. He also discusses the legacy of its renown publisher, James R. Quirk, who was regarded as the father of the fan magazines. He profiles pioneering fan magazine writers Adele Whitely Fletcher, Gladys Hall, and Adela Rogers St. Johns, the most famous fan magazine writer who was known as the Mother Confessor of Hollywood. Other prominent individuals featured include publishers, George T. (Thomas) Delacorte, Jr., Wilford H. Fawcett, and Benarr Macfadden; editors Lester C. Grady, Ernest V. Heyn, and Ruth Waterbury; fan magazine writers Delight Evans, Herbert Howe, and Dorothy Manners; and gossip columnists Sheilah Graham, Hedda Hopper, and Louella Parsons. …

Asta's ink: The Stockholm letters

This article offers a condensed account of Asta Nielsen's interaction with the Swedish National Censorship Board in 1911 after the banning of her film In dem großen Augenblick/The Great Moment for screening in Sweden. Her strategy, publishing open letters and inviting representatives from the press to non-public screenings, set the standard for other film companies dissatisfied with the slew of bans issued by the Board. A Nielsen letter to young movie fans, published in facsimile in a Swedish fan magazine in 1920, is translated to illustrate a different type of press interaction a decade later.

‘A star who is not like the others’: Arletty's publicity persona during the 1930s

ABSTRACTThis article examines Arletty's star persona as it was articulated during the 1930s. Arletty (1898–1992) is primarily remembered today for her association with poetic realism from the late 1930s to the mid-1940s, with much scholarship dismissing the importance of her early film career. I argue that a significant reason why Arletty's status as a star during the 1930s is considered to be ambiguous is that, although she was in the public eye throughout the decade, she did not fit the romantic ideal of French femininity that was currently en vogue in the French cinema. Thus, although she was recognized as a prominent vedette, she never achieved the level of stardom of Danielle Darrieux or Annabella during the 1930s. The major female stars of the decade were more conventionally romantic in appearance and tended to be cast in relation to the domestic ideal in their off-screen publicity. Arletty was distinctive because of her sustained association with la femme moderne. Focusing on her representation in the French movie fan magazines, this article explores how Arletty differed from her contemporary French female stars in her embodiment of French nationality.

Picturegoer: The Fan Magazine and Popular Film Culture in Britain During The Second World War

‘What agent of Chancellor Hitler is it who has suggested that we should all cower in darkness and terror “for the duration”?’, demanded George Bernard Shaw in a letter to the Times. Published on 5 ...

Flickers of desire: movie stars of the 1910s

Today, we are so accustomed to consuming the amplified lives of film stars that the origins of the phenomenon may seem inevitable in retrospect. But the conjunction of the terms movie and star was inconceivable prior to the 1910s. Flickers of Desire explores the emergence of this mass cultural phenomenon, asking how and why a cinema that did not even run screen credits developed so quickly into a venue in which performers became the American film industry's most lucrative mode of product individuation. Contributors chart the rise of American cinema's first galaxy of stars through a variety of archival sources--newspaper columns, popular journals, fan magazines, cartoons, dolls, postcards, scrapbooks, personal letters, limericks, and dances. The iconic status of Charlie Chaplin's little tramp, Mary Pickford's golden curls, Pearl White's daring stunts, or Sessue Hayakawa's expressionless mask reflect the wild diversity of a public's desired ideals, while Theda Bara's seductive turn as the embodiment of feminine evil, George Beban's performance as a sympathetic Italian immigrant, or G. M. Anderson's creation of the heroic cowboy/outlaw character transformed the fantasies that shaped American filmmaking and its vital role in society.

Celebrity culture and the American dream: stardom and social mobility

Celebrity Culture and the American Dream, Second Edition considers how major economic and historical factors shaped the nature of celebrity culture as we know it today, retaining the first edition’s examples from the first celebrity fan magazines of 1911 to the present and expanding to include updated examples and additional discussion on the role of the internet and social media in today’s celebrity culture. Equally important, the book explains how and why the story of Hollywood celebrities matters, sociologically speaking, to an understanding of American society, to the changing nature of the American Dream, and to the relation between class and culture. This book is an ideal addition to courses on inequalities, celebrity culture, media, and cultural studies.