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Photoplay

Photoplay
Photoplay December 1921.jpg
Cover of the December 1921 issue featuring Lillian Gish painted by Rolf Armstrong
Categories Film
Entertainment
Year founded 1911
Final issue 1980
Company Macfadden Publications
Country United States
Based in Chicago
Language English
ISSN 0732-538X

Photoplay was one of the first American film fan magazines. It was founded in 1911 in Chicago, the same year that J. Stuart Blackton founded Motion Picture Story, a magazine also directed at fans. For most of its run, Photoplay was published by Macfadden Publications.

Photoplay began as a short-fiction magazine concerned mostly with the plots and characters of films at the time and was used as a promotional tool for those films. In 1915, Julian Johnson and James R. Quirk became the editors (though Quirk had been vice president of the magazine since its inception), and together they created a format which would set a precedent for almost all celebrity magazines that followed. By 1918 the circulation exceeded 200,000, with the popularity of the magazine fueled by the public's increasing interest in the private lives of celebrities.

Photoplay reached its apex in the 1920s and 1930s and was considered quite influential within the motion picture industry. The magazine was renowned for its artwork portraits of film stars on the cover by such artists as Earl Christy and Charles Sheldon. Macfadden Publications purchased the magazine in 1934. With the advancement of color photography, the magazine began using photographs of the stars instead by 1937.

Photoplay published the writings of Hedda Hopper, Walter Winchell, Hazel MacDonald, Adela Rogers St. Johns, Sheilah Graham, Dorothy Kilgallen, Rob Wagner, later editor and publisher of Rob Wagner's Script, and Louella Parsons, among others. The magazine was edited by Quirk until 1932; later editors include Kathyrn Dougherty, Ruth Waterbury, and Adele Whiteley Fletcher. It also featured the health and beauty advice of Sylvia of Hollywood, arguably the first fitness guru to the stars.


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