Film History, Volume 18, pp. 140153, 2006. Copyright John Libbey Publishing ISSN: 0892-2160.

. Printed in United States of America

Fan discourse in the heartland: the early 1910s

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Richard Abel
few years ago, I was scanning microfilm of the Des Moines News, looking for information in ads and articles on motion picture exhibition in the early 1910s. One of those guilty pleasures to which cinema historians only rarely admit. Suddenly in the 11 November 1912 issue, something unexpected popped up. There was this boldly bannered announcement: Gertrude M. Price, the Daily News Moving Picture Expert, would be entertaining readers with stories about the MOVING PICTURE FOLKS that Smiley, Golden-Haired Girl [most likely, Mary Pickford] ... that Beautiful Child ... that Athletic Young Hero, and that Gun-Toting Cowboy because the News recogniz[ed] the movies as the biggest, most popular amusement in the world.1 Sure enough, the News began running Prices stories the very next day and quite regularly thereafter. Now, I already had discovered that, more than a year earlier, beginning in September 1911, newspapers like the Canton News and Youngstown Vindicator in northeastern Ohio had been printing unsigned capsule reviews of moving pictures in their Sunday editions.2 Moreover, from December 1911, the Cleveland Leader had been publishing a Sunday page devoted to photoplays and players.3 But no other paper, so far as I then knew, had a series of signed stories on the movies by late 1912, and signed by a woman no less. So who was this writer named Gertrude Price, what and how did she write about the movies, who were her assumed readers, and what possible significance could her long forgotten newspaper stories have?

trated story on Dolores Cassinelli (a popular actor for Essanay, a Chicago studio) as well as another banner story about the movie business in Des Moines, claiming the citys fourteen moving picture houses had a daily attendance of ten thousand from the coal miner north of the city who walks a mile or more to attend the picture show in Highland Park [a northern suburb] to the rich man who stops his automobile in front of the show in University Place [two blocks from my former office at Drake University].4 Throughout the following week, stories appeared daily and in unexpected places: a front page story praised Kings of the Forest, a two-reel jungle picture from Selig (another Chicago studio); a Movies column claimed there were five hundred people in Des Moines who depend for a living on the motion picture industry; another Movies column offered capsule reviews of films shown at eight different theaters; and other illustrated stories (some signed by Price, some not) featured Essanays Francis X. Bushman, Broncho Billy and Alkali Ike, and Seligs fearless heroine, Kathlyn Williams (who, one year later, would star in the first serial, The Adventures of Kathlyn).5 Yet as I read on further, this initial impression seemed less and less plausible. Whereas the Movies columns and some articles clearly had a local angle, many illustrated stories read like interviews (obviously not done in Des Moines); moreover, by 1 February 1913,

Gertrude Price and the Des Moines News, 19121914

Because Price was described as the News Moving Picture Expert, I first thought she might be a local journalist, perhaps with connections in Chicago. On 12 November 1912, for instance, there was an illus-

Richard Abel is Robert Altman Collegiate Professor of Film Studies and Chair of the Screen Arts & Cultures Department at the University of Michigan. His most recent books are The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 19001910 (California 1999) and Imagining Community in US Cinema, 19101914 (forthcoming California). He co-edited, with Rick Altman, The Sounds of Early Cinema (Indiana 2001) and served as general editor for the Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (Routledge 2005). Contact: richabel@umich.edu

Fan discourse in the heartland: the early 1910s Price was described as writing from the great California studios where they make your wild west pictures.6 As this disjunction persisted, well into 1914, it became less and less likely that the Des Moines News, alone among the countrys papers, had shipped one of its reporters or feature writers to Southern California to send back exclusive stories about the movies. A partial answer to this mystery, again unexpectedly, came from subsequent research I was doing at the US Library of Congress, the Toledo Public Library, the Minnesota Historical Society Library, and, most recently, the State Library of Michigan. Prices initial articles, I discovered, also appeared at the same time in several other newspapers: the Toledo News-Bee, Cleveland Press, Pittsburgh Press, Detroit Times, St. Paul Daily News and, based on clippings that Shelley Stamp has found researching Lois Weber, the New Orleans Statesman.7 The placement of stories may have differed what appeared on one page of the Des Moines News appeared on another of the Toledo News-Bee or Cleveland Press and some illustrated stories in the News did not appear in the others and vice versa but all those by a signed writer were attributed to Price. That the Des Moines News and most of the other papers were members of the Scripps-McRae League, a Midwest chain of papers, meant that Prices stories were syndicated and probably distributed throughout the chain.8 And because the chain was contracted to the United Press Association, which had gathered the Scripps telegraphic services into a single nationwide entity in 1906, her stories would have been available to scores or even hundreds of other client papers as well9 In short, Prices stories, much like the movies themselves or the illustrated songs that often complemented them, circulated as mass culture commodities throughout the country almost simultaneously yet could be framed or tweaked specifically for local consumption.10 Moreover, not only was Price probably the first syndicated writer with motion pictures as her exclusive subject, she also may have been more widely read at the time, especially by movie-goers, than anyone in the trade press.11 That alone made Prices writings worth investigating further, I concluded, but so did the extent of her work in the Des Moines News, because more columns seemed to appear there than in the other newspapers that I was examining. Gerald Baldestys recent study of publisher E.W. Scripps provides a valuable context for this

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research by suggesting that, given the readership of the Scripps-McRae League papers, Prices work may have targeted a particular audience. In contrast to Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, who competed fiercely in New York City and built their newspaper empires on advertising, Scripps created a string of small, cheap, working-class newspapers that were unusually independent in their dealings with advertisers.12 In a 1906 letter to Robert Paine, general editor of his chains nationwide, Scripps himself (sounding a bit like Charles Foster Kane) described his papers as friends, advisors, and even special pleaders of the ninety-five percent of the population that were not rich or powerful.13 Indeed, most of the papers that Scripps bought or started up after 1900 pledged allegiance to the common people, promising to act as the organ, mouthpiece, the apologist, the defender and the advocate of the wage earning class.14 This pledge extended to giving substantial coverage to labour issues and strongly supporting organized labour.15 Like many

Fig. 1. Gertrude Price, Sees the Movies as Great New Field for Women Folk, Toledo News-Bee, 30 March 1914, p. 14.

