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This chapter describes the golden age of the fan magazine from the 1920s through the 1940s. The Great Depression of the 1930s caused film companies to falter but the fan magazines kept on going. Photoplay suffered a drop in sales, in part because of James R. Quirk’s death, but also because its two major rivals, Modern Screen and Silver Screen, were sold at a lower price—ten cents versus twenty-five cents. In December 1929, the Tower group launched The New Movie Magazine, which by 1933 became the biggest-selling fan magazine, with an estimated circulation of 650,000 copies.

This chapter explores the text-making activities of fans in the form of fan magazines and fan letters, and the imaginary but contingent worlds they conjure up, looking at the supposedly unorthodox script in which fan letters are written, a script labeled “abnormal shōjo script” by detractors. It also discusses the homoerotic aesthetic linking the Takarazuka actors and the New Half phenomenon in Japan, speculating about androgyny as a body politics that serves to interrogate the naturalized dualities of male and female, masculine and feminine, and Japanese and others.

This chapter describes the impact of television on fan magazines. In the 1950s, television not only challenged the film industry for audience and revenue, but also created an audience for a new type of fan magazine—one in which the motion picture had to compete with television for space and publicity. By the mid-1950s, television fan magazines included TV People, TV Star Parade, and TV World. Between 1961 and 1966, fan magazines discovered that television stars sold as many issues as several of their movie counterparts.

This chapter describes the changes to fan magazines brought about during the 1960s, by which time the studio system was dying and the studios’ publicists were no longer peddling stories to the fan magazines. Editors and writers were on their own in unearthing stories and unchecked as to the content of such stories. Press agents were still active, but stars dictated to whom they could and could not speak. The rise of the independent filmmaker created a new brand of films and a new brand of stars, uninterested in furnishing the fan magazines with the same old fluff. Fan magazines complained that stars now wanted to talk about issues of no interest to readers, such as the environment, women’s liberation, and liberal politics.

This introductory chapter discusses the history of fan magazines, from their heyday in the 1920s and 1930s through to the 1980s. It discusses the importance of the fan magazine in American society as an arbiter of taste, a source of knowledge, and a gateway to the fabled land of Hollywood and its people. The chapter also sets out the book’s purpose, which 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. It examines not only the corporate history, content, and writers and editors of fan magazines, but also the manner in which the fan magazines presented their view of what was happening within the film industry and beyond.

This chapter describes the symbiotic relationship between fan magazines and movie studios. By the late 1920s and the 1930s, contract players, both stars and featured performers, were interviewed by fan magazines under the supervision of studio publicists, and were subject to rigorous rules and boundaries. The fan magazines and their writers published and wrote what the studios determined they should publish and write.

This chapter describes the origins of the fan magazine, which goes back to the popular general magazines promoting consumer culture and social issues that began publication in the 1880s and 1890s. 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 the Ladies’ Home Journal.

This chapter describes the rise of People magazine, which became the most successful personality-oriented publication on the market. While borrowing heavily from the fan magazines, it also had a major news organization, Time, Inc., as its parent company. People emphasized lightweight, trivial, picture-oriented content. The first issue appeared on February 25, 1974, with Mia Farrow on the cover and an initial print run of 1.4 million copies.

This chapter focuses on the reinvention of fan magazines in the last decades of the twentieth century. The growing popularity of television soap operas spawned magazines that targeted female viewers who wanted to learn more of the series and the stars involved. In 1967, Paul Denis, a former radio columnist for the New York Post and gossip columnist for Screen Stars and Movie World, founded what was the first modern soap opera publication, the annual Who’s Who in Daytime TV. In the late 1980s and 1990s, three entertainment journals exemplified the “new” fan magazines—glossy, literate, and aimed at a far more intelligent and affluent audience than their ancestors: Premiere, Movieline, and Entertainment Weekly.

This chapter focuses on the earliest fan magazine writers. Fan magazine writers believed much that they wrote, and much that they wrote was usually closer to truth than fiction. Their light, frothy, and generally insubstantial stories were derided by writing colleagues from newspapers and general periodicals, who never let them forget that they were at the bottom of the heap in the world of contemporary letters. One name that dominates the fan magazine field is Gladys Hall, who was not only good but incredibly prolific. By 1923, she had published more signed articles on motion pictures and more interviews with movie stars than any other magazine writer, and had also written novelettes, short stories, hundreds of poems, and four one-act plays.

