Part Three - Introduction

Summary

While the previous sections of this book focused exclusively on fan magazines, albeit occasionally referencing women's magazines, this portion casts the net wider. It encompasses other non-fan film publications to complicate general notions about what a fan or movie magazine might be.

In the last two decades, the New Cinema History turn in film studies has placed centrally film historians Robert Allen and Douglas Gomery's brief thoughts on the importance of ‘non-filmic evidence’ such as trade publications and studio records (1985, 38–42). Fan magazines also belong to the ‘non-filmic evidence’ category, but those in the field of New Cinema History have addressed film coverage in general interest local and national newspapers (Abel 2015, 2019; Moore 2011, 2019). Martin Loiperdinger (2019) considers newspapers alongside trade magazines – publications which carried production news, box office reports and advice on exhibiting films. Even though these were aimed at a relatively small readership that invariably had a financial interest in the film industry, trade publications are often seen as reliable or impartial, where fan magazines might not be. Eric Hoyt (2014), co-founder of the Media History Digital Library (MHDL), has written of the scholarly bias towards one particular long-running and influential entertainment trade paper, Variety (1905 – current). Certainly, several studies have used Variety as their main source (for instance Hoyt et al. 2015; Thissen and Eisenstein Baker 2020). However, others have focused on alternative trade publications (for example Whitehead, Pelletier and Moore on Canadian Moving Picture Digest 2020). Academic work using non-Variety trade magazines is only likely to increase as the MHDL continues to digitize diverse titles, including Moving Picture World, Motion Picture News, Film Daily and The Hollywood Reporter, alongside other material, such as pressbooks for specific films and fan magazines.

Occasionally scholars have placed fan and trade magazines in closer dialogue with one another. Tamar Jeffers McDonald notes that while many trade magazines – especially Variety – treated fan magazines with scorn (2016, 31), in June 1933 the daily US trade paper The Hollywood Reporter considered them a positive ally in promoting the film industry (30). Its ‘Reviewing the Fan Mags’ feature surveyed 145 fan magazine issues in terms of their content until mid-1934 when it described them as a ‘growing evil’ which needed cleaning up (30).