About Screenland

Screenland

Screenland was an American monthly magazine about motion pictures, published from September 1920 until June 1971, when it was merged into its sister title Silver Screen. Founded in Los Angeles in the silent era, it was among the earliest magazines devoted to film stars and film culture, and it chronicled Hollywood from the age of silent film, through the coming of sound and the studio system's golden years, to the television age, when its title was restyled Screenland plus TV-Land.

Screenland called itself The Smart Screen Magazine and America's Smart Screen Magazine, and boasted that it was made where the movies are made. Each issue offered a full-colour cover portrait of a leading star, publicity stories about current stars and films, and pages of black-and-white photographs — a formula that defined the fan magazine for half a century.

Origins in Los Angeles, 1920

Screenland was established in Los Angeles, California, in 1920 by the Screenland Publishing Company, with Myron Zobel as editor. The first issue was dated September 1920. The timing placed it in the pioneering generation of film magazines: Photoplay had been founded in Chicago in 1911 and had shown, under editors Julian Johnson and James R. Quirk, that a magazine about films and their players could build a mass circulation on public interest in the private lives of celebrities. By the 1920s more than a dozen major fan magazines were competing, and Photoplay's circulation ran above two million.

Screenland's Los Angeles origin was itself a selling point. Based where films were actually produced, the young magazine could present itself as closer to the studios, the sets and the stars than its eastern rivals, even as its publishing operations later moved east.

Move to New York and the Frederick James Smith Era

In 1923 the magazine moved to Cooperstown, New York, and Frederick James Smith became editor. The move reflected the economics of American magazine publishing, in which printing, paper and distribution were centred in the East even for magazines about Hollywood. Under Smith, Screenland operated within the publicity system shared by all fan magazines: studios supplied photographs, access and stories; magazines supplied sympathetic, sales-friendly coverage of stars under contract.

That system carried risks, which Screenland discovered in its first years in New York. In 1923 the magazine reported a love affair between actress Evelyn Brent and Douglas Fairbanks, then one of the most powerful figures in Hollywood and married to Mary Pickford, America's most beloved star. The story brought legal threats, and the magazine published a retraction — an early demonstration that fan magazines negotiated, rather than simply reported, the private lives of the stars they depended on.

Magazine Builders and Harry Donenfeld

In 1924 the magazine was taken over by Magazine Builders. Myron Zobel remained publisher and Frank Armer served as treasurer. The printing from this period was done by Harry Donenfeld through his Elmo Press, formed in 1924. One magazine-collector account, repeated without full attribution in reference works, credits a Paul Hunter with rescuing Screenland for publisher John Cuneo in 1932, during the Depression years when many magazines failed.

Through these changes of ownership the title itself survived, an asset in a business where a recognised name, newsstand relationships and a loyal readership could outlast any single proprietor.

Covers, Titles and the Coming of Sound

Screenland's covers were its shop window: a full-colour portrait of a leading star of the day, painted or photographic. Surviving issues show the range — Betty Blythe in January 1922 in artwork by D. Anthony Tauszky, Greta Garbo in May 1928 in a profile portrait by Anita Parkhurst, Billie Dove in May 1930 by the celebrated cover artist Rolf Armstrong, Kay Francis in June 1936 by Marland Stone, Joan Blondell in June 1939 and Ingrid Bergman in November 1948. Such covers are now sold and catalogued individually by poster and magazine dealers, who record the magazine's varying taglines issue by issue.

The cover lines themselves tracked film history. In the early 1920s the publishers added the words from Hollywood after the title for a time. In 1929, as the industry converted to talking pictures, the cover announced a magazine devoted to silent and talking pictures; once all films were in sound, the line was dropped. The title then settled back to the single word Screenland for the studio era.

Inside the Magazine

Inside, Screenland followed the mature fan-magazine pattern: publicity stories about current stars and forthcoming films, illustrated throughout with black-and-white studio photographs, together with the advertising — including full-page advertisements for new films — that supported the enterprise. Scholars of the genre note that fans were not passive consumers of this material: they wrote letters, entered competitions and treated the stars' domestic details, from homes and gardens to families and pets, as a continuing serial story in which each issue was an instalment.

Fan magazines were also constrained by the industry they covered. After Hollywood adopted its Production Code, only code-compliant films were available to review and stars were bound by contract to behave accordingly, so magazines learned to communicate through implication, placement and layout. Screenland's fifty-year run was a continuous exercise in that negotiation.

The Henry and Pines Years

By the early 1950s Screenland was published by the Henry Publishing Company. In October 1952 Ned Pines's Standard Magazines, an imprint of Pines Publications, bought both Screenland and Silver Screen from Henry. Pines, a veteran pulp publisher, acquired established magazine brands as the pulp market contracted and television reshaped popular reading.

The television challenge was acknowledged on the cover itself. From the September 1952 issue the magazine's name was presented as Screenland plus TV-Land, adding coverage of television stars to its film brief. In June 1954 Pines announced that he was suspending publication with the August 1954 issue, citing production and distribution costs. In the event the suspension did not end the magazine, which continued publication, in step with its sister title's pause and bi-monthly revival in the same period.

Final Years and Merger, 1971

Screenland continued through the 1960s, covering a Hollywood transformed by the collapse of the studio system, independent production and the dominance of television. Its long run ended in June 1971, when it was merged with Silver Screen. The combined magazine retained the Silver Screen title, so the name founded in 1920 disappeared from the newsstand after fifty-one years, although its history continued inside its younger sister until that title also closed in 1977.

Preservation and Historical Value

Screenland survives in library holdings, in the collectors' market — where dealers catalogue individual issues by cover artist, size and contents in remarkable detail — and in digital collections of fan magazines used by film historians. Because it began in 1920, in the first decade of the fan magazine form that Photoplay had pioneered in 1911, its pages preserve the star system in formation: the moment when film actors, once anonymous, became named, pictured and followed personalities, and when a new kind of magazine arose to follow them.

Legacy

Screenland's significance is its span. A single title connects the silent Los Angeles of 1920, the retraction-haunted publicity battles of 1923, the painted covers of Armstrong and Stone, the sound revolution, the war and post-war studio years, and the television age that forced TV-Land onto its cover. When it merged away in 1971, an institution older than talking pictures closed with it — and its half-century of covers and portraits remains one of the fullest visual records of Hollywood stardom ever published.