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

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Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine: A History of Star Makers, Fabricators, and Gossip Mongers ReviewAs a long-time fan and former reader of fan magazines, I was very excited to see this book by Anthony Slide. I previously enjoyed his book "Nitrate Won't Wait," about film preservation. Somehow this latest volume missed the mark for me. The main problem seemed to be a lack of organization. At times the story of the fan magazine was presented chronologically, at other times thematically. But it seemed to jump around a great deal from subject to subject, from magazine to magazine, from year to year. At times there seemed to be an over-emphasis on trivia concerning certain writers and long-forgotten titles, many of which were short-lived and somewhat beside the point.
The leading fan magazines for many years were Photoplay, Modern Screen, Motion Picture, and a few others, such as Silver Screen, Screenland, etc. The magazines began in the silent days, reaching a peak of beauty in the 1920s and 1930s, and continuing to thrive into the 1940s and 1950s. By the 1960s, however, the form was on a downhill run, with the decline of the studio system, the rise of television, and a move towards titillating headlines and an obsession with Jackie Onassis. By the end of the 1970s the major titles were out of business and the fan magazine field pretty much over, although celebrity journalism has certainly thrived in other formats since then.
Interviews with Rona Barrett and David Ragan were interesting and welcome, but only told part of the story.
Movie magazines were great fun to read and look at, and additional photographs of movie magazine covers through the years would have been a welcome addition.
The rise, golden years, and fall of the fan magazines is a fascinating story, but too much of that fascination is left out of this book. I enjoyed it, but wanted more.Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine: A History of Star Makers, Fabricators, and Gossip Mongers Overview
The fan magazine has often been viewed simply as a publicity tool, a fluffy exercise in self-promotion by the film industry. But as an arbiter of good and bad taste, as a source of knowledge, and as a gateway to the fabled land of Hollywood and its stars, the American fan magazine represents a fascinating and indispensable chapter in journalism and popular culture.

Anthony Slide's Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine provides the definitive history of this artifact. It charts the development of the fan magazine from the golden years when Motion Picture Story Magazine and Photoplay first appeared in 1911 to its decline into provocative headlines and titillation in the 1960s and afterward. Slide discusses how the fan magazines dealt with gossip and innuendo, and how they handled nationwide issues such as Hollywood scandals of the 1920s, World War II, the blacklist, and the death of President Kennedy. Fan magazines thrived in the twentieth century, and they presented the history of an industry in a unique, sometimes accurate, and always entertaining style.

This major cultural history includes a new interview with 1970s media personality Rona Barrett, as well as original commentary from a dozen editors and writers. Also included is a chapter on contributions to the fan magazines from well-known writers such as Theodore Dreiser and e. e. cummings. The book is enhanced by an appendix documenting some 268 American fan magazines and includes detailed publication histories.


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