Fan discourse in the

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Richard Abel

Afew years ago, I was scanningmicrofilm of the

Des Moines News, looking for information in

ads and articles on motion picture exhibition

in the early 1910s. One of those ‘guilty pleas-

ures’ to which cinema historians only rarely admit.

Suddenly in the 11 November 1912 issue, something

unexpected popped up. There was this boldly ban-

nered 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,mostpopularamusement in theworld’.1Sure

enough, the News began running Price’s 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 north-

eastern 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 sig-

nificance could her long forgotten newspaper stories

have?

Gertrude Price and the Des MoinesNews, 1912–1914

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-

trated story on Dolores Cassinelli (a popular actor for

Essanay, a Chicago studio) as well as another ban-

ner story about the movie business in Des Moines,

claiming the city’s 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 north-

ern suburb] to the rich manwho stops his automobile

in front of the show in University Place’ [two blocks

frommy former office at Drake University].4 Through-

out 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 Essanay’s Francis X. Bushman, Broncho

Billy and Alkali Ike, and Selig’s ‘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,

Film History, Volume 18, pp. 140–153, 2006. Copyright © John Libbey PublishingISSN: 0892-2160. Printed in United States of America

Richard Abel is Robert Altman Collegiate Professorof Film Studies and Chair of the Screen Arts & CulturesDepartment at the University of Michigan. His mostrecent books are The Red Rooster Scare: MakingCinema American, 1900–1910 (California 1999) andImaginingCommunity inUSCinema, 1910–1914 (forth-coming California). He co-edited, with Rick Altman,The Sounds of Early Cinema (Indiana 2001) and servedas general editor for the Encyclopedia of Early Cinema(Routledge 2005).Contact: richabel@umich.edu

Price was described as writing from the ‘great Cali-

fornia studios where they make your wild west pic-

tures’.6 As this disjunction persisted, well into 1914,

it became less and less likely that the Des Moines

News, alone among the country’s 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 unex-

pectedly, came from subsequent research I was

doing at the US Library of Congress, the Toledo

Public Library, the Minnesota Historical Society Li-

brary, and, most recently, the State Library of Michi-

gan. Price’s initial articles, I discovered, also

appeared at the same time in several other newspa-

pers: the Toledo News-Bee, Cleveland Press, Pitts-

burgh Press, Detroit Times, St. Paul Daily News and,

based on clippings that Shelley Stamp has found

researching Lois Weber, the New Orleans States-

man.7 The placement of stories may have differed –

what appeared on one page of theDesMoines 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

Price’s stories were syndicated and probably distrib-

uted 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 hun-

dreds of other client papers as well9 In short, Price’s

stories, much like the movies themselves or the illus-

trated songs that often complemented them, circu-

lated 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 syn-

dicated 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 Price’s 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 Baldesty’s recent study of publisher

E.W. Scripps provides a valuable context for this

research by suggesting that, given the readership of

the Scripps-McRae League papers, Price’s work

may have targeted a particular audience. In contrast

to Joseph Pulitzer andWilliam 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 him-

self (sounding a bit like Charles Foster Kane) de-

scribed 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 peo-

ple’, promising to act as the ‘organ, mouthpiece, the

apologist, the defender and the advocate of the

wage earning class’.14 This pledge extended to giv-

ing substantial coverage to labour issues and

strongly supporting organized labour.15 Like many

Fig. 1. GertrudePrice, ‘Sees theMovies as GreatNew Field forWomen Folk’,

Toledo

News-Bee, 30March 1914, p.14.

Fan discourse in the heartland: the early 1910s 141

others, the Scripps papers also paid particular atten-

tion 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 stenog-

raphers (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

seems to have been the principal audience for mo-

tion pictures in Des Moines in the early 1910s. From

the fall of 1911 on, for instance, several picture thea-

tres began to place ads on a regular basis in the

evening News rather than in its rivals, the jointly-

owned, more business-oriented morning Register

and Leader and evening Tribune. And it was there too

that, complementing Price’s stories, weekly movie

listings and reviews first began to appear one year

later. Only in February 1913 did theRegister 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 Play-

houses’, 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 oth-

ers, 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 public-

ity photos (sometimes copyrighted by the film com-

panies).24 Early examples include figures as different

as King Baggott, Maurice Costello and comedian

John Bunny or Mary Fuller, Edith Storey and come-

dienneMabel Normand.25 At first the stars or person-

alities 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 ‘FlyingA’, Solax, Keystone, Kay-Bee and

101-Bison (after its acquisition by Universal) – as well

as others from Pathé 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

Selig’s ‘wild animal pictures’ to Judson Melford, a

‘natural ... clever picture-player’ who just happened

to be the young son of one of Kalem’s chief filmmak-

ers. In fact, not only did Price writemore than a dozen

stories on child actors in the movies, but she also

Fig. 2. ‘TheGreat American

Home’, DesMoines News, 3

June 1913, p. 1.

