Posted 30 September 2003

In Movie Crazy, Samantha Barbas looks at the relationship between fans and film stars in the golden age of the Hollywood studio system, from about 1910 to 1950. She seeks to offer a corrective to the common characterization of fans as obsessive and gullible by social critics, psychologists, journalists and even filmmakers during the same period. She shows how fans, often successfully, sought to influence publicity decisions, casting choices and the production of stars by lobbying the studios, complaining to the press and forming fan clubs. In Barbas’s reading, the reactions of fans to celebrities turn out to be complex and many-sided, as they are seen questioning the authenticity of celebrity texts and reading stars in demythologizing, creative ways. Barbas combines this interpretation of fans with a narrative of the development of celebrity in this period, particularly the new interest in ‘personality’ and the off-screen lives of stars. She relates this to new cultures of consumption, glamour and advertising, and argues that this is why fans were increasingly encouraged to imitate celebrity styles and purchase star-endorsed beauty products. Fan-dom thus became increasingly associated with women, a factor which may explain the condescension towards them by predominantly male critics. While Barbas’s narrative of the emergence of Hollywood stardom is not theoretically groundbreaking, and her positive take on fan-dom follows the similar work of other critics such as Jackie Stacey, Henry Jenkins and Lisa Lewis, her book is still a lively and worthwhile contribution to the literature on stardom. Movie Crazy originates in a doctoral thesis and it has all the strengths of an extended research project, drawing on rarely examined primary sources such as fan letters, fan journals and celebrity magazines. Although many books on Hollywood celebrity begin with the emergence of illustrated magazines in the 1920s, this book usefully takes us back to the 1910s and to now little-known stars such as Florence Lawrence. Barbas’s narrative is accessible and always entertaining, and her book will be useful to anyone interested in the early days of film stardom in America.

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