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Richard Abel seems to have been the principal audience for motion pictures in Des Moines in the early 1910s. From the fall of 1911 on, for instance, several picture theatres began to place ads on a regular basis in the evening News rather than in its rivals, the jointlyowned, more business-oriented morning Register and Leader and evening Tribune. And it was there too that, complementing Prices stories, weekly movie listings and reviews first began to appear one year later. Only in February 1913 did the Register establish its own irregular Sunday column devoted to motion pictures, and the nomenclature it used assumed an audience of moviegoers quite different from that in the News. Initially called At the Moving Picture Playhouses, the column soon became News of the Photoplays and Photoplayers. Here the Register was following the trade press, writing manuals, and other papers like the Cleveland Leader in using the newly coined photoplays, castingt moving pictures as a legitimate form of art, with educational effects, in order to build a middle-class audience.21 The News, and Price herself, opted instead for movies, a term often linked alliteratively with menace by others, but which they knew as a popular slang term circulated by their clientele.22 Most of the stories Price signed in the News, as well as those she did not, focused on screen personalities or movie stars, exploiting a new public interest that the industry was beginning to use to its advantage.23 Moreover, all were illustrated with one or more half-tone sketches deftly drawn from publicity photos (sometimes copyrighted by the film companies).24 Early examples include figures as different as King Baggott, Maurice Costello and comedian John Bunny or Mary Fuller, Edith Storey and comedienne Mabel Normand.25 At first the stars or personalities that Price wrote about were associated with the licensed manufacturers, particularly Essanay, Selig, Vitagraph and Kalem. But she gradually included those working for the Independent companies Imp, American or Flying A, Solax, Keystone, Kay-Bee and 101-Bison (after its acquisition by Universal) as well as others from Path American. There are several striking patterns in her choice of stars. One is the frequency of child actors, from Helen Armstrong, the tiny starlet of the Flying A, or Baby Lillian Wade of Seligs wild animal pictures to Judson Melford, a natural ... clever picture-player who just happened to be the young son of one of Kalems chief filmmakers. In fact, not only did Price write more than a dozen stories on child actors in the movies, but she also

Fig. 2. The Great American Home, Des Moines News, 3 June 1913, p. 1.

others, the Scripps papers also paid particular attention to women readers: as Paine once wrote, the woman in a house who swears by a paper is worth five men who buy it on the street.16 But they were different, Baldasty argues, in making a particular effort at providing content of interest to working-class women.17 That content ranged from weekly short stories to articles on how to run a household on a limited income or on how many women now worked outside the home.18 In the case of Des Moines, an insurance and retail center with a population of nearly 100,000 by 1910, the News had a very large clientele among ... workingmen, at least according to a 1911 history of the city, and was a vigorous supporter of labor interests.19 In articles published as early as 1907, the News also gave special attention to women with blue-collar, white-collar, and even professional jobs in the city.20 At the time, they included 1,200 women who ran machines in the garment, hosiery and glove factories, another 1,200 girls and women who worked as store clerks, perhaps close to that number employed in insurance offices and allied printing companies, and hundreds more working as stenographers (or typewriters, as they were then often called) in other businesses and government offices or as nurses in hospitals. It was this clientele that still

Fan discourse in the heartland: the early 1910s seems to have signed several pieces as Aunt Gertie, most notably in a story about Thomas A. Edison, who invented the phonograph, and the electric light, and the moving picture, too. Using the pseudonym of Aunt Gertie, from May through July 1913, she composed a series of condensed fairy tales for children, from Snow White to The Little Mermaid.26 And she even contributed a story on five-year-old Princess Ileana of Roumania, in which children in Des Moines (and other cities) could imagine a real princess sitting right beside them in a movie theatre. Another pattern, however, is even more prominent. At least one out of every four or five actors or stars are described as acting in westerns, and the illustrations support this by having men and women like Edwin August (Powers), George Melford (Kalem), or Jack Richardson and Pauline Garfield Bush (American) decked out in cowboy hats and others like Mona Darkfeather (Universal) or Red Wing (Path American) in full Indian costume.27 Prices texts also underscore that emphasis, as in her description of Kalems Ruth Roland as an athletic girl who runs, rides and rows with all the freedom and agility of a boy for instance, in one of her riding pictures, The Girl Deputy.28 Now, Des Moines picture theatres did not promote westerns as prominently as did theatres in other cities. Essanays G. M. Anderson, for instance, whether known as Broncho Billy or Bullets (as he was called in northeastern Ohio), was rarely advertised as a headliner in the city.29 The multiplereel westerns of 101-Bison, Broncho and Kay-Bee occasionally were celebrated, but not as frequently or intensely as they were in cities such as Baltimore, Cleveland, Toledo, or elsewhere.30 Prices many stories suggest, however, especially coming after several Flying A stories were published in the News in early 1912, that she was not alone in her fascination with cowboy, cowboy girl, and Indian figures and that indeed there may well have been a substantial audience for westerns in the city.31 In late 1913, she even wrote an exclusive series of nine stories on location about Buffalo Bill Codys epic re-enactment of several battles in the Indian wars of 1876 to 1891, produced by Essanay with US government support.32 This series is a rare record of what then became Indian Wars Pictures, which was shown privately to government officials and clubs, beginning in January 1914, but whose several versions never were widely distributed or exhibited.33 Most striking, however, are the number of articles, at least two thirds of the total by my count,

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devoted to women. As might be expected, stars that are still familiar turn up from Mary Pickford and Kathlyn Williams to Alice Joyce and Pearl White but most now have been forgotten, and several of the latter, such as Pauline Bush, receive repeated attention.34 Among them were regal-looking Miriam Nesbitt who, bored by the world, turned to the movies and likes rough and ready parts. And Anna Q. Nilsson a movie beauty [who] risks [her] life to put thrill in the pictures for Kalem whose story appeared prominently on the newspapers front page.35 And Jessylyn Von Trump, a capital rider at American, who likes herself in a cowgirl costume very much, indeed. And that tall woman of the picture players, Anne Schaefer, who enjoys playing lead roles and character parts for Vitagraphs western unit. And dainty, daring Clara Williams, Lubins leading lady, who can beat the boys at anything on a horse. And Leona Hutton, who finds that being

Fig. 3. Gertrude Price, Movie Beauty Risks Life, Des Moines News, 7 February 1913, p. 1.