142 Richard Abel

seems to have signed several pieces as ‘Aunt Ger-

tie’, 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 chil-

dren, from ‘SnowWhite’ to ‘The LittleMermaid’.26And

she even contributed a story on five-year-old Prin-

cess Ileana of Roumania, in which children in Des

Moines (and other cities) could imagine a real prin-

cess sitting right beside them in a movie theatre.

Another pattern, however, is even more promi-

nent. 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 (Ka-

lem), or Jack Richardson and Pauline Garfield Bush

(American) decked out in cowboy hats and others

likeMonaDarkfeather (Universal) or RedWing (Pathé

American) in full Indian costume.27 Price’s texts also

underscore that emphasis, as in her description of

Kalem’s 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. Essanay’s G. M. Anderson, for in-

stance, 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 multiple-

reel 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 Price’s many sto-

ries suggest, however, especially coming after sev-

eral ‘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 audi-

ence for westerns in the city.31 In late 1913, she even

wrote an exclusive series of nine stories on location

about Buffalo Bill Cody’s epic re-enactment of sev-

eral battles in the Indian wars of 1876 to 1891, pro-

duced 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 arti-

cles, at least two thirds of the total by my count,

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 atten-

tion.34 Among them were ‘regal-looking Miriam Nes-

bitt’ 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 ap-

peared prominently on the newspaper’s front page.35

And Jessylyn Von Trump, ‘a capital rider’ at Ameri-

can, 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 Vitagraph’s western

unit. And ‘dainty, daring’ Clara Williams, Lubin’s

‘leading lady’, ‘who can beat the boys at anything on

a horse’. And Leona Hutton, who finds that ‘being

Fig. 3. GertrudePrice, ‘MovieBeauty RisksLife’, Des Moines

News, 7 February1913, p. 1.

Fan discourse in the heartland: the early 1910s 143

“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 horese-

women and fearless ‘daredevils’, often seen in west-

erns and other adventure films. In fact, some are not

unlike the champion cowgirl riders and sharpshoot-

ers, such as Bessie Herberg and Lucile Parr, promi-

nently promoted in performances of the 101 Ranch

Wild West that toured the country to great acclaim at

the time.36Moreover, all of these women are comple-

mented by others who had become successful film-

makers or scenario writers in the industry: Alice Guy

Blaché at Solax, Nell Shipman and Lois Weber at

Rex.37

Beyond the ‘moving picture expert’

So, what can we make of all this ephemeral discur-

sive material, these Pandora-like boxes of rarely ex-

amined microfilm? One tack would be to extend the

detective story suggested in my opening. Who, in-

deed, was Gertrude Price?

My own research, I have to admit, has pro-

duced 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 I’ve

been able to examine.38 Although her last signed

story in the Des Moines News appeared in late Feb-

ruary (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 syn-

dicated writer, now called a ‘picture play reporter’,

was named Esther Hoffmann.39 Recently, however, I

have found that one reason for Price’s 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 More-

over, in researching early newspaper coverage of

moving pictures in Los Angeles, Jan Olsson has

turned up some pertinent information: the Los Ange-

les 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 paper’s ‘movie

expert’ that summer, as she did in other Scripps-

McRae papers. About that time, apparently, Price

seems to have accepted a more permanent position

at theRecord, for she gradually took on other respon-

sibilities, according to Olsson, most notably serving

as editor of the paper’s ‘Women’s 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 In-

deed, she remained a member of the Record’s 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 that’s hardly certain.

