ABSTRACT
The iconoclastic movie and television stars of the 1960s and 1970s seemed to do little to inspire the fantasy of the American Dream in the way that their predecessors once had. Film scholar Anthony Slide partly attributes this failure to the eventual demise of fan magazines such as Photoplay and Modern Screen, as their subjects no longer served to stoke the public’s imagination of what life might be like if only they too made it big.1 If anything, the magazines’ focus on unhappy celebrities rejecting mainstream society left a void in the fantasy. In a desperate attempt to increase circulation, the old fan magazines re-ran stories about stars from the 1930s and 1940s, hoping to revive nostalgia for Hollywood’s Golden Age. It didn’t work, and the traditional fan magazines had folded by or during the 1980s, to be replaced largely by People, a spinoff of a mainstream weekly news magazine.
