
Contents
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Selling Middlebrow Culture: Stewardship Selling Middlebrow Culture: Stewardship
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Selling Female Stars: Consumption Selling Female Stars: Consumption
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Selling Aspiration: Advertisements Selling Aspiration: Advertisements
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Conclusion: MPSM and MPM versus Photoplay Conclusion: MPSM and MPM versus Photoplay
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Notes Notes
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31 The Decline of Middlebrow Taste in Celebrity Culture: The First Fan Magazines
Get accessSumiko Higashi is Professor Emerita in the Department of History at the College at Brockport, SUNY. She is the author of Virgins, Vamps, and Flappers: The American Silent Movie Heroine (1978), Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture: The Silent Era (1994), Stars, Fans, and Consumption in the 1950s: Reading Photoplay (2014), and essays on women in the media, film as historical representation, and film history as cultural history. She has served on the editorial boards of Cinema Journal and Film History. At the Society for Cinema Studies conference in 1992, she co-founded the Asian Pacific American Caucus in a Pittsburgh coffee shop.
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Published:22 February 2024
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Abstract
-As the first fan magazine, Motion Picture Story Magazine (later Motion Picture Magazine) exemplified middlebrow culture by validating film as narrative but soon capitulated to female fans clamoring for publicity about the stars. Founded in 1911, MPSM affirmed the didactic and moral value of the movies by publishing storyized versions with stills. A product of Progressive-Era stewardship, it sanctioned uplift and upheld class, ethnic, and racial divisions. But a cultural transformation based on the emergence of modern personalities was occurring. What MPSM and MPM failed to anticipate was the significance of gender at a time when women and girls were fast becoming ardent fans—first of romantic heroes and then of daring serial heroines. As a result, storyizations were superseded by publicity about stars consuming fashion, mansions, and roadsters. Such stories provided lower-class fans with compensatory experience while stimulating the purchase of aspirational goods—a practice that is still pervasive today.
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