She may well have used her ‘movie reporting’ as a

means to make her way as a professional newspa-

perwoman, but she also may have lost interest in the

new amusement industry. Although her own writings

offer some support for either conclusion, more im-

portantly 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 per-

sistent fascination for westerns, especially one- and

two-reelers, or with relatively minor stars, also in one-

and two-reelers, could have seemed ‘outdated’ by

1914.43 For another, the readers she had addressed

in 1912–1913 were fast becoming a new core audi-

ence of middle-class moving picture fans – with

women, evenworking 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 Scripps-

McRae 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 Essanay’s multi-talented Beverly Bayne

as a ‘clever horsewoman’; by July 1914, the ‘Beauti-

ful, Graceful Beverly Bayne, Society Actress of the

Movies’, was the subject of a series of articles on

proper feminine behaviour and appearance, assum-

ing a role performed earlier by stage actresses such

as Lillian Russell and Billie Burke.44 Then, too, al-

thoughHoffmann continued her predecessor’s prac-

tice of writing ‘personality sketches’, she wrote less

frequently and focused on far less active female

figures, such as Lillian Gish and Marguerite Cour-

tot.45 Perhaps most tellingly, along with Bayne’s arti-

cles, Hoffmann’s stories, unlike Price’s, now

144 Richard Abel

consistently appeared on the News’ relatively new

‘Society’ page ‘For Women’.

Whatever interest Price’s own story may gen-

erate, a far more important issue to address is how

reading her syndicated column compels us to rethink

our notions of cinema’s 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 Price’s work is but

one instance – along with regular Sunday pages,

daily exhibitor ads, weekly movie listings, and other

discursive material – of the mutually profitable rela-

tionship that quickly developed betweenmoving pic-

tures and newspapers in the early 1910s. Let me

summarize a few of the ways this newspaper dis-

course 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 differ-

ent as Cleveland. Toledo and Des Moines). It reveals

how resilient was the variety format of daily-changed

programs, first established in the nickelodeon pe-

riod, no matter whether the one- and two-reel films

from General Film, Universal, or Mutual were supple-

mented by orchestral music, illustrated songs, or

vaudeville acts. It shows that feature films first ap-

peared not only in legitimate theatres but also in

major downtown or even suburban motion picture

theatres (i.e. the 1,200-seat Knickerbocker in Cleve-

land). 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-Cana-

dian populations. It also suggests how theatres

sometimes catered to ethnic audiences, for political

and social reasons: i.e. the Irish in Lynn (Massachu-

setts), the Polish or Italians in Pawtucket (Rhode

Island), the Italians in Canton.47

Price’s stories also suggest how keen an inter-

est 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, Price’s steady

output assumed, supported, and arguably embod-

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 spon-

sored, in February 1913, asking News’ readers to

name which stars appeared at which houses, using

images repeated from Price’s 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, an-

nouncing 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 sum-

mer 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 theStar contest, DesMoines News, 10February 1913,p. 3.

Fan discourse in the heartland: the early 1910s 145

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 Amer-

ica’, 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 Price’s 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 young-

sters’, 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

describemovie-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 suchmaternal consent.54More-

over, at least one story about Adrienne Kroell toyed

with the conventions of romance, addressing ‘girls,

girls, Des Moines girls – how’d 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 unat-

tached, 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 sen-

sational melodramas – risks that the trade press

exploited, and sometimes exaggerated, as behind-

the-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 Selig’s 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 Essanay’s Broncho Billy’s Christmas Dinner,

plucky Edna Fisher ‘continued acting during three

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-101’s

The Crisis, was ‘a corking rider, full of vim in action’,

who ‘sweeps on the screen like a whirlwind’.59 Price’s

countless stories of young female ‘daredevils’ simply

extended and even celebrated this spectacle of thrill-

ing threats to women’s 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, Bean’s conclusion neatly fits Price’s

own subjects: they repeatedly experience the threat

of accident and disaster, ‘but, more importantly,

[they] survive and, better yet, thrive on it’.61 Con-

stantly coping with catastrophe and performing

spectacular feats, most of Price’s 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 sig-

nificant part of the core readership of Scripps-McRae

newspapers and, thus, an emerging fan culture, per-

haps especially those in white-collar or even profes-

sional 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 projec-

tive sites of fantasy adventure for spectators – that

lashed reading/viewing/consuming into a pleasur-

able activity – but, as a new kind of active, attractive

worker or professional, the stars served as success-

ful 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 pio-

neering 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

Essanay’s 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 news-

paper writers, arguably can be read as exemplary

figures of the American ‘New Woman’ takes on

added significance in the light of reports beginning

146 Richard Abel

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 women’s suffrage, another

characteristic of Scripps-McRae papers, the News

had printed stories about special screenings of suf-

fragette 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 appar-

ently 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

woman’s ‘originality ... her perseverance and her

brains are coming to be recognized on the same

plane as [a] man’s’.70 Within that ‘wonderful field’,

they might explore what ‘the new womanmeans’, 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’.71Consequently, 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’) Price’s syndi-