144 almost killed 365 days in the year is only a hum drum regularity in her busy life at Kay-Bee. Those Price writes about, for the most part, are active, independent figures, celebrated as skilled horesewomen and fearless daredevils, often seen in westerns and other adventure films. In fact, some are not unlike the champion cowgirl riders and sharpshooters, such as Bessie Herberg and Lucile Parr, prominently promoted in performances of the 101 Ranch Wild West that toured the country to great acclaim at the time.36 Moreover, all of these women are complemented by others who had become successful filmmakers or scenario writers in the industry: Alice Guy Blach at Solax, Nell Shipman and Lois Weber at Rex.37

Richard Abel seems to have accepted a more permanent position at the Record, for she gradually took on other responsibilities, according to Olsson, most notably serving as editor of the papers Womens Page and later as its Club editor pages and columns that began to appear regularly around the turn of the last century and usually were written by newspaperwomen.42 Indeed, she remained a member of the Records staff into the early 1930s. Could her later positions at the Record explain why Price abandoned her work as a syndicated movie expert? Perhaps, but thats hardly certain. She may well have used her movie reporting as a means to make her way as a professional newspaperwoman, but she also may have lost interest in the new amusement industry. Although her own writings offer some support for either conclusion, more importantly perhaps they point to significant changes in the industry that also may have determined her choices or options. For one thing, Price displayed a noticeable lack of attention to features, which then were coming into prominence; by contrast, her persistent fascination for westerns, especially one- and two-reelers, or with relatively minor stars, also in oneand two-reelers, could have seemed outdated by 1914.43 For another, the readers she had addressed in 19121913 were fast becoming a new core audience of middle-class moving picture fans with women, even working women, increasingly de-linked from suffrage (after the failed vote of 1913) and more firmly aligned with consumption and domestication. That new audience signaled a corresponding shift in newspaper coverage, even throughout the ScrippsMcRae chain, which Price may have been either unwilling to accept or was at least slow to do so. There are several signs of such a shift in the Des Moines News. In March 1913, for instance, Price had described Essanays multi-talented Beverly Bayne as a clever horsewoman; by July 1914, the Beautiful, Graceful Beverly Bayne, Society Actress of the Movies, was the subject of a series of articles on proper feminine behaviour and appearance, assuming a role performed earlier by stage actresses such as Lillian Russell and Billie Burke.44 Then, too, although Hoffmann continued her predecessors practice of writing personality sketches, she wrote less frequently and focused on far less active female figures, such as Lillian Gish and Marguerite Courtot.45 Perhaps most tellingly, along with Baynes articles, Hoffmanns stories, unlike Prices, now

Beyond the moving picture expert

So, what can we make of all this ephemeral discursive material, these Pandora-like boxes of rarely examined microfilm? One tack would be to extend the detective story suggested in my opening. Who, indeed, was Gertrude Price? My own research, I have to admit, has produced little evidence beyond what is suggested in her writings. Nothing about what she did before her sudden appearance as a movie expert in November 1912, and nothing about what she did after her name vanished in early 1914, at least from the sources Ive been able to examine.38 Although her last signed story in the Des Moines News appeared in late February (and in other papers a month later), unsigned stories perhaps written by her continued to appear irregularly for several months. When, in late July, the News reintroduced a signed movie column, the syndicated writer, now called a picture play reporter, was named Esther Hoffmann.39 Recently, however, I have found that one reason for Prices prominence in the News may be that its dramatic editor and special feature writer, Sue McNamara, seemed to share her interest in personality sketches.40 Moreover, in researching early newspaper coverage of moving pictures in Los Angeles, Jan Olsson has turned up some pertinent information: the Los Angeles Record also announced Price as its movie expert beginning in late 1912 moreover, she actually was living in the area by 1913, according to a listing in the 1914 city directory.41 Although the Record continued to print movie-related articles by Price well into 1914, it was Hoffmann who became the papers movie expert that summer, as she did in other ScrippsMcRae papers. About that time, apparently, Price

Fan discourse in the heartland: the early 1910s consistently appeared on the News relatively new Society page For Women. Whatever interest Prices own story may generate, a far more important issue to address is how reading her syndicated column compels us to rethink our notions of cinemas emergence in the USA within a number of broader contexts. As Olsson, Paul Moore, and others (including myself) have argued, local newspapers remain a largely untapped source for research on early cinema, and Prices work is but one instance along with regular Sunday pages, daily exhibitor ads, weekly movie listings, and other discursive material of the mutually profitable relationship that quickly developed between moving pictures and newspapers in the early 1910s. Let me summarize a few of the ways this newspaper discourse can enhance our understanding of a range of cinema conditions and practices at the time.46 For instance, it allows one to pinpoint key moments of prosperity in exhibition (i.e. the block ads for up to fifty theatres in the St. Louis Times, from September 1909 through May 1910) and to map the spread of motion picture theatres into secondary shopping districts and neighborhood areas (in cities as different as Cleveland. Toledo and Des Moines). It reveals how resilient was the variety format of daily-changed programs, first established in the nickelodeon period, no matter whether the one- and two-reel films from General Film, Universal, or Mutual were supplemented by orchestral music, illustrated songs, or vaudeville acts. It shows that feature films first appeared not only in legitimate theatres but also in major downtown or even suburban motion picture theatres (i.e. the 1,200-seat Knickerbocker in Cleveland). It suggests that French crime thrillers became a staple for working-class audiences (largely male?) in cities such as Toledo and Youngstown, and for those segregated racially, as in Cleveland; yet they were not promoted in mill towns like Lawrence or Lowell, with significant middle-class French-Canadian populations. It also suggests how theatres sometimes catered to ethnic audiences, for political and social reasons: i.e. the Irish in Lynn (Massachusetts), the Polish or Italians in Pawtucket (Rhode Island), the Italians in Canton.47 Prices stories also suggest how keen an interest her readers in Des Moines (and elsewhere) had in the commodified figures of stars, and how their continual circulation could produce and sustain the desire to go to the movies. In short, Prices steady output assumed, supported, and arguably embod-

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ied an emerging fan culture in which the movie star or personality was the main attraction. One specific sign of that culture at the local level was the contest that five downtown theatres in Des Moines sponsored, in February 1913, asking News readers to name which stars appeared at which houses, using images repeated from Prices articles.48 Another was the stark difference between one kind of fictional tie-in, promoted long before she appeared in the News, and another, shortly thereafter.49 Which story in the Motion Picture Story Magazine is the best? a Family Theater ad had asked, in March 1911, announcing a contest with $250 in cash prizes.50 The inaugural issue of that magazine, printing the stories of selected MPPC or licensed films (illustrated with a few photos), had just been released in February, and moviegoers probably could purchase that or the new March issue at the theatre box office.51 By the summer of 1913, they could read a very different kind of fictional tie-in. For more than a month, the News ran a new short story every Saturday, with an illustration especially posed for this newspaper of Vitagraph stars Pauline Frederick and Earle Williams that,

Fig. 4. Name the Star contest, Des Moines News, 10 February 1913, p. 3.

