Defying Gravity: Solving the ‘Wicked Problem’ of Film Fandom in the Pre-Digital Age

Abstract

In this chapter, the author investigates the classic Hollywood fan magazine as a fan platform for the pre-digital age and highlights particularly the affordances it offered to its readers.

In doing so, the author firstly frames this magazine as an object designed in the early 1910s to resolve a ‘wicked problem’; that of managing the parasocial relationships between a growing number of enthusiastic fans and their increasingly distant idols, the Hollywood stars. The author then looks at five issues of Photoplay magazine in detail and determines how the magazine developed from 1915 to the later 1930s in terms of fulfilling this purpose, focusing particularly on participatory sections such as fan letter departments, competitions and, importantly, the often-overlooked Questions and Answers section.

The author argues these sections not only created a space for fans to converse – with the magazine’s editors and with each other – about the objects of their fandom but also helped shape the magazine itself, prompting a series of optimisations which improved the user-friendliness of the magazine’s design. Over the course of the 1920s–1930s, a number of new departments, focused on star and studio addresses, as well as film reviews and casts, gradually helped facilitate the booming business of being a fan.