cated stories take on added salience for the ways

they interconnect movies, working women of differ-

ent classes, and the suffragette movement.72

Whatever the reasons for her ‘disappearance’,

the effect of Price’s 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

city’s motion picture theatre entrepreneurs and the

new marketing strategies promoted by the industry

and trade press. Yet they would not have succeeded

without the emerging fan culture of moviegoers

throughout the city, from skilled laborers and white-

collar 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 Price’s sustained efforts to legitimize the movies

and, in so doing, legitimize a range of women’s work

and experience. In short, the most lasting conse-

quence of Price’s ‘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 atthe Women and Silent Screen conference, sponsoredby the University of California-Santa Cruz, in November2001. A substantially rewritten and expanded version,based on further research, was delivered as the inaugu-ral Robert Altman Collegiate Professorship Lecture atthe University ofMichigan, on 14April 2004. That versionagain was revised and expanded in the summer of 2005.Thanks for insightful comments and suggested sourcesfrom Jennifer Bean, Giorgio Bertellini, Amelie Hastie,Barbara Hodgdon, Rob King, Terry McDonald, JanOlsson and Gaylyn Studlar.

Fig. 5. ‘WesternGirl You Love inthe Movies’, DesMoines News, 11February 1913),p. 3.

Fan discourse in the heartland: the early 1910s 147

1. ‘The Movies’, Des Moines News (11 November

1912), 2.

2. These columns first appeared in the Youngstown

Vindicator (3 September 1911), 17; and in theCanton

News-Democrat (24 September 1911): 24. Richard

Koszarski acknowledges that no one yet seriously

has studied newspaper coverage ofmovingpictures

in the 1910s – see Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertain-

ment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture,

1915–1928 (New York: Scribner’s, 1990), 191.

3. See, for instance, ‘Photo-Plays and Players’, Cleve-

land Leader (10 December 1911), S5. The editor was

Ralph Stoddard, a former theatre manager in San-

dusky, Ohio, and then a Leader reporter, who also

editedoneof the first dailynewspaperpagesdevoted

to real estate and building construction – see ‘Real

Estate and Building News’, Cleveland Leader (16

February 1913), M13; ‘Meet Your Plain Dealer Men

AboutTown:RalphStoddard’,ClevelandPlainDealer

(21 February 1948) – Clipping File, Cleveland Public

Library.

4. ‘The Movies’, Des Moines News (12 November

1912), 1; ‘Many “Dolor’s Clubs” Named After This

Beauty of theMovies’,DesMoinesNews (12 Novem-

ber 1912), 8.

5. ‘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 Novem-

ber 1912): 7; ‘The Movies’, Des Moines News (20

November 1912), 7.

6. 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 inMovingPictures tobeShownatPresbyterian

Church’, Des Moines News (18 December 1912), 1;

and ‘Daily News Reporter Writes from Great Califor-

nia Studios Where They Make Your Wild West Pic-

tures’, Des Moines News (1 February 1913), 6.

7. See, for instance, ‘The Movies’, Cleveland Press (11

November 1912), 1: 4; ‘The Movies’, Toledo News-

Bee (11 November 1912), 1, 6; and ‘The Movies’,

Detroit Times (16 December 1912), 5. In her research

on Lois Weber at theMuseum of Modern Art, Shelley

Stamp found a clipping of Price’s story on Weber

from the New Orleans Statesman (dated September

1913); the same story appeared almost simultane-

ously in the Des Moines News.

8. Gerald Baldasty, E. W. Scripps and the Business of

Newspapers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,

1999), 15–20.SeealsoAlfredMcClungLee,TheDaily

Newspaper in America: The Evolution of a Social

Instrument (New York: Macmillan, 1937), 213; and

Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History,

1690–1960, (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 Chron-

icle, Kansas City World and Des Moines News.

9. Baldasty, 21–22. In 1906, for instance, the United

Press Association serviced more than 200 newspa-

per clients.

10. I develop this point in ‘That Most American of Attrac-

tions, the Illustrated Song’, in Richard Abel and Rick

Altman, eds., The Sounds of Early Cinema (Bloom-

ington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 147–149.