146 especially for a target audience of women, explicitly linked reading and viewing.52 Sporting captions claiming that famed illustrator Harrison Fisher had called Frederick the most beautiful woman in America, these images now promoted a cheap version of mass magazine short fiction to News readers by exploiting the lure of the movies and, specifically, their stars. All of this newspaper discourse on American movie stars, however, may be most revealing about the fan culture then emerging in the early 1910s. Certainly Prices texts, their elaborated, punchy titles, and the images of all these female stars, in or out of westerns, could have appealed to men reading the News. One cannot ignore that. And those devoted to child stars could have targeted Daily News youngsters, encouraging them to go see the latest movie starring, for instance, The Thanhouser Kid.53 Yet they also invited the consent of mothers, in that they describe movie-making as a kind of family affair and promote movie-going as a safe, acceptable, as well as enjoyable experience. Indeed, a Mutual ad in newspapers such as the St. Paul Press, in November 1913, explicitly elicits such maternal consent.54 Moreover, at least one story about Adrienne Kroell toyed with the conventions of romance, addressing girls, girls, Des Moines girls howd you like to have the reputation of being the most engaged girl living?55 But, overall, the stories seem to target other kinds of women. Most of the movie stars Price promotes are described as athletic young women, carefree but committed to their work, frank and fearless in the face of physical danger; strikingly, nearly all are unattached, and without children. In short, they seem to have the freedom assumed as natural for young men. That natural freedom involved putting their bodies at risk in real-life physical stunts, as Jennifer Bean argues especially in westerns and other sensational melodramas risks that the trade press exploited, and sometimes exaggerated, as behindthe-scenes spectacle attraction.56 In June 1911, for instance, Film Index recounted the bloody injuries that Kathlyn Williams suffered as well as the nerve and grit she displayed in making Seligs Lost in the Jungle, when a leopard pounced on her head and shoulders full weight.57 Six months later, both the World and the Mirror reported that, despite breaking an ankle during the filming of a runaway stagecoach, in Essanays Broncho Billys Christmas Dinner, plucky Edna Fisher continued acting during three

Richard Abel subsequent scenes without revealing the extent of her injuries.58 In April 1912, Louis Reeves Harrison was forced to admit that Anna Little, in Bison-101s The Crisis, was a corking rider, full of vim in action, who sweeps on the screen like a whirlwind.59 Prices countless stories of young female daredevils simply extended and even celebrated this spectacle of thrilling threats to womens bodies, and several of the personalities she singled out Williams, Roland, Joyce would become even more renowned as serial queens or, in the case of Joyce, as a series queen.60 Although her analysis focuses on these later figures, Beans conclusion neatly fits Prices own subjects: they repeatedly experience the threat of accident and disaster, but, more importantly, [they] survive and, better yet, thrive on it.61 Constantly coping with catastrophe and performing spectacular feats, most of Prices movie stars turn the figure of the American New Woman into an exceptional subject of modernity.62 How desirable all this must have been for the young unmarried working women who formed a significant part of the core readership of Scripps-McRae newspapers and, thus, an emerging fan culture, perhaps especially those in white-collar or even professional jobs in the growing service industries of Des Moines and other cities. For them, the desire to go to the movies would have been double: not only did the film roles that women played function as projective sites of fantasy adventure for spectators that lashed reading/viewing/consuming into a pleasurable activity but, as a new kind of active, attractive worker or professional, the stars served as successful role models to emulate. And Price herself, whose newspaper work had an uncanny parallel to that of Mary Fuller in yet another Edison series, Dollie of the Dailies, would have served as a no less successful role model.63 Other women soon followed her pioneering lead as newspaper columnists, interviewers and reviewers: from Mae Tinee and Kitty Kelly (the names sound like pseudonyms, but at least one was not) at the Chicago Tribune, in March and July 1914, respectively, or Louella Parsons (a scenario editor in Essanays Chicago office) at the Chicago Herald, in December 1914, to cub reporter Dorothy Day, whose News of the Movies column first appeared in the Des Moines Tribune in the summer of 1915.64 That most of these women, whether movie stars or newspaper writers, arguably can be read as exemplary figures of the American New Woman takes on added significance in the light of reports beginning

Fan discourse in the heartland: the early 1910s to circulate by 1914 that the principal readers of all this moving picture news were women and girls.65 The political stance of the News as well as that of Price herself provides a further perspective on the continual parade of all these picture personalities. As a strong advocate of womens suffrage, another characteristic of Scripps-McRae papers, the News had printed stories about special screenings of suffragette films such as Votes for Women at the Unique Theater in June 1912.66 Furthermore, not only did it give front-page coverage to the famous suffragette march on Washington in early 1913, but Price apparently also joined the march to interview one of its leaders.67 In writing about actors such as Pauline Bush, then, the following admiring remark was hardly surprising: that, much like herself, she was an ardent suffraget.68 Indeed, Price acknowledged women in the industry as political figures, promoting the early 1914 election of several to public office in the newly incorporated Universal City near Los Angeles.69 Moreover, in one of her last signed stories, on 30 March 1914, she explicitly described the wonderful field which the moving picture has opened as a great new field for women folk from stars and lesser actors to writers and filmmakers where a womans originality ... her perseverance and her brains are coming to be recognized on the same plane as [a] mans.70 Within that wonderful field, they might explore what the new woman means, as feminist anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons put it in 1916 that is, the woman not yet classified, perhaps not classifiable, the woman new not only to men, but to herself.71 Consequently, in circulating (weekly and sometimes even daily for more than a year), a series of influential new women for female fans of the movies (perhaps especially what Film Index recently had dubbed photoplay matinee girls) Prices syndicated stories take on added salience for the ways they interconnect movies, working women of different classes, and the suffragette movement.72 Whatever the reasons for her disappearance, the effect of Prices work as a movie expert for the Scripps-McRae chain, and especially the Des Moines News, remains unusually significant. For News readers seem to have played a major role in the movie madness that, according to a local preacher, seized Des Moines in the early 1910s.73 Some of that madness was due, of course, to the citys motion picture theatre entrepreneurs and the new marketing strategies promoted by the industry and trade press. Yet they would not have succeeded

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without the emerging fan culture of moviegoers throughout the city, from skilled laborers and whitecollar workers to professionals, most of them likely women. And that fan culture seems to have been especially dependent, as it was elsewhere in cities with Scripps-McRae newspapers, at least for a while, on Prices sustained efforts to legitimize the movies and, in so doing, legitimize a range of womens work and experience. In short, the most lasting consequence of Prices personality sketches may have been the creation of bonds of pleasure, however shifting, between female movie stars and female movie fans.
This essay initially was written as a paper delivered at the Women and Silent Screen conference, sponsored by the University of California-Santa Cruz, in November 2001. A substantially rewritten and expanded version, based on further research, was delivered as the inaugural Robert Altman Collegiate Professorship Lecture at the University of Michigan, on 14 April 2004. That version again was revised and expanded in the summer of 2005. Thanks for insightful comments and suggested sources from Jennifer Bean, Giorgio Bertellini, Amelie Hastie, Barbara Hodgdon, Rob King, Terry McDonald, Jan Olsson and Gaylyn Studlar.

Fig. 5. Western Girl You Love in the Movies, Des Moines News, 11 February 1913), p. 3.

