DOI10.5281/zenodo.10553027Zenodo10553027MaRDI QIDQ6694353FDOQ6694353
Dataset published at Zenodo repository.
Samuel Hansen, Eric Hoyt, Lesley Stevenson, Ben Pettis
Publication date: 22 January 2024
For the first half of the twentieth century, no American industry boasted a more motley and prolific trade press than the movie business—a cutthroat landscape that set the stage for battle by ink. In 1930, Martin Quigley, publisher of Exhibitors Herald, conspired with Hollywood studios to eliminate all competing trade papers, yet this attempt and each one thereafter collapsed. Exploring the communities of exhibitors and creative workers that constituted key subscribers, Ink-Stained Hollywood tells the story of how a heterogeneous trade press triumphed by appealing to the foundational aspects of industry culture—taste, vanity, partisanship, and exclusivity. In captivating detail, Eric Hoyt chronicles the histories of well-known trade papers (Variety, Motion Picture Herald) alongside important yet forgotten publications (Film Spectator, Film Mercury, and Camera!), and challenges the canon of film periodicals, offering new interpretative frameworks for understanding print journalism's relationship with the motion picture industry and its continued impact on creative industries today. We selected the year 1922, with an emphasis on July 1922, for two chief reasons. First, the MHDL had already digitized a wide cross-section of trade papers from that year, including—appropriately for this book—several published outside of the United States. Second, we knew from Eric's earlier research that there was a great deal of competition within the American film industry's trade press during this period. In 1922, Variety and the Chicago-based Exhibitors Herald, were pursuing strategies to grow their readership and influence within the industry, emphasizing independence, integrity, and uniqueness as distinguishing factors. During the following year, Exhibitors Herald created the '"Herald Only' Club"—emphasizing the loyalty of subscribers who exclusively wrote into Exhibitors Herald and read the paper, to the exclusion of its rivals (Hartman, Rea). Given the competitive bent of the 1920s trade press, how distinct was each publication? Would the "'Herald Only' Club" have any factual grounding once the word patterns, sentences, and page structures were analyzed at scale? In addition to the above-mentioned trade papers, we included 16 additional unique journals. Our corpus included fan magazines (Photoplay, Shadowland, and The Picturegoer), a technical journal (American Cinematographer), English language trade papers published outside the U.S. (Canadian Moving Picture Digest and The Film Renter and Moving Picture News), and studio generated publicity (Universal Weekly and Paramount Pep). This dataset is comprised of the scans of the trade papers we analyzed, as well as a zip archive of the code we used to do the similarity analysis. C.M. Hartman, qtd. in "'Herald Only' Club Gains Six; Veteran and Newcomer Give Reasons for Joining," Exhibitors Herald, March 29, 1924, 63, http://lantern.mediahist.org/catalog/exhibitorsherald18exhi_0_0073 George Rea letter to Exhibitors Herald, Exhibitors Herald, May 26, 1923, 69, http://lantern.mediahist.org/catalog/exhibitorsherald16exhi_0_0869.
This page was built for dataset: 1922 Film Industry Trade Press Corpus