11. According to the trade press, in 1913 other syndi-

cated services, perhaps emboldened by Scripps-

McRae’s ‘movie expert’, may have begun supplying

newspapers with material on moving pictures for

special columns and/or pages. That spring, Arthur

Leslie’s syndicated service (in New York), for in-

stance, boasted of plans to furnish ‘60 newspapers,

weekly, with “roasts” on films’ that already had ap-

peared 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 theScripps-McRaeprecedent –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

inMovingPictureNewsdepicting itsservice 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 editionwas read by ‘650,000 to 750,000men

and women’ throughout the country, its ‘Motion Pic-

tures and Photo Plays’ supplement targeted exhibi-

Notes

148 Richard Abel

tors rather than movie-goers – ‘The Morning Tele-

graph and Motion Picture Enterprises’, New York

Morning Telegraph (5 March 1911), 4. 1, 4.

12. Baldasty, E.W. Scripps and the Business of Newspa-

pers, 3, 102–119.

13. E.W. Scripps to Robert F. Paine, 26 February 1906

– cited in Baldasty, 147.

14. Quotation fromMinutesofConferenceBetweenE.W.

Scripps, E.B. Scripps and George Putnam, 17 Au-

gust 1902 – cited in Baldasty, 104.

15. The News was especially interested in the Socialist

Party’s 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.

16. R.F. Paine to W.D. Wasson, 27 January 1906 – cited

in Baldasty, 141.

17. Baldasty, 143.

18. 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,

1870–1920, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1979;

Elyce Rotella, From Home to Office: U. S. Women at

Work, 1870–1930, 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; Eliza-

beth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the

Control ofDisorder, andWomen, 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: Rut-

gers University Press, 1998; and Shelley Stamp,

Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Cul-

ture After the Nickelodeon, Princeton: Princeton Uni-

versity Press, 2000. I myself take up the question of

women’s relation to early cinema in Abel, The Red

Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1999.

19. 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 Moines’s population had

increasedbynearly40percent in the tenyearsbefore

1910, and it would increase even more in the follow-

ing ten years. ‘Supplement for Iowa’, Thirteenth Cen-

sus of the United States, with a Supplement for Iowa

(Washington: Government Printing Office, 1913),

588, 620, 624. See also ‘Des Moines: One of the

World’s Great Insurance Centers’,DesMoines News

(27 October 1910), 9.

20. 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 Be-

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 ‘Women’s Page’ – see the front-page ad

in the Des Moines News (24 June 1914), 1.

21. The Cleveland Leader called its Sunday page de-

voted to moving pictures, ‘Photo-Plays and Players’,

and several times reported favorably on the continu-

ing 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 ‘“Specta-

tor’s’ 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 nomen-

clature debate over moving pictures, see Gregory

Waller, ‘Photodramas and Photoplays, Stage and

Screen, 1909–1915’, in Leonardo Quaresima and

Laura Vichi, eds., The Tenth Muse: Cinema and the

Other Arts (Udine: Forums, 2001), 575–585.

22. 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.

BergandA.Leeds,Writing thePhotoplay:AComplete

Manual of Instruction in the Nature, Writing and Mar-

keting of the Moving-Picture Play, Springfield, Mass.:

Home Correspondence School, 1913.

23. The crucial study of this phenomenon is Richard

deCordova’s Picture Personalities: The Emergence

of the Star System in America, Urbana: University of

Illinois Press, 1990. But see also Abel, The Red

Rooster Scare, 148–150. A revealing account of the

phenomenon, and concurrent with Price’s writings,

is ‘Personality aForce inPictures’,NewYorkDramatic

Mirror (15 January 1913), 44.

24. See, for instance, Vitagraph’s copyrighted image of

Edith Storey in Price, ‘Splendid Eyes in Her Pretty

Head Help “Movie” Star’, Des Moines News (21

January 1913), 2.

25. Gertrude Price, ‘King Baggott Detests Sentimental

Stuff; Longs To Be Regular Dyed-in-the-Wool Rip

Roarin’ Jake’,DesMoinesNews (7 December 1912),

2; Gertrude Price, ‘Mary Fuller? Why, Of Course,

You’ve Met Mary! And Such a Deep-Dyed Pessimist

Is This Slip-of-a-Girl Who Likes Witches, Old People

andPoor FolksMost’,DesMoinesNews (28Decem-

ber 1912), 4; Gertrude Price, ‘Funniest, Fattest Man

in theMovies Is JohnBunnyWhoPlays“Mr.Pickwick”

’, Des Moines News (29 December 1912), 4; and

‘The Airman’s Hoodoo Is What Mabel of the Movies

Calls Her Pretty Self’, Des Moines News (4 March

1913), 7.