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Richard Abel

Notes
1. 2. The Movies, Des Moines News (11 November 1912), 2. These columns first appeared in the Youngstown Vindicator (3 September 1911), 17; and in the Canton News-Democrat (24 September 1911): 24. Richard Koszarski acknowledges that no one yet seriously has studied newspaper coverage of moving pictures in the 1910s see Koszarski, An Evenings Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 19151928 (New York: Scribners, 1990), 191. See, for instance, Photo-Plays and Players, Cleveland Leader (10 December 1911), S5. The editor was Ralph Stoddard, a former theatre manager in Sandusky, Ohio, and then a Leader reporter, who also edited one of the first daily newspaper pages devoted to real estate and building construction see Real Estate and Building News, Cleveland Leader (16 February 1913), M13; Meet Your Plain Dealer Men About Town: Ralph Stoddard, Cleveland Plain Dealer (21 February 1948) Clipping File, Cleveland Public Library. The Movies, Des Moines News (12 November 1912), 1; Many Dolors Clubs Named After This Beauty of the Movies, Des Moines News (12 November 1912), 8. A Wild Animal Sensation at the Star Theatre, Des Moines News (13 November 1912): 1; The Movies, Des Moines News (13 November 1912), 2; Gertrude Price, Alkali Ike and Broncho Bill Tear Things up Something Fierce, But The Old Sheriff Jerks Em Short With His Six-Shooter, Des Moines News (16 November 1912), 3; Gertrude Price, Nervy as Ever to Act the Most Daring Things Ever Seen on Stage! Heroine of Movies, Des Moines News (17 November 1912): 7; The Movies, Des Moines News (20 November 1912), 7. See, for instance, The Movie Man Taking Pictures of the Crowd in Front of the News on Thursday, Des Moines News (23 November 1912), 1; Gertrude Price, King Baggott Detests Sentimental Stuff; Longs To Be Regular Dyed-in-the-Wool Rip Roarin Jake, Des Moines News (7 December 1912), 2; Stars in Moving Pictures to be Shown at Presbyterian Church, Des Moines News (18 December 1912), 1; and Daily News Reporter Writes from Great California Studios Where They Make Your Wild West Pictures, Des Moines News (1 February 1913), 6. See, for instance, The Movies, Cleveland Press (11 November 1912), 1: 4; The Movies, Toledo NewsBee (11 November 1912), 1, 6; and The Movies, Detroit Times (16 December 1912), 5. In her research on Lois Weber at the Museum of Modern Art, Shelley Stamp found a clipping of Prices story on Weber from the New Orleans Statesman (dated September 8. 1913); the same story appeared almost simultaneously in the Des Moines News . Gerald Baldasty, E. W. Scripps and the Business of Newspapers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 1520. See also Alfred McClung Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America: The Evolution of a Social Instrument (New York: Macmillan, 1937), 213; and Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History, 16901960, (3rd edn.) (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 553. At one time or another, the Scripps-McRae League included the Cleveland Press, Akron Press, Toledo News-Bee, Columbus Citizen, Cincinnati Post, Kentucky Post, Detroit News, St. Louis Chronicle, Kansas City World and Des Moines News. Baldasty, 2122. In 1906, for instance, the United Press Association serviced more than 200 newspaper clients. I develop this point in That Most American of Attractions, the Illustrated Song, in Richard Abel and Rick Altman, eds., The Sounds of Early Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 147149. According to the trade press, in 1913 other syndicated services, perhaps emboldened by ScrippsMcRaes movie expert, may have begun supplying newspapers with material on moving pictures for special columns and/or pages. That spring, Arthur Leslies syndicated service (in New York), for instance, boasted of plans to furnish 60 newspapers, weekly, with roasts on films that already had appeared in the trade press see Jas. S. McQuade, Chicago Letter, Moving Picture World (19 April 1913), 265. Leslie later claimed that he had induced over a hundred of the more enterprising newspaper editors to allow him to inaugurate ... the first motion picture page, but his claim has yet to be verified and certainly ignores the Scripps-McRae precedent see the Arthur Leslie ad, New York Morning Telegraph (13 December 1914), 7. Later that same year, the Syndicate Publishing Company also placed an ad in Moving Picture News depicting its service funneling information to scores of papers, but that too remains to be documented see the Syndicated Publishing Co. ad, Moving Picture News (8 November 1913), 8. An exception could be made for the anonymous writers of the New York Morning Telegraph, which, by early 1912, had an entire section of the Sunday edition devoted to moving pictures, running six pages, that could be sold as a separate paper with a half-tone colored supplement see Robert Grau, The Theatre of Science (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1969), 251. Although the Telegraph boasted that its Sunday edition was read by 650,000 to 750,000 men and women throughout the country, its Motion Pictures and Photo Plays supplement targeted exhibi-

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Fan discourse in the heartland: the early 1910s

