As mentioned yesterday, we're jumping back a full 100 years today to the February 1917 issue of Film Fun. Early 20th century Hollywood and pre-Tinsel Town is a territory we've visited briefly in the past, and to which we'll return a fair bit over time.
The public fascination with stars started early, and publishers were lining up to take advantage of that. In addition to Film Fun, there were magazines like Silverscreen, Picture-Play, Screenland, Movie Pictorial, Photoplay, Movie Weekly, Pantomime, and certainly more. (But those are the titles i can see while sitting here, and i'm too lazy to go looking for others just now.)
There's also the "Other" Film Fun, the comic magazine featuring strips starring film actors. Not surprisingly, Laurel & Hardy and Abbot & Costello translated well to that format. We'll take a look at those, along with Radio Fun and TV Fun.
There is one other Movie/Comics intersection standing by - Non-Comics from old magazines like Miss America, wherein we can find comic strip adaptations of Hollywood films like Magic Town, with Jimmy Stewart. (A personal favorite old look at social psychology)
But, by this point, you're probably starting to think (and not unrightly) that i'm stalling and avoiding the subject of that cover up there, and yesterday's ponderable - wtf is going on there?
None of the options i suggested yesterday was the actual story, but that's probably no surprise. And while there's no Inter-Species Romance happening here, there is a bit of Love.
You see, the cover painting ties to a two-page spread on stars and their beloved pets:
Things really haven't changed much in a century in this regard. Stars still sometimes have odd pets, and fans still
Now that we've solved that mystery, let's return to the beginning, and the Masthead & Editorial page:
(Go ahead. Take as long as you like absorbing the imagery in that Film Fun title cartoon.)
Definitely some big changes in things on those text pieces. Smaller changes on the masthead.
The President goes out to a motion picture show to help popularize the notion.
No part of that sentence makes sense in today's world. Here they're still trying to convince the public that movies are valid entertainment. Air Conditioning made things so much easier for them when that came along.
And look - no boys/men want to become movie stars. They didn't want to do the job while being paid less than the opposite sex. Who'da thunk it?
Of course, that kind of leads to something that hasn't much changed in 100 years:
Those illustrations come from the first part of a serialized article that would still be quite timely today. In the same issue, the previous serialization was coming to an end - a piece on D.W. Griffith written by his wife, Linda. Bit of a tonal shift there.
One feature reflected a big cultural change over the last 100 years:
It's very hard to picture this spread running in a modern film magazine, and even harder to imagine the stars willing to pose in furs in the age of internet rage. I can hear the cries of "Throw her to the casting directors!"
Of course, they had the usual spotlight features with the stars of the day. How many names can you recognize a century later?
I find it interesting to remember that something simple like the white blended image of Dorothy Love Clark on the page above actually required physically cutting the photograph to remove the parts unwanted for the layout. That held true until recent decades. So much more work involved in the simplest things back then.
The big surprise find for me in this issue was a feature on Helen Gibson.
"Who?" some, no doubt, are asking.
Besides being a performer in movies, vaudeville, and radio, Helen Gibson was also a film producer, rodeo & trick rider, and, more to the point here, she was the first Stunt Woman.
They gave her a photo feature page:
A totally unexpected delight to discover here. I wonder what else is hiding in these piles?
Hmm...
That also leads me to wonder how many are familiar with Kane Richmond? Once again, a topic for another time.
I'll leave you with a final text piece from Film Fun.
I wonder if anything ever came of William Fox's "Cinema" notion?
pages from Film Fun #335 (1917)