26. See, for instance, Gertrude Price, ‘Here’s a Story for

Kiddies; 10-YearOldMovieStarDraws$100aWeek’,

Fan discourse in the heartland: the early 1910s 149

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 Mer-

maid, 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 Children’s Gallery’,

Moving Picture World (28 February 1914), 1066.

Among the frequent references to women and chil-

dren attending moving picture theaters, especially

matinees, see ‘Women and Children Get Picture

Habit [Champaign, Illinois]’,New York Morning Tele-

graph (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 womenand childrenwere theprincipal audience

formovingpictures,butheadmittedthathisevidence

rested on downtown theatres in Chicago and New

Yorkandnot thegreater number inshoppingdistricts

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 Feb-

ruary 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.

28. ‘Runs, Rides, Rows’, Des Moines News (16 April

1913), 6.

29. 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 Sun-

day programs; the same thing happened slightly

later at a downtown theatre in Canton. See, for

instance, ‘J. Max Anderson’, Youngstown Vindicator

(15October 1911), 14; thePrincessads,Youngstown

Vindicator (22 October 1911), 17 and (17 December

1911), 24; the Orpheumad,Canton News-Democrat

(28 April 1912), 14; and ‘Orpheum Theater’, Canton

News-Democrat (9 June 1912), 12.

30. Throughout the winter and spring of 1913, however,

according to the Des Moines News’ ‘movie’ listings,

the downtown Unique Theatre had exclusive show-

ings of Kay-Bee and Brocnho westerms on Friday

nights.

31. 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 sub-

sequently ‘want to see them’. Although only three

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 adver-

tised them. See the American Film ad in Moving

Picture World (16 March 1912), 980–981; 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,

‘IndianBraves Adopt HeapBig “Movie”ManandCall

Him “Wanbli Wiscasa”’, Des Moines News (2 No-

vember 1913), 4. For information in the trade press

on this film’s production, see Charles J. Ver Halen,

‘Bringing the Old West Back’, Moving Picture News

(22 November 1913), 19–20.

33. James McQuade, ‘Chicago Letter’, Moving Picture

World (7 February 1914), 660 and (14 March 1914),

1388–1389; and ‘“Buffalo Bill” Picture Shown’, Mov-

ing Picture World (14 March 1914), 1370. For a good

discussion of this film’s production, distribution and

exhibition, as well as its difference from Cody’s

previousenterprises, seeJoyS.Kasson,BuffaloBill’s

Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History

(New York: Hill & Wang, 2000), 257–263.

34. Price, ‘“Billie Unafraid”’, 7; Gertrude Price, ‘Stunning

Mary Pickford – Only 19 Now! – Quits $10,000 “Mov-

ies” Career to ShakeHer 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 secondmovie star, after

Pickford, to appear on the cover of the New York

Dramatic Mirror, on 2 October 1912.

35. Price, ‘Movie Beauty Risks Life to Put Thrill in the

Pictures’, Des Moines News (7 February 1913), 1.

36. See, for instance, ‘Daring Girl Rider Coming’, Des

MoinesNews (27July1912),3;and ‘SummerAmuse-

ments’, 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.

37. Gertrude Price, ‘Charming Little Woman Runs

“Movie” Business By Herself, and Makes Big Suc-

cess’,DesMoinesNews (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.

38. One source I have yet to consult – the huge volume

of business letters in the E. W. Scripps Correspon-

dence Collection, Alden Library, Ohio University –

150 Richard Abel

could provide information on Price’s 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 news-

paper, theTribune.Hercolumn, ‘Newsof theMovies’,

first appeared in theDes 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. Day’s real name was

Dorothy Gottlieb, and she went on to head the public

relations department for A. H. Blank’s circuit of cine-

mas in the 1920s and for Central States Theater

Corporation from 1933 to 1950 – see Variety Obitu-

aries 6, 1964–1968 (New York: Garland, 1988), n. p.

40. A.C. Hasselbarth, ‘Women Writers of American

Press’,Editor and Publisher and Journalist (6 Decem-

ber 1913), 476.

