Founding
Modern Screen magazine debuted on November 3, 1930 (some sources say December 1930). Founded by the Dell Company of New York City it initially sold for 10 cents. Modern Screen quickly became popular and by 1933 it had become Photoplay magazine's main competition. It began to brag on its cover that it had "The Largest Circulation of Any Screen Magazine", and Jean Harlow is seen reading a copy of Modern Screen in the 1933 film Dinner at Eight.
During the early 1930s, the magazine featured artwork portraits of film stars on the cover. By 1940 it featured natural color photographs of the stars and was charging 15 cents per issue.
Modern Screen had many different editors in chief over the years, including Richard Heller, who understood the importance of the fan magazine's contribution to movie sales and Mark Bego, the latter of whom edited the book The Best of Modern Screen (St. Martin's Press, 1986). The editor most associated with the magazine, however, was Regina Cannon (1900-1992), but her standards for publication were so low that Carl F. Cotter, who wrote 'Forty Hacks of the Fan Mags' (The Coast, 1939), declared her stories to be the worst of the entire lot.
Contributors to the magazine included famed photographer George Hurrell and famed writers like Faith Baldwin. Louella Parsons wrote a column entitled "Good News."
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Famous quotes containing the word founding:
“The responsible business men of this country put their shoulders to the wheel. It is in response to this universal demand that we are founding today, All-American Airways.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“... there is no way of measuring the damage to a society when a whole texture of humanity is kept from realizing its own power, when the woman architect who might have reinvented our cities sits barely literate in a semilegal sweatshop on the Texas- Mexican border, when women who should be founding colleges must work their entire lives as domestics ...”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.”
—John Updike (b. 1932)