tors rather than movie-goers The Morning Telegraph and Motion Picture Enterprises, New York Morning Telegraph (5 March 1911), 4. 1, 4. 12. 13. 14. Baldasty, E.W. Scripps and the Business of Newspapers, 3, 102119. E.W. Scripps to Robert F. Paine, 26 February 1906 cited in Baldasty, 147. Quotation from Minutes of Conference Between E.W. Scripps, E.B. Scripps and George Putnam, 17 August 1902 cited in Baldasty, 104. The News was especially interested in the Socialist Partys political triumph in Milwaukee, Wisconsin see, for instance, Dorothy Dale, The Rule of the Socialists in Milwaukee and What They Are Doing, Des Moines News (21 July 1910), 4. R.F. Paine to W.D. Wasson, 27 January 1906 cited in Baldasty, 141. Baldasty, 143. See also, among the many studies of young women at the turn of the last century, sometimes in relation to new amusements, Margaret Gibbons Wilson, The American Woman in Transition: The Urban Influence, 18701920, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1979; Elyce Rotella, From Home to Office: U. S. Women at Work, 18701930, Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981; Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986; Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991; Lauren Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998; and Shelley Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture After the Nickelodeon, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. I myself take up the question of womens relation to early cinema in Abel, The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. John Brigham, History of Des Moines and Polk County, Iowa (Chicago: S. J. Clarke, 1911), 558. The population of Polk County, with Des Moines at its center, was 110,000. Des Moiness population had increased by nearly 40 per cent in the ten years before 1910, and it would increase even more in the following ten years. Supplement for Iowa, Thirteenth Census of the United States, with a Supplement for Iowa (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1913), 588, 620, 624. See also Des Moines: One of the Worlds Great Insurance Centers, Des Moines News (27 October 1910), 9. See, for instance, Des Moines Women Found in All Fields of Labor, Des Moines News (7 July 1907), 9; and Women Are Rapidly Taking the Jobs That Be21. long to Men, Des Moines News (6 October 1907), Sunday Supplement 3. Years later, the News was still promoting this special attention, but now with a featured Womens Page see the front-page ad in the Des Moines News (24 June 1914), 1. The Cleveland Leader called its Sunday page devoted to moving pictures, Photo-Plays and Players, and several times reported favorably on the continuing protest in the trade press against using movies because it harms the business Photo-Plays and Players, Cleveland Leader (10 December 1911), S5; Protest Against Use of Name, Movie, Cleveland Leader (20 October 1912), S5. See also Spectators Comments, New York Dramatic Mirror (15 May 1912), 25; and Epes Winthrop Sargent, Advertising for Exhibitors, Moving Picture World (31 August 1912), 872. For an excellent analysis of this nomenclature debate over moving pictures, see Gregory Waller, Photodramas and Photoplays, Stage and Screen, 19091915, in Leonardo Quaresima and Laura Vichi, eds., The Tenth Muse: Cinema and the Other Arts (Udine: Forums, 2001), 575585. Most explicitly in drama critic Walter Pritchard Eaton, The Menace of the Movies, American Magazine 86 (September 1913), 60. But see also J. Esenwein, J. Berg and A. Leeds, Writing the Photoplay: A Complete Manual of Instruction in the Nature, Writing and Marketing of the Moving-Picture Play, Springfield, Mass.: Home Correspondence School, 1913. The crucial study of this phenomenon is Richard deCordovas Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. But see also Abel, The Red Rooster Scare, 148150. A revealing account of the phenomenon, and concurrent with Prices writings, is Personality a Force in Pictures, New York Dramatic Mirror (15 January 1913), 44. See, for instance, Vitagraphs copyrighted image of Edith Storey in Price, Splendid Eyes in Her Pretty Head Help Movie Star, Des Moines News (21 January 1913), 2. Gertrude Price, King Baggott Detests Sentimental Stuff; Longs To Be Regular Dyed-in-the-Wool Rip Roarin Jake, Des Moines News (7 December 1912), 2; Gertrude Price, Mary Fuller? Why, Of Course, Youve Met Mary! And Such a Deep-Dyed Pessimist Is This Slip-of-a-Girl Who Likes Witches, Old People and Poor Folks Most, Des Moines News (28 December 1912), 4; Gertrude Price, Funniest, Fattest Man in the Movies Is John Bunny Who Plays Mr. Pickwick , Des Moines News (29 December 1912), 4; and The Airmans Hoodoo Is What Mabel of the Movies Calls Her Pretty Self, Des Moines News (4 March 1913), 7. See, for instance, Gertrude Price, Heres a Story for Kiddies; 10-Year Old Movie Star Draws $100 a Week,

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Des Moines News (30 December 1912), 1; Gertrude Price, Everybody Writes to Pretty Helen, Starlet of the Flying A, Des Moines News (23 February 1913), 4; Aunt Gertie, A Little Personality About a Great Big Man [Thomas Edison], Des Moines News (3 June 1913), 3; The Dustman, as Told by Aunt Gertie, Des Moines News (9 June 1913), 5; and The Little Mermaid, as Told by Aunt Gertie, Des Moines News (26 June 1913), 7. W. Stephen Bush later would pay a well-deserved tribute to child actors in a column that first appeared as The Screen Childrens Gallery, Moving Picture World (28 February 1914), 1066. Among the frequent references to women and children attending moving picture theaters, especially matinees, see Women and Children Get Picture Habit [Champaign, Illinois], New York Morning Telegraph (14 January 1912), 4.2, 1; and Nickels for Theatres vs. Nickels for Bread [Denver], New York Morning Telegraph (12 May 1912), 4.2. 2. As late as 1914, F. H. Richardson was contesting the notion that women and children were the principal audience for moving pictures, but he admitted that his evidence rested on downtown theatres in Chicago and New York and not the greater number in shopping districts and residential areas see Women and Children, Moving Picture World (21 February 1914), 962. 27. Movie Stars Who Play Leads in Western Dramas at Unique Theater, Des Moines News (12 December 1912), 7; and The Great Spirit Took Mona, But In This Girl She Still Lives, Des Moines News (6 February 1913), 12. See also the article on Louise Lester and her Flying A western series: Everyone Is for Busy Ann, Calamity Ann You Know! Des Moines News (29 April 1913), 10. Runs, Rides, Rows, Des Moines News (16 April 1913), 6. In Youngstown, Bullets Anderson was so popular that, from the fall of 1911 through early 1912, one downtown theater could use his name and photo to promote Essanay westerns as headliners on its Sunday programs; the same thing happened slightly later at a downtown theatre in Canton. See, for instance, J. Max Anderson, Youngstown Vindicator (15 October 1911), 14; the Princess ads, Youngstown Vindicator (22 October 1911), 17 and (17 December 1911), 24; the Orpheum ad, Canton News-Democrat (28 April 1912), 14; and Orpheum Theater, Canton News-Democrat (9 June 1912), 12. Throughout the winter and spring of 1913, however, according to the Des Moines News movie listings, the downtown Unique Theatre had exclusive showings of Kay-Bee and Brocnho westerms on Friday nights. Early in 1912, American chose the News as one of fifty dailies across the country in which to publish Flying A stories so that people would subsequently want to see them. Although only three 38. 35. 36.

Richard Abel
stories ever appeared, they suggest that Flying A films circulated and may have been popular in Des Moines, despite the fact that no theatre ever advertised them. See the American Film ad in Moving Picture World (16 March 1912), 980981; and the first story, The Grub Stake Mortgage A Moving Picture Short Story of Western Life, Des Moines News (17 January 1912), 10. 32. See, for instance, Here They Are! Snapshots from Wounded Knee, Where Our Movie Experts Are, Des Moines News (23 October 1913), 4; and Price, Indian Braves Adopt Heap Big Movie Man and Call Him Wanbli Wiscasa, Des Moines News (2 November 1913), 4. For information in the trade press on this films production, see Charles J. Ver Halen, Bringing the Old West Back, Moving Picture News (22 November 1913), 1920. James McQuade, Chicago Letter, Moving Picture World (7 February 1914), 660 and (14 March 1914), 13881389; and Buffalo Bill Picture Shown, Moving Picture World (14 March 1914), 1370. For a good discussion of this films production, distribution and exhibition, as well as its difference from Codys previous enterprises, see Joy S. Kasson, Buffalo Bills Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (New York: Hill & Wang, 2000), 257263. Price, Billie Unafraid, 7; Gertrude Price, Stunning Mary Pickford Only 19 Now! Quits $10,000 Movies Career to Shake Her Golden Locks as a Belasco Star, Des Moines News (9 January 1913), 7; Movie Queen Is Alice Joyce, Des Moines News (1 March 1913), 1; and Live With Flowers and Grow Beautiful, Says Girl, Des Moines News (29 November 1913), 5. Pauline Bush was only the second movie star, after Pickford, to appear on the cover of the New York Dramatic Mirror, on 2 October 1912. Price, Movie Beauty Risks Life to Put Thrill in the Pictures, Des Moines News (7 February 1913), 1. See, for instance, Daring Girl Rider Coming, Des Moines News (27 July 1912), 3; and Summer Amusements, Des Moines News (28 July 1912), 12. The cowgirls of the 101 Ranch Wild West show also were linked with the suffrage movement see Girls With Wild West Show to Help Women Gain Equal Suffrage, Toledo Blade (17 August 1912), 7. Gertrude Price, Charming Little Woman Runs Movie Business By Herself, and Makes Big Success, Des Moines News (9 February 1913), 2; Lucky Thirteen Word Proves to be a New Money Making Position, Des Moines News (15 May 1913), 8; and Gertrude Price, Sad Endings Are All Right, Says This Woman Director, Des Moines News (27 September 1913), 5. One source I have yet to consult the huge volume of business letters in the E. W. Scripps Correspondence Collection, Alden Library, Ohio University

