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Movie Crazy: Fans, Stars, and the Cult of Celebrity Samantha Barbas. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.
"The world is movie mad," wrote one early silent-picture star in the San Francisco Examiner in 1915. And indeed, in her fine study of the rise of Hollywood celebrity culture, Samantha Barbas describes how America would become even more movie crazy as the twentieth century progressed. Using an impressive variety of source material, including archival fan clippings from the collections of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and private fan scrapbooks, Barbas gives us a clear, thoughtful portrait of the American movie fan. She explores the complicated relationships among movie fans, film celebrities, and the film industry of Hollywood from the earliest days of silent films through the late 1940s.
Barbas challenges the caricature of American movie fans as the "frenzied mob and the silly schoolgirl" stereotypes that have been portrayed, ironically enough, in Hollywood films through the years. Movie fans, she argues, have contributed to popular film culture in profoundly significant ways since the days of the Nickelodeon. "The story of film fandom," Barbas writes, "is the story of the way that fans refused to accept mass culture passively and, instead, became actively involved in their entertainment." Film fans have never been controlled by an unseen, all-knowing Hollywood dream factory. On the contrary, film fans have done much more than...