American Studies Commons^™

Blue Bloods, Movie Queens, And Jane Does: Or How Princess Culture, American Film, And Girl Fandom Came Together In The 1910s, Diana Anselmo-Sequeira

Diana Anselmo-Sequeira

This article explores the complex relationship established between young film actresses and their adolescent female fans during the second decade of the twentieth century. In the 1910s, popular press often promoted movie stars in their teens—such as Mary Pickford, Shirley Mason, Mae Marsh, and Lila Lee—as rag-to-riches Cinderellas released from urban squalor due to employment in the motion pictures. Fan magazines also presented these girl stars as blue-blooded princesses, whose royal bloodline enriched American stardom. Such press pageantry invited girl fans to identify with girl stars’ mythologized biographies.

However, the depiction of female movie stars as manufactured blue bloods also …

Romancing The Fan-Girl: Early Film Fan Magazines And American Girls’ Longing For Stardom., Diana Anselmo-Sequeira

Diana Anselmo-Sequeira

Looking at “Beauty and Brains,” the first nationwide beauty competition issued by a film fan magazine (Photoplay Magazine) and a producing company (World Film Co.), this paper explores how early American cinema was shaped by female adolescence. In 1904, American psychologist G. Stanley Hall first described the “budding girl” as psychologically impermanent, malleable, and lacking self-awareness. A decade later, as the film industry became organized under an institutionalized star system, the figure of the growing girl linchpined the cult of the individual movie star.

I argue that, throughout the 1910s, adolescent girls were not only some of the best paid …

Romancing The Fan-Girl: Early Film Fan Magazines And American Girls’ Longing For Stardom., Diana Anselmo-Sequeira

Diana Anselmo-Sequeira

No abstract provided.