Revealing Reality: Fan Magazine Rhetoric, Sound Technology, and Stardom in the Early Sound Era

when synchronized sound arrived for good in Hollywood in the late 1920s, it disrupted an industry that had become dependent on marketing its product primarily through its silent-era stars. With the assistance of the period's popular fan magazines, the silent-era film industry had forged imagined—yet intimate—connections between audience and star that drove film consumption. How, then, was this relationship adjusted during the transition to sound? What qualities did fan magazines ascribe to sound technology, and how did these qualities—according to fan magazines—impact how audiences now viewed stars on the screen?¹

This article addresses these questions by examining one prominent strain found in fan magazines during the transition to sound: the equation of sound technology with realism and truth and the consequent notion that sound technology could reveal more of—and even embarrass—the star. Fan magazine writing and imagery, I submit, suggested that sound technology required audiences to recalibrate the reality of the silent-era stars they now saw onscreen—that is, to use talking pictures as a means for reflecting upon and reassessing the "true" personalities and talents of the star. Though one could theoretically imagine fan magazines positing sound cinema as more distanced from reality thanks to the additional mediations of sound recording and reproduction technologies, fan magazines more commonly framed sound technology as a purveyor of truth and realism, a device that cast stars in a new light and threatened to expose a damaging amount of a star's true self.

Analyzing such fan magazine rhetoric is not merely an academic exercise. Fan magazines were widely circulated during the 1920s and '30s, and they constituted a major form through which audiences engaged with and understood cinema. To stay viable as a publication, a fan magazine needed to produce content that would resonate with the tastes, preferences, and attitudes of its mass readership. At the same time, as scholars have noted, fan magazines used such elements as editorials, reviews, contests, and advertisements to mold how audiences thought about and consumed Hollywood entertainment.² Factually, fan magazines are not fully reliable—scholars have pointed to fan magazines' need to frame stories in ways that would assure continued cooperation with Hollywood studios, the potential for staff members to write fan letters published by the magazine, and the interchangeability of Hollywood press agents and staff writers (Fuller 151–52; Crafton 483; Slide 75). Yet as research has indicated,³ fan magazines held considerable sway in how audiences experienced, thought about, and reacted to cinema.

The cultural connotations surrounding the voice are important for understanding why fan magazines regularly tied early talking pictures to truthfulness and reality. Amanda Weidman has discussed how a long and influential tradition of modern thought has connected the voice to "true" selfhood, agency, and subjectivity. Drawing upon such theorists as Charles Taylor, Weidman notes that the modern subject is defined through interiority and that "modern subjectivity hinges on the notion of the voice as a metaphor for self and authenticity" (7–8).⁴ Implicit in much fan magazine writing in the early sound era is the notion that silent stars' voices failed to fully "match" their preexisting star bodies. This, when coupled with the voice's cultural connotations, suggested two things: that stars had previously hidden part of their true selves from their fans and that sound cinema inherently revealed more about the star than had silent cinema. Fan magazines harnessed the perceived connection between voice and selfhood to their purported goal of revealing what stars were really like. In doing so, they regularly implied that the recorded voice offered a fuller understanding of the star as a performer and as a person.

Fan magazines' engagement with questions of reality and truth was hardly new to the early sound era. As Gaylyn Studlar has observed, by the 1920s fan magazines regularly reminded audiences of the star-making process (13–14), and thus audiences were positioned to recognize that silent stars played a constructed role not fully identical to what they were like in private. The notion that the voice...