41. E-mail communication from Jan Olsson, 24 March

2002.

42. See, for instance, the series of articles, ‘Women

Writers of American Press’, written by A.C. Hassel-

barth forEditor andPublisher andJournalist, between

October 1913 and at least December 1914.

43. 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

picturesno longerwerepopular inEurope– ‘Valuable

Consular Reports’, Moving Picture World (9 May

1914), 811.

44. The Beverly Bayne series was announced in ‘Every

Movie Fan Knows This Face’, Des Moines News (10

July 1914), 1. See also IdahM’GloneGibson, ‘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 ‘Don’t Attempt

the Venus Slouch Unless You Have the Proper Lines

Says Beverly Bayne’, Des Moines News (11 July

1914), 5. For contrast, see Price’s unsigned story on

Bayne, ‘Movie Girl in Social Whirl Is Artist-Horse-

woman-Wit’, Des Moines News (8 April 1913), 4.

45. See, for instance, Esther Hoffmann, ‘Shyest Man in

the Movies’, Des Moines News (23 July 1914), 2;

‘“LittleMary”HasCorner onPetNames’,DesMoines

News (22 August 1914), 4; ‘Most Beautiful Blond in

World inMovieland’,DesMoinesNews (9September

1914), 5; ‘The Little Movie Star is Good Friend of

Princess of Portugal’, Des Moines News (9 Septem-

ber 1914), 5; and ‘TheGirl With the Curl – She’sMost

WinsomeMiss of the Movies’, Des Moines News (23

September 1914), 5. Hoffman’s stories soon began

to appear under the title, ‘Who’s Who on the Films’

– see the Des Moines News (19 October 1914), 7.

46. See, for instance, Jan Olsson, ‘Pressing inroads:

metaspectatorsand thenickelodeonculture’, inJohn

Fullerton, ed., Screen Culture: History and Textuality

(Eastleigh: John Libbey, 2004), 113–135, and Paul

Moore, ‘ “Everybody’sGoing”:CityNewspapersand

the Early MassMarket for Movies’,City & Community

4.4 (December 2005), 339–357.For amore thorough

summary of my own early research, see Richard

Abel, ‘A Marriage of Ephemeral Discourses: News-

papers and Moving Pictures, 1910–1914’, Cinéma

et cie1 (Fall 2001): 59–83.Anyattempt to reconstruct

patterns of exhibition and reception from newspa-

pers (aswithanykindofsurvivingdiscursivematerial)

always has to confront historiographical questions

of veracity, responsibility and relevance – see, for

instance, Donald Crafton, ‘The Jazz Singer’s Recep-

tion in the Media and at the Box Office’, in David

Bordwell andNoël Carroll, eds.,Post-Theory: Recon-

structing Film Studies (Madison: University of Wis-

consin Press, 1996), 461–463.

47. Kathryn Oberdeck offers a model for analysing how

one vaudeville manager negotiated among different

ethnic audiences inNewHaven,Connecticut, in ‘“Mr.

Poli is the Big Chief!”: The Theatrical Manager, His

Audiences, and the Vaudeville Industry’, The Evan-

gelist and the Impresario: Religion, Entertainment,

and Cultural Politics in America, 1884–1914 (Balti-

more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999),

179–213. Although focused on New York, Giorgio

Bertellini offers another model in ‘Italian Imageries,

Historical Feature Films and the Fabrication of Italy’s

Spectators in Early 1900s New York’, in Stokes and

Maltby, American Movie Audiences, 29–45.

48. See the largeadannouncing thecontest,DesMoines

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 week-

long series of portraits or caricatures of several stars,

beginning with John Bunny – ‘Who’s Who In The

Movies Caricatured by Higgins’, Des Moines News

(12 October 1913), 12.

49. For further information on fiction tie-ins, especially in

relation to the later serials, see Singer, Melodrama

and Modernity, 269–287.

50. Family Theater ad,DesMoinesNews (8March1911),

13.

51. KathrynFuller,At the PictureShow:Small-Town Audi-

ences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture (Wash-

ington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), 136.

Fuller’s remark comes in the context of a valuable

Fan discourse in the heartland: the early 1910s 151

history of the development of movie fan magazines

in the 1910s.

52. See, for instance, ‘Our Saturday Short Story’, Des

Moines News (9 August 1913), 6.

53. Gertrude Price, ‘Here’s a Story for Kiddies; 10-Year

Old Movie Star Draws $100 a Week’, Des Moines

News (30 December 1912), 1.

