Amazing research resource - old film periodicals

[Doctor Strange]

I don't recall seeing this posted here before... but anyone who's interested in classic Hollywood will want to bookmark it at once!

http://mediahistoryproject.org/collections/

There are already over 800,000 pages of scanned material available there representing a wide range of film periodicals. There are both trade publications and fan magazines, as well as technical and legal documents, radio-oriented magazines, and some general-interest publications. They are all PDF files that can be downloaded; the site also offers a useful browsing/zooming interface and an excellent search engine.

This is just amazing... It's the motherlode. Pounce!

 

[Stanley Doble]

I don't know if this is well known or obvious, but a lot of the information in movie magazines came from the studios' publicity departments and was totally bogus. Artists' names, dates of birth, place of birth, and all the details of their biographies were invented and any resemblance to a real person was purely coincidental.

I suppose you could use them to find out what date a certain picture premiered on and things like that. But even reviews could be bought, or on the other hand, influenced by a grudge the reviewer had against the studio or star.

 

[Doctor Strange]

Well, of course... I know better than to expect objectivity or truth from the Hollywood promotion machine in its heyday. But this remains a massive trove of great historical value for all kinds of reasons, not the least of which is the authentic feel it gives you for the POV (and PR/advertising approaches) of the times. Scanning through these of-their-times publications is a much better way to get a sense of how things were viewed/promoted/thought about - warts and all - than trusting to modern, politically correct, Wikified retellings of the time.

Best of all, you don't have to comb through bins of old microfilms or dusty stacks of boxed magazines to view it!

 

[Worf]

If nothing else, the pics of the cars, the stars and the clothes makes it worthwhile. Thanks for the link Doc. How's life treatin' ya? Remember there's always a second rocker on my porch!

Worf

 

[LizzieMaine]

It's also very valuable to see what the *exhibitors* thought about the films they were given to show -- the fan press didn't cover this angle, but the trades definitely did, and some of them could be absolutely brutal. Katherine Hepburn and Bette Davis might be legendary iconic stars today, but to the exhibitors of 1938 they were "box office poison." Nobody liked them, nobody wanted to see them, and their films lost loads of money. You won't read that in the fan press, but Variety was all over the story.

As for radio, Broadcasting magazine is, by far, the most important publication out there for understanding what actually went on in the industry, and why. A lot of modern "old time radio" scholarship is still based in the fan press, with all the fluff that implies, but the trade publications are far more valuable in explaining the whats and whys of program production and distribution, and also help researchers understand why recordings of certain programs survive in great numbers today while others are almost entirely (or entirely) lost.

 

[Fading Fast]

Great link - thank you. I had read the "box office poison" stuff about Katherine Hepburn, but not Bette Davis, but it is interesting that it was said about both of them as they are unconventional beauties compared to most of the other female stars of the 1930s and they had, IMHO, unconventional acting styles that, today, we see as brilliant, but might have, in the 1930s, been an acquired taste, which accounts for the success of both actresses increasing in the 40s and beyond.

That said, I love both actresses' movies from the 1930s. "Stage Door" has incredible rapid fire dialogue that highlights Hepburn's impressive ability to deliver an incredible number of lines while moving just as quickly and naturally and "Christopher Strong" is one of the edgier "pre-codes" that only works because of Hepburn (almost everyone else is flat and she lights the fire in every scene she is in). And Davis drives the "Petrified Forest" almost as much as Bogart does.