Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine: A History of Star Makers, Fabricators, and Gossip Mongers

CHAPTER 1. The Birth of the Fan Magazine

11 CHAPTER 1 THE BIRTH OF THE FAN MAGAZINE A fan magazine was fundamentally a film- and entertainment-related periodical aimed at a general fan, an average member of the moviegoing public who more often than not was female. (Throughout I refer to “the fan magazine” in the singular, because it was very much a magazine genre in its own right.) The common object of devotion of both the magazines and their readers was the motion picture. While film buffs might be the primary purchasers of old fan magazines today, they were not originally targeted as the primary audience . Thus, such illustrious film-buff publications as Films in Review, Film Fan Monthly, and Screen Facts, published from the 1950s onward, cannot be classified as fan magazines. Neither can the so-called fanzines American Classic Screen and Hollywood Studio Magazine. This, despite there being nothing more fanatical than the ardent film buff. The origins of the fan magazine lie in the popular general magazines promoting consumer culture and social issues that began publication in the 1880s and 1890s and presented a non-elitist view of society—contrary to that found in such earlier “quality” periodicals as Harper’s Monthly, Century, and The Atlantic Monthly. These new publications, from which the first fan magazines borrowed their graphics and their style, included Munsey’s (founded in 1886 by Frank Munsey), McClure’s (founded in 1893 by S. S. McClure), and Cosmopolitan (founded in 1886 and taken over by William Randolph Hearst in 1905), followed in the early years of the twentieth century by the Saturday Evening Post and Ladies’ Home Journal. Appearing at the close of the Victorian era, these new popular magazines were intended for mass consumption, with a readership not limited to the intellectually and financially superior. Their circulation was wide and substantial: by 1895 Munsey’s boasted a circulation in excess of 500,000. Obviously, there was money to be made from these popular periodicals, and it was only a matter THE BIRTH OF THE FAN MAGAZINE 12 The first page of the first issue of the first fan magazine, February 1911. THE BIRTH OF THE FAN MAGAZINE 13 of time before an ambitious entrepreneur or two would decide to publish a popular magazine aimed at the audience for what was rapidly becoming the preeminent entertainment of the time, the motion picture. Did the film industry welcome or really want the fan magazine? At first, probably not. They were much too dangerous in the potential promotion of actors and actresses as “stars,” planting the notion in the minds of the players that they might have some relevance to the success of a film and, thus, be worthy of a higher salary. Fan magazines generated fan mail, and fan mail was conclusive proof of the worth of an actor or actress. Selling the producers on the value of publicity would take time. Posters outside of theaters could be justified easily. They seldom mentioned a player, limiting themselves to the film title and the company responsible. Posters were, therefore, good publicity. Fan magazines were potentially bad for the industry. Thus, the fan magazines were latecomers in terms of an industry interest in disseminating information on its films and their makers. A number of trade publications were extant several years prior to publication of the first fan magazine . Views and Film Index (later The Film Index) was the earliest such trade periodical, first published on April 25, 1906. The Moving Picture World began publication on March 9, 1907, and its closest rival, Motion Picture News, was first published under the title of Moving Picture News in May 1908. Variety, dubbed the “Bible of Show Business,” dates back to December 16, 1905; it made its first reference to films on December 23 of that same year, and began reviewing motion pictures on a regular basis on January 19, 1907. Other early entertainment trade periodicals, such as The Billboard, The New York Clipper, The New York Dramatic Mirror, and The New York Morning Telegram, began regular coverage of the film industry around the same time. None of these publications, of course, was promoted for public consumption. Intended to be read only by exhibitors, house organs from several producers predate fan magazines. For a short time in the mid 1910s, one major studio, Universal, converted its house organ, The Universal Weekly, into a semi-fan magazine, The Moving Picture Weekly. (In all probability, Universal...