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Fan discourse in the heartland: the early 1910s

could provide information on Prices career before November 1912 and after February 1914 as well as clarify her position as a syndicated writer for Scripps papers. 39. Esther Hoffmann, Drowning Is Pleasant! , Des Moines News (25 July 1914), 1. Not until a year later did a local cub reporter named Dorothy Day begin writing about the movies for the rival evening newspaper, the Tribune. Her column, News of the Movies, first appeared in the Des Moines Tribune (12 August 1915), 4, and Day finally began signing the column in the Des Moines Tribune (23 February 1916), 4, 5. At that time, the column became a permanent part of the daily theatrical page. Days real name was Dorothy Gottlieb, and she went on to head the public relations department for A. H. Blanks circuit of cinemas in the 1920s and for Central States Theater Corporation from 1933 to 1950 see Variety Obituaries 6, 19641968 (New York: Garland, 1988), n. p. A.C. Hasselbarth, Women Writers of American Press, Editor and Publisher and Journalist (6 December 1913), 476. E-mail communication from Jan Olsson, 24 March 2002. See, for instance, the series of articles, Women Writers of American Press, written by A.C. Hasselbarth for Editor and Publisher and Journalist, between October 1913 and at least December 1914. Although never a fan, W. Stephen Bush did admit that, in the early 1910s, the Western, too, was thought to be the foundation and hope of the motion picture. It came to its destined end where the freak feature will shortly follow it. See Bush, No Lowering of Standards, Moving Picture World (24 January 1914), 389. See also an article on the U. S. Consul reports in England, claiming that cowboy and Indian pictures no longer were popular in Europe Valuable Consular Reports, Moving Picture World (9 May 1914), 811. The Beverly Bayne series was announced in Every Movie Fan Knows This Face, Des Moines News (10 July 1914), 1. See also Idah MGlone Gibson, Would You Have a Pleasing Personality? Beverly Bayne, Movie Star, Will Tell You How in the Daily News, Des Moines News (10 July 1914), 5; and Dont Attempt the Venus Slouch Unless You Have the Proper Lines Says Beverly Bayne, Des Moines News (11 July 1914), 5. For contrast, see Prices unsigned story on Bayne, Movie Girl in Social Whirl Is Artist-Horsewoman-Wit, Des Moines News (8 April 1913), 4. See, for instance, Esther Hoffmann, Shyest Man in the Movies, Des Moines News (23 July 1914), 2; Little Mary Has Corner on Pet Names, Des Moines News (22 August 1914), 4; Most Beautiful Blond in World in Movieland, Des Moines News (9 September 1914), 5; The Little Movie Star is Good Friend of 47. Princess of Portugal, Des Moines News (9 September 1914), 5; and The Girl With the Curl Shes Most Winsome Miss of the Movies, Des Moines News (23 September 1914), 5. Hoffmans stories soon began to appear under the title, Whos Who on the Films see the Des Moines News (19 October 1914), 7. 46. See, for instance, Jan Olsson, Pressing inroads: metaspectators and the nickelodeon culture, in John Fullerton, ed., Screen Culture: History and Textuality (Eastleigh: John Libbey, 2004), 113135, and Paul Moore, Everybodys Going: City Newspapers and the Early Mass Market for Movies, City & Community 4.4 (December 2005), 339357. For a more thorough summary of my own early research, see Richard Abel, A Marriage of Ephemeral Discourses: Newspapers and Moving Pictures, 19101914, Cinma et cie 1 (Fall 2001): 5983. Any attempt to reconstruct patterns of exhibition and reception from newspapers (as with any kind of surviving discursive material) always has to confront historiographical questions of veracity, responsibility and relevance see, for instance, Donald Crafton, The Jazz Singers Reception in the Media and at the Box Office, in David Bordwell and Nol Carroll, eds., Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 461463. Kathryn Oberdeck offers a model for analysing how one vaudeville manager negotiated among different ethnic audiences in New Haven, Connecticut, in Mr. Poli is the Big Chief!: The Theatrical Manager, His Audiences, and the Vaudeville Industry, The Evangelist and the Impresario: Religion, Entertainment, and Cultural Politics in America, 18841914 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 179213. Although focused on New York, Giorgio Bertellini offers another model in Italian Imageries, Historical Feature Films and the Fabrication of Italys Spectators in Early 1900s New York, in Stokes and Maltby, American Movie Audiences, 2945. See the large ad announcing the contest, Des Moines News (10 February 1913), 3; and the equally large ad announcing the winners, Des Moines News (17 February 1913), 7. Later the News also ran a weeklong series of portraits or caricatures of several stars, beginning with John Bunny Whos Who In The Movies Caricatured by Higgins, Des Moines News (12 October 1913), 12. For further information on fiction tie-ins, especially in relation to the later serials, see Singer, Melodrama and Modernity, 269287. Family Theater ad, Des Moines News (8 March 1911), 13. Kathryn Fuller, At the Picture Show: Small-Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), 136. Fullers remark comes in the context of a valuable