This chapter focuses on the gossip columnists of fan magazines. The most notable, most respectful, and most reliable was the pseudonymous Cal York in Photoplay. By the 1950s, York was fighting for space in the pages of Photoplay with several other gossip columnists, including Sidney Skolsky (“That’s Hollywood for You”), Edith Gwynn (“Hollywood Party Line”), Herb Stein (“What’s Hollywood Whispering About”), and Mike Connolly with a semi-gossip column titled “Impertinent Interview.”

This chapter explores short-story film fictions, tie-ins fan magazines stories and novelettes. It considers how they addressed and represented female spectators, particularly through the genre of romance. Such stories offered a range of different forms of screen fantasy that encouraged an active, intermedial readership. Film magazines in particular provided platforms for consuming fiction in which women were exposed to a diversity of forms of female representations, within the fictions themselves but also within the wider context of the reading material. Offering female readers escapist and aspirational models of womanhood through romance and adventure genre tropes, the tie-in short story constitutes a textual element that cannot be read in isolation from the intermedial framework of the magazine as a whole. Fiction was one tool amidst a range of content across the magazine articulating ideas and images of modern femininity. Magazine content created star images through representations of cosmetics, dress, domestic labour and public and private life, in advertising, interviews and images. The chapter will argue that varied models of womanhood could be tried out and tested through fictional forms positioned amidst these intersecting discourses, positing female identities as a form of masquerade, tied to the image of the female star.

This chapter details the arrival of new publishers by the 1920s and 1930s, taking over the earlier publications and introducing ones of their own. The common denominator linking these new publishers was that their primary income often came from comic books.

Although the gender politics of local country music moved in conservative directions, especially within some segments of fan culture, new women auteurs began playing significant and often underacknowledged roles in challenging the constrictions that women faced in the 1950s and 1960s. This chapter explores the complex interplay between the progressive messages offered by these female Okie stars and the general gender conservatism of locally produced country music fan magazines.

This chapter focuses on Rona Barrett, who revolutionized not only the fan magazines but the entire coverage of entertainment news. Barrett was the first fan magazine writer to mature from the genre to become a full-fledged media reporter, and was Hollywood’s leading entertainment reporter from 1960 through 1980. Once she had conquered the new territory, Barrett returned to the fan magazines and introduced her own brand, which competed with and complemented her television work.

This chapter focuses on the contributions of literary figures to fan magazines. The editors welcomed major names from the world of literature, individuals whose contributions suggested endorsement of the fan magazine in its own right. The literary giants presumably welcomed the payments they received from fan magazine editors and the wider audience that they reached. For those just starting their writing careers, an article in a fan magazine was just part of the job.

This chapter describes the fan magazine Photoplay and its editor James R. Quirk. Photoplay, first published in August 1911, is the most famous of all fan magazines. It began in the pioneering days of the motion picture and lasted through the demise of the star system, the rise of independent filmmaking, and into an era when the public got its entertainment news from the pages of People and similar magazines. Quirk helped establish Photoplay’s prominence with a reliable table of contents, good writing (by fan magazine standards), and improved circulation.

This chapter explores the role of the interwar British fan magazine in mediating ideas about modern British girlhood. Film periodicals invited readers into a complex and unstable network of film-inflected girlhoods in a period during which youthful femininity was defined more closely in relation to class and marital status than age, and in which representations of unmarried working girls and young wives had complex roles to play in defining national culture. The chapter suggests that reading the interwar film magazine is a distinct new way to re-read the narrative of ‘home and duty’, complicating a domestic ideal by offsetting more glamorous images and alternative possibilities of modern femininity against more conservative discourses on female identity. It argues that print cultures of film affected ideas about girlhood, class, and mass culture in this way, allowing their readers to simultaneously assign, test out, and in some ways re-write girls’ culturally ascribed domestic roles.

This chapter traces the figure of the female or ‘Lady Interviewer’ across the interwar period. A target of satire in the media, the Lady Interviewer was regularly conceived as a garrulous, gossiping figure. Yet she also had her real-life counterparts: women who used this stereotype to break into the print and broadcast media industries in increasing numbers, and who in turn supported the expansion of print media oriented towards women’s professional and social interests. Increasingly close associations between female journalists and Hollywood fan magazines in the 1920s and 1930s, would however, see a decline in the reputation of both the Lady Interviewer and her female readers. This chapter explores the constructions of specific reading communities forged through interviewing in popular media.