Fan Magazines

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture by Steve Hanson

Although many fields of endeavor such as sports, auto racing, radio, and music have all spawned "interest magazines" that provide inside information for devotees of a particular subject or pursuit, it is to the motion picture industry that America owes the long-established concept of the fan magazine. Conceived to promote, popularize, and trade off the fledgling art of film in early Hollywood, the publication of fan magazines dates back to 1911 when Motion Picture Story magazine and Photoplay first appeared. These magazines provided readers with an illusion of intimacy with the stars, and fed into their fantasies of the opulent lifestyles and sometimes scandal-ridden private lives of the famous. At the same time, they purported to reveal the mechanics of the star making process, allowing the average reader--an outsider looking in--to claim spurious knowledge and form a personal judgment as to a player's screen image, talent, off-screen personality and character, and to hold opinions about the best career moves for their favorites.

Initially, fan magazines relied on a formula that packaged a gallery of movie star portraits and illustrated stories of popular motion pictures, together with a few specialized features such as reader inquiries. Each issue was rounded off with short fictional pieces. However, as early as 1912, the magazines began to print interviews with stars, articles on various phases of film production, and even motion picture scenarios. The magazines were targeted to appeal primarily to female readers who, in the belief of most film industry executives, formed the large majority of the filmgoing public. By the same token, most of the magazine contributors were also women, and included such notables as Adela Rogers St. John, Hazel Simpson Naylor, Ruth Hall, and Adele Whitely Fletcher, who all wrote for several different publications under a variety of pen names. Other contributors came from the ranks of press representatives for both actors and film studios. Occasionally, a magazine would publish an article purportedly written by a star, or print an interview in which the actor or actress supposedly solicited readers' opinions on career moves, etc. Though these pieces were normally the result of collaboration between the editorial staff and the subject's press agent, there would be an accompanying photograph, or a set of handwritten responses to questions, supposedly supplied by the star, in order to lend authenticity to the enterprise. These editorial ploys gave the impression that the magazines were essentially uncritical mouthpieces, fawning on an industry that fed them tidbits so as to heighten the public's interest in films.

While this was not without some truth, fan magazines were, for the most part, published independently of the studios, although this did not always guarantee objectivity. The publications were dependent on the studios to organize interviews with actors and to keep them supplied with publicity releases and information about the stars and the films. Nonetheless, the magazines could be critical at times, particularly from 1915 when they began publishing film reviews. It was not uncommon to see both Photoplay and Motion Picture Story giving the "thumbs down" to pictures that they didn't think their readers would enjoy, although the sort of harsh criticism or expose that became a feature of the tabloids in the late decades of the twentieth century were generally avoided. Articles that dealt with the private lives of screen personalities tended to overlook any sordid doings and placed their emphasis on family values, domestic pursuits, and the aesthetics of the Hollywood home and hearth. From the 1930s onwards, it was commonplace to see major photographic features showing the famous names hard at work gardening, cooking, washing the car, or playing with the baby.

This was in extreme contrast to Hollywood coverage in the national press. The circulation of tabloid newspapers thrived through titillating their readers with detailed reportage of the numerous scandals that erupted in the early decades. A notorious example of this was the murder trial of Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle during the 1920s. The magazine Screenland (published from 1921 to 1927) took Hollywood's side against the sensationalism of the Arbuckle case by publishing a piece in defense of the comedian (later found innocent), but other fan publications, notably Photoplay, took a decidedly neutral stance on Hollywood scandal. Such incidents as the murder of director William Desmond Taylor, of which Mabel Normand was briefly suspected, Rudolph Valentino's divorce, and Wallace Reid's drug-related death, while prompting the implementation of the motion picture production code in the early 1930s, were pretty much neglected in the fan magazines, or treated in vague general terms within an article presenting a star and his family bravely overcoming adversity. That this approach worked as well as it did demonstrates the devotion of film fans to the romanticized image of their screen idols as peddled by the fan magazines. Most readers were well up on the current scandals, and when the fan magazines alluded to a star's "brave fight" or "lingering illness," they were knowledgeable enough to translate the terms into "drug addiction," or to know that "young foolishness," or "hot-headed wildness" meant sexual indiscretions of one kind or another.

Most film historians view the fan magazines of the silent era as having more scholarly validity than those after the advent of sound. Such publications as Filmplay Journal, Motion Picture Classic, Motion Picture, and Movie Weekly, gave readers well-written film reviews and factual, biographical information that could not be found anywhere else. They have come to provide modern scholars with fascinating sociological insights into the phenomenon of filmgoing in the first two decades of American motion picture history.