The first film magazine was published by the British Picture Publishing Company released the first issue of The Pictures, a small sixteen page illustrated story paper, on the 21st of October 1911. The Pictures carried stories based on newly released films illustrated with pictures from the production. In their opening editorial they claimed that their stories made the actors seem more like people rather than actors on the screen.
The release of The Pictures marked over 100 years of film and fan magazines. These magazines became particularly popular and a big part of film culture across the early 1910s and into the 1920s where they developed from fiction papers into star magazines, providing the audience with gossip about the stars, new productions, screen fashions and competitions. All of this got the audience excited about celebrity media and it continued to grow in popularity. These magazines also functioned as a tool for the film industry to promote new productions and for other companies who shared the same female demographic to promote their products inside the pages.
The Pictures, and eventually its successors Picturegoer and The Picture Show, became an essential tool to their predominantly female audience who wanted to know intimate details about the stars such as their hair colour, which at the time would have been seen onscreen as black and white.
Across the twenties, thirty’s and fourties’, the content of the Picturegoer featured an enormous amount of advertising vying for the attention of the female readers. Amidst film and gossip were advertisements for household cleaning products, dress patterns and star endorsed cosmetics.
The introduction of TV in the fifties saw a dramatic reduction in cinema audience, with its female audience viewing from home. Picturegoer ended in 1961 and fan magazines started to shift to a new emerging audience of regular cinema-goers, teenage boys and young men- which remains the core cinema audience today.
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