Hi everyone! Welcome to “The Shadow Land of Make Believe: Mythologising Hollywood in the 1920s”. This is a blog series I will be writing during the next few weeks for Warwick University’s Undergraduate Research Support Scheme (URSS). In this series, I will explore how 1920s Hollywood represented itself to audiences through fan memorabilia and promotional materials as well as its own films. Was Hollywood a heaven or a hell? How did a few increasingly powerful production studios market it to the masses? What did it take for ordinary folks to become a part of it? I hope you enjoy my foray into this fascinating period of American filmmaking!
Last month, I was lucky enough to visit the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum at Exeter University to study some 1920s Hollywood memorabilia! Reading a one-hundred-year-old fan magazine online is fascinating enough, but it just cannot compare to thumbing through the paper pages as so many others have done before me.
I may have been sitting in a cold little Devonshire archive – cold to help preserve the artefacts in the museum’s care – but my box of items was a veritable treasure trove of time travel. I was suddenly transported across the Atlantic Ocean, peering through the eyes of an avid American moviegoer.
Discovering the identity of this moviegoer was my goal. In an era of escalating studio bureaucracy, the ideal Hollywood consumer was being cooked up as carefully as the films themselves: by combing through the group of goodies on my desk, perhaps I could get to know this imaginary audience member who lived and breathed all things cinema. How did this audience member engage with the movies they loved? What was it they eagerly anticipated as they waited for the programme to start?
The fan magazines were the ideal place to begin my search for answers. What struck me most about these particular periodicals – beautifully preserved editions of Screenland and Picture-Play – was the sheer quantity of advertisements. Many of them were awkwardly inserted within a supposedly un-commercial array of articles, film synopses and interviews. A piece purportedly penned by Greta Garbo instructed readers to obtain a copy of Anna Karenina, soon to be adapted into a motion picture with her in the titular role. The irony of Garbo’s reputation as one of Hollywood’s most anti-publicity performers was obviously lost on the ghostwriter – the appearance of a bankable household name surpassed any attempt at realism.
Writing a promotional article doesn't sound very "Garbo" to me.
Even more surprising was the constant appearance of products dedicated to rapid weight loss. “How folks grow thin”, according to one advert, was through four Marmola tablets per day: “Watch the reduction, watch the gain in vitality. Do this now, for your own sake.” Needless to say, this laxative-packed pill was treated with suspicion by the Federal Trade Commission as a misleading, ineffective and potentially dangerous ‘miracle cure’. A series of lawsuits condemned the company to obscurity by the 1940s. Regardless, Marmola’s marketing strategy reflected a wider pattern in how these magazines addressed their audience: as bright-eyed wannabe socialites.
Nothing dodgy here at all...
At their core, Screenland and Picture-Play depicted those they centered their publications around as idols, not individuals. Whether through stunningly painted front-cover portraits or gossip about life away from the camera, actors were packaged as all-too-perfect personas for audiences to unconditionally adore. Performing did not end once filming did – maintaining a celebrity image off-screen was the ultimate method of sustaining the public’s love affair with Hollywood and therefore filling cinema seats nationwide. Fan magazines might as well have been mediators between these production studios and their vast audiences. They promised ordinary people a connection to the glamorous faces they encountered via direct commercial interaction with the publication itself: in other words, they positioned readers as aspirants to an ostensibly fashionable lifestyle. If you took a Marmola tablet, applied Stillman’s Freckle Cream, attended a French elocution course or entered a competition for $50, perhaps you could become the biggest movie star of them all.
Another item in the box, a cigar label illustrated with Rudolph Valentino’s face, brought this phenomena of star commodification to a whole new level. I’d requested to view it without a second thought. We’re so accustomed to celebrity endorsement in the twenty-first century that it shouldn’t have surprised me to discover one of Hollywood’s most popular heartthrobs slapped onto a random consumer product. Even so, there was something so humorous about the gold trimming that adorned his framed portrait: he might as well have been a king on a commemorative tea set. Was there really any other connection between this Italian actor and Italian cigars? I could only imagine the manufacturer’s glee as he foresaw a surge of screaming admirers, desperate for anything with Valentino’s visage that they could get their hands on. Perhaps buying this label would get them closer to the real man himself!
Just the face I want to see when I fill my lungs with tobacco smoke.
But despite what the studios may have believed, the cinema-going public was not a crowd of unthinking, unfeeling automatons who lapped up Hollywood’s newest concoctions without question. What made me feel most connected to this assortment of antiques was the unadulterated enthusiasm of a blossoming community of film lovers. The “Four Novarroists” of Picture-Play’s “Information, Please” feature – supporters of Ramon Novarro, another ‘Latin Lover’ – coined a fandom name a century before Swifties, Whovians and Potterheads. Screenland regulars offered anecdotes, confessed crushes and presented screenplay ideas. Meanwhile, I might as well have been looking in a mirror. The passion of these anonymous forum writers strongly resonated with my own teenage years: countless evenings I’d spent scouring social media for other girls who shared my interests.
And there was no doubt in my mind who this memorabilia was created for. It was almost certainly for young women: women at home, at college, at their first jobs. Women who put aside any money they could spare for an afternoon trip to the cinema. An over-reliance on pseudo-scientific advertisements – and, quite frankly, on body-shaming – didn’t take away from the fact that these publications provided an opportunity for an otherwise marginalised demographic to be themselves. Through fandom culture, women could use their voices to actively participate in the critique and creation of American filmmaking.
The final item in my Bill Douglas box was an unassuming little thing – a navy hardback volume on the verge of falling apart. It belonged in 1929 to ‘M. McKnight’, Form 4, according to a narrow scrawl on the lining. In terms of provenance, there wasn’t a particularly compelling story to tell: a vintage schoolbook whose owner’s identity had been lost to time. But when I began to flick through the contents, I quickly realised that there was more story here than words could ever express.
Comments