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history of the development of movie fan magazines in the 1910s. 52. 53. See, for instance, Our Saturday Short Story, Des Moines News (9 August 1913), 6. Gertrude Price, Heres a Story for Kiddies; 10-Year Old Movie Star Draws $100 a Week, Des Moines News (30 December 1912), 1. See the Mutual Movies ad, St. Paul News (29 November 1913), 8. Most Engaged Girl In All America Is Miss Adrienne Kroell; Shes Proposed to Nearly Every Day And By a Different Man! Des Moines News (14 November 1912), 12. Jennifer Bean argues that one of the industrys more successful ploys during this period was to shift [public] attention along the axis of production from the mechanical base and financial backers of film to the people who enacted real-life situations, giving a name and a face to spectacle Bean, Technologies of Early Stardom and the Extraordinary Body, camera obscura 48 (2001), 18. This essay is reprinted, with slight revisions, under the same title in Jennifer Bean and Diane Negra, eds., A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 404443. James M. McQuade, Photoplayer Who Flirts With Fate, Film Index (3 June 1911), 11. See also Trip in Hydroplane Climax of Thrills for Kathlyn Williams, New York Morning Telegraph (6 October 1912), 4.2: 2. Later stories on the filming of Seligs The Adventures of Kathlyn often celebrated Williams courage in working with wild animals see Lions Cant Scare This Young Lady, New York Morning Telegraph (21 December 1913), 5: 1. Serious Mishap of Picture Actress, Moving Picture World (9 December 1911), 823; Essanay Leading Woman a Real Heroine, Moving Picture World (16 December 1911), 894; and Heroic Edna Fisher, New York Dramatic Mirror (20 December 1911), 29. Louis Reeves Harrison, The Bison-101 Headliners, Moving Picture World (27 April 1912), 321. Kalem titled its 1915 film series with Joyce simply The Alice Joyce Series. Bean, Technologies of Early Stardom, 34. For especially relevant studies of the cultural figure of the New Woman, see Lois Rudnick, The New Woman, in Adele Heller and Lois Rudnick, eds., 1915: The Cultural Moment (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 6981; Glenn, Introduction, Female Spectacle, 18; and Singer, Melodrama and Modernity, 241253. Glenn makes the case for an earlier parallel development in the theater by focusing on figures such as Bernhardt, Eva Tanguey and Marie Dressler: By opening a space for female performers to become both spectacles and person65. 64.

Richard Abel
alities, the popular theater promoted the development of the first self-consciously modern expression of new womanhood see Glenn, Female Spectacle, 7. The crucial distinction with female movie performers was their engagement in action, thrills and danger. 63. See the Edison ad, New York Morning Telegraph (25 January 1914), 5: 2; and Important Films of the Week, New York Morning Telegraph (1 February 1914), 5: 5. See, for instance, Mae Tinee, Zip!-Zam!-Zowie! Thats How They Stage a Movie, Chicago Tribune (22 March 1914), 5:45; Mae Tinee, Answers to Movie Fans, Chicago Tribune (31 May 1914), 5:3; Kitty Kelly, Photoplay Stories and News, Chicago Tribune (8 July 1914), 11; and Louella O. Parsons, How to Write Photoplays, Chicago Herald (13 December 1914), 6: 8. See also Edwin M. La Roche, A New Profession for Women, Motion Picture Story Magazine (May 1914), 8485. Mae Tinee was actually Frances Peck, a friend of Louella Parsons see Samantha Barbas, The First Lady of Hollywood: A Biography of Louella Parsons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 205), 54. Both Tinee and Kelly were among the Tribunes staff of more than 50 highlighted in All These People Will Write and Draw For You All This Year! Chicago Tribune (3 January 1915), 8:3. In fact, Mae Tinee was featured as the weeks movie star in The Frame of Public Favor, Chicago Tribune (3 January 1915), 8:7. News of the Movies first appeared in the Des Moines Tribune (12 August 1915), 4, and Day finally began signing the column in the Tribune (23 February 1916, 4, 5) it was then that the column became a permanent part of the daily theatrical page. Days real name was Dorothy Gottlieb, and she went on to head the public relations department for A.H. Blanks circuit of cinemas in the 1920s and for Central States Theater Corporation from 1933 to 1950 see Variety Obituaries 6, 19641968 (New York: Garland, 1988), n. p. This was the case specifically with the Washington Star, which was printing the programs of a large number of motion picture theatres in its amusement columns almost daily Exhibitors News, Moving Picture World (13 June 1914), 1574. By then, of course, most companies had publicity departments that aimed to ease the work of all these columnists and reviewers: in the summer of 1914, for instance, Mutual claimed to be shipping a weekly news sheet for 6,000 editors of daily and weekly newspapers to clip from, and a cut and matrix service to go with it Philip Mindil, Publicity for the Pictures, Moving Picture World (11 July 1914), 217. See also F. J. Beecroft, Publicity Men I Have Met, New York Dramatic Mirror (14 January 1914), 48. See Suffragettes See Parade Picture, Des Moines News (25 June 1912), 5; and Votes For Women in

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Picture Play, Des Moines News (27 June 1912), 5. For more information on and an analysis of Votes For Women, see Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls, 175179. The Cleveland Leader also was a strong advocate of womens suffrage; moreover, it often heralded the new woman in articles on athletic figures, such as A Modern Race of Amazons, Cleveland Leader (6 August 191), C1; in full-page ads for the Ohio Woman Suffrage Party, such as Her Job, Cleveland Leader (1 September 1912), M4; and in stories such as The Stick-Up Girl: A True Story of an Uncaught Outlaw, Cleveland Leader (16 March 1913), Feature Section, 1. 67. Gertrude Price, A Day With General Jones and Her Army of Hikers on Their Way to the Capitol, Des Moines News (23 February 1913), 3. Western Girl You Love in the Movies is a Sure Enough Suffrager, Des Moines News (11 February 1913), 3. The cowgirls of the 101 Ranch Wild West show also were linked with the suffrage movement see Girls With Wild West Show to Help Women Gain Equal Suffrage, Toledo Blade (17 August 1912), 7. Gertrude Price, Only Movie Players Live in this Town, Toledo News-Bee (6 January 1914), 13. Gertrude Price, Sees the Movies as Great New Field for Women Folk, Toledo News-Bee (30 March 1914), 14. The article includes a head shot of Price herself, as one of those women folk. Only a month later did Motion Picture Story Magazine publish a long article on professional women working as scenario editors in the industry, including Marguerite Bertsch (Vitagraph), Louella Parsons (Essanay, Chicago), Josephine Rector (Essanay, Niles), and several graduates of Beta Breuils scenario class at Vitagraph Edwin M. La Roche, A New Profession for Women, Motion Picture Story Magazine (May 1914), 8388. 71. Parsons is quoted in Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 172. I take the quoted citation from Glenn, Female Spectacle, 5. The Photoplay Matinee Girl, Film Index (3 June 1911), 11. The secretary of the citys inter-church council had used the phrase in explaining a lack of attendance at Sunday night services Des Moines is Going Movie Mad Says The Rev. J. W. Graves, Des Moines News (2 November 1913), 8. Another sign of movie madness was the series of Adolf and Osgar cartoons that ran for several weeks in the News, from A Movie Actor Must Take All Kinds of Risks to Produce a Thriller, Des Moines News (28 April 1913), 6, to Osgar Pirates the Death Scene in Queen Elizabeth, Des Moines News (14 May 1913), 6.

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Abstract: Fan discourse in the heartland: the early 1910s, by Richard Abel
Through extensive research into local newspapers throughout the United States in the early teens, the author chronicles the work of little-known columnist Gertrude Price, demonstrating how she crafted an appeal to female movie fans while highlighting the powerful roles played by women in the early industry.