54. See the ‘Mutual Movies’ ad, St. Paul News (29 No-

vember 1913), 8.

55. ‘“Most EngagedGirl” In All America Is Miss Adrienne

Kroell; She’s Proposed to Nearly Every Day – And

By aDifferentMan!’DesMoinesNews (14November

1912), 12.

56. Jennifer Bean argues that one of the industry’s 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, ‘Technolo-

gies of Early Stardom and the Extraordinary Body’,

camera obscura 48 (2001), 18. This essay is re-

printed, 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), 404–443.

57. 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 Selig’s The Adven-

tures of Kathlyn often celebrated Williams’ courage

in working with wild animals – see ‘Lions Can’t Scare

This Young Lady’, New York Morning Telegraph (21

December 1913), 5: 1.

58. ‘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.

59. Louis Reeves Harrison, ‘The “Bison-101” Headlin-

ers’, Moving Picture World (27 April 1912), 321.

60. Kalem titled its 1915 film series with Joyce simply

The Alice Joyce Series.

61. Bean, ‘Technologies of Early Stardom’, 34.

62. 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: TheCulturalMoment (NewBrunswick:Rutgers

University Press, 1991), 69–81;Glenn, ‘Introduction’,

Female Spectacle, 1–8; and Singer, Melodrama and

Modernity, 241–253. Glenn makes the case for an

earlier parallel development in the theater by focus-

ing on figures such as Bernhardt, Eva Tanguey and

Marie Dressler: ‘By opening a space for female

performers to become both spectacles and person-

alities, the popular theater promoted the develop-

ment of the first self-consciously “modern” expres-

sion 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.

64. See, for instance, Mae Tinee, ‘Zip!-Zam!-Zowie! –

That’s How They Stage a Movie’, Chicago Tribune

(22 March 1914), 5:4–5; 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 De-

cember 1914), 6: 8. See also Edwin M. La Roche, ‘A

New Profession for Women’, Motion Picture Story

Magazine (May1914), 84–85.MaeTineewasactually

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 theTribune’s staff ofmore than50highlighted

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 week’s ‘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. Day’s real name was Dorothy

Gottlieb, and shewent on to head thepublic relations

department for A.H. Blank’s circuit of cinemas in the

1920s and for Central States Theater Corporation

from 1933 to 1950 – see Variety Obituaries 6,

1964–1968 (New York: Garland, 1988), n. p.

65. 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 Dra-

matic Mirror (14 January 1914), 48.

66. See ‘Suffragettes See Parade Picture’, Des Moines

News (25 June 1912), 5; and ‘Votes For Women in

152 Richard Abel

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, 175–179.

The Cleveland Leader also was a strong advocate

of women’s 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-pageads for theOhioWoman

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.

68. ‘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.

69. GertrudePrice, ‘OnlyMoviePlayersLive in thisTown’,

Toledo News-Bee (6 January 1914), 13.

70. Gertrude Price, ‘Sees the Movies as Great New Field

forWomenFolk’,ToledoNews-Bee (30March1914),

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 (Vita-

graph), Louella Parsons (Essanay, Chicago),

Josephine Rector (Essanay, Niles), and several

‘graduates of Beta Breuil’s “scenario class”’ at Vita-

graph – Edwin M. La Roche, ‘A New Profession for

Women’,Motion Picture Story Magazine (May 1914),

83–88.

71. Parsons is quoted in Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond

SeparateSpheres: Intellectual RootsofModernFemi-

nism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 172.

I take the quoted citation from Glenn, Female Spec-

tacle, 5.

72. ‘The Photoplay Matinee Girl’, Film Index (3 June

1911), 11.

73. The secretary of the city’s inter-church council had

used the phrase in explaining a lack of attendance

at Sunday night services – ‘Des Moines is Going

MovieMad Says The Rev. J. W. Graves’,DesMoines

News (2 November 1913), 8. Another sign of ‘movie

madness’ was the series of ‘Adolf and Osgar’ car-

toons that ran for several weeks in the News, from

‘A Movie Actor Must Take All Kinds of Risks to

ProduceaThriller’,DesMoinesNews (28 April 1913),

6, to ‘Osgar Pirates the Death Scene in Queen

Elizabeth’, Des Moines News (14 May 1913), 6.

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.

Fan discourse in the heartland: the early 1910s 153