20 Vintage Magazines That Shaped Celebrity Culture As We Know It

The Photoplay Medal of Honor, given to the 1920 film Humoresque in 1921, was the first major movie award decided by fan voting, eight years before the first Academy Awards. Photoplay itself had begun in Chicago in 1911, and under editor James R. Quirk, it gained a foothold in Hollywood by hiring writers such as Adela Rogers St. Johns. Its circulation peaked in the 1920s at between 500,000 and 600,000 copies a month, while the magazine claimed a total readership of 2 million when pass-along readers were included.

First published in May 1957, 16 was created by Jacques Chambrun, Desmond Hall, and George Waller, with Elvis Presley on its first cover. Soon afterward, Gloria Stavers joined the team, becoming editor in 1958. She ditched outside advertising and adult-oriented content, relying instead on eye-catching features, including unedited Q&As from fans and pull-out color posters for the bedroom. Now that’s a magazine teenage me would’ve happily spent my money on! By the 1960s, its circulation topped five million readers, with virtually all copies sold on newsstands.

On April 3, 1953, Walter Annenberg’s Triangle Publications brought out TV Guide nationally, effectively bringing celebrity culture into the living room. Instead of creating a new television listings format, the magazine combined a fan magazine with feature articles and a weekly listing, and it acquired local television listings, including Lee Wagner’s competing local listings directory, TeleVision Guide. The first issue featured Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’s newborn son, Desi Jr., on the cover.

The Answer Man was no man at all. He was a collective, a first for film journalism in 1912, when he began answering readers’ questions. The Motion Picture Story Magazine, started by J. Stuart Blackton and Eugene V. Brewster in Brooklyn in February 1911, targeted moviegoers rather than theater owners. The Answer Man was written by staff, like Rose Tapley, but his answers gave readers a false sense of direct communication with Hollywood.

In March 1921, Bernarr Macfadden started a tabloid called Movie Weekly, which used talent searches open to its readers and the confessional literary form. At the time, Norma Shearer was a teenager auditioning in New York. She won one of the magazine’s contests, although the prize didn’t come with a film contract. Instead, the nationwide attention Shearer received helped attract the studio interest that eventually led to her MGM contract. No movie deal for winning, but getting MGM’s attention wasn’t exactly a bad consolation prize!

Starting with a November 1930 issue (under editor Ruth Waterbury, with Greta Garbo gracing the first-ever cover), Silver Screen introduced a novel aspect of celebrity coverage: photo tours of stars’ homes and living spaces. Suddenly, it wasn’t just movies or careers or personalities that captivated the public, but also stars’ lifestyles, explored room by room.

While Movie Mirror, published by Macfadden between 1931 and its merger with Photoplay in 1941, did print news about studio divorces, scandals, and health scares, many pieces were written as first-person confessions credited to the stars. Because of strict libel laws and studio-era propriety, they were more emotional pieces than the hard-hitting exposés of modern tabloids.

The pop vocalist became a distinctive type of media figure through the familiar fan magazine formula, as seen in Hit Parader’s coverage of stars like Frank Sinatra. Launched in September 1942 by Charlton Publications as a monthly magazine to complement its Song Hits sheet of song lyrics, Hit Parader combined songs with photo essays and biographical information about the singers.

Some scholars consider Screen Guide’s photography to be early examples of paparazzi photos. Instead of relying on studio portraits and posed photographs, Moses Annenberg’s Screen Guide, which first had a limited edition in 1932 and then re-launched as a rotogravure in 1936, took photographers to airports, to beaches, to rehearsals to capture stars off-guard. A new era had begun in which the cameras did not always ask for permission.

The format of the fan magazine successfully crossed over from movie stars to radio actors. Dell started a new publication in 1932 called Radio Stars, which featured portraits of the performers whom, up to that point, people had only heard and not seen. With portraits and photoshoots in the performers’ homes, it gave the actors their first visual representation.

The greatest fan magazine rivals of the 1930s were Modern Screen and Photoplay. When Dell introduced Modern Screen on November 3, 1930, it sold for just 10 cents, undercutting other magazines. The publication also included Louella Parsons’ gossip column as well as features on Hollywood starlets. Celebrity gossip for a dime? I would’ve been sold too!

The fan magazine industry wasn’t built for American readers alone: Chalmers Publishing’s Cine-Mundial, a fan magazine about Hollywood stars like Dolores del Río, was written in Spanish and solicited submissions from correspondents in Mexico City, Havana, and Buenos Aires, despite being published in New York beginning in 1916. It was a publication conceived entirely for the foreign market.

Picturegoer, originally titled The Pictures, was Britain’s foremost weekly film fan magazine. Published in London from 1921 to 1960, the magazine judged Hollywood and British stars not just on their glamour but on their moral character and screen craft, revealing that British fandom had its own critical relationship to stardom and Hollywood.

Fandom could adapt to fit a reader’s budget, too. For example, Amalgamated Press first published the periodical Girls’ Cinema in Great Britain in October 1920. Scholars have suggested that the magazine, which featured serialized film fiction alongside dressmaking patterns, allowed working-class British women to channel Hollywood glamour on the cheap. A little movie gossip and a new dress pattern in the same issue sound like a good deal to me.

Screen Romances, which began in 1929, combined the full novelization of a film and the gossip about the on-screen actors’ off-screen romantic involvements, allowing its readers to consume the plot of the film and the lives of the stars all in the same issue. This collapsing of the distinctions between fiction and reality generated the celebrity romance narrative.

Appearing during the Jazz Age in 1920, Screenland translated readers’ love of celebrity culture into consumerism by linking stars to the sales of the clothing and makeup they used. The fashion-oriented magazine provided beauty and makeup tips alongside glamorous imagery. Its Art Deco cover designs and clothing layouts showed trends and also taught readers how to imitate their favorite stars.

Readers were encouraged to participate in Picture Play forums and discuss films and stars, but the magazine was equally known for the quality of its portraits, which rivaled studio art and were suitable for galleries, not just casual browsing. This was made possible by the magazine’s publisher, Street & Smith, using rotogravure, a high-quality print technology that the magazine was among the first to apply to fan-magazine portraiture starting in 1915. These technological innovations, alongside writing, helped shape fan culture.

Many publications in this era aspired to high art and prestige, but in 1915, one magazine carved out a very different niche for itself. Film Fun mixed slapstick comedians with swimsuit-clad pin-up models, which made its approach pretty clear: the magazine was selling sex appeal. Evidently, celebrity magazines figured out early on that glamour sells!

In contrast with Film Fun was Eugene V. Brewster’s 1915 Motion Picture Classic. Brewster used large-format rotogravure photographs and painted covers. In Classic, Valentino and other silent stars were presented as fine art icons, not entertainers. For Brewster’s publication, glamour was a signifier of prestige.

Scholars trace the origins of paparazzi culture back to 1937 and the celebrity magazine Movie Life. Along with Screen Guide, it broke tradition by replacing lengthier articles with candid photographs of celebrities doing everyday things, like shopping for groceries. This normalized fans having access to more aspects of a celebrity’s life, rather than only seeing them in staged studio portraits. Soon enough, candid photographs of celebrities became the media norm.

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