Picturegoer

Last updated
Petula Clark on the cover of the 3 December 1949 issue Picturegoer.jpg
Petula Clark on the cover of the 3 December 1949 issue

Picturegoer was a fan magazine published in the United Kingdom between 1911 and 23 April 1960.

Contents

Background

The magazine was started in 1911 under the name The Pictures and in 1914 it merged with Picturegoer. [1] Following the merge it was renamed Pictures and The Picturegoer, which continued until 1920. [1] The same year it was renamed as Pictures for the Picturegoer. [1]

It began publication with the name Picturegoer in January 1921. [2] [3] Odhams Press was the publisher of the magazine during the early years. [2] It was initially published monthly through May 1931, switching to weekly publication on 30 May 1931 as Picturegoer Weekly. [4] In September 1939, Picturegoer incorporated Film Weekly , and in September 1941 it became a bi-weekly. It went back to weekly publication every Thursday in July 1949.

Picturegoer featured the screen's biggest stars and was sold at all cinemas. Clark Gable, Laurence Olivier, Bette Davis, Paulette Goddard, Petula Clark, Fred Astaire, and Richard Burton were among the hundreds of stars who graced its front cover. Its circulation reached a peak of 325,000 during the mid-1940s. [5]

After World War II, it found itself competing with periodicals published by the Rank Organisation, Odeon Cinemas, and Associated British Cinemas, which replaced Picturegoer with their own magazines at their theatre kiosks. As a result, Picturegoer became more sensational in the 1950s, with covers featuring cheesecake and beefcake-style artwork. The magazine missed publication on 1 March 1947 and from 4 July 1959 to 15 August 1959.

It eventually merged with the pop music magazine Disc Date. Shortly after the Picturegoer name was dropped and the publication concentrated solely on music. The last issue of Picturegoer with Disc Date was published on 23 April 1960, with a cover showcasing Jackie Rae and Janette Scott. [6]

See also

Related Research Articles

<i>Photoplay</i> American film magazine

Photoplay was one of the first American film fan magazines. It was founded in Chicago in 1911, the same year that J. Stuart Blackton founded Motion Picture Story, another magazine directed at fans. In 1921, Photoplay established what is considered the first significant annual movie award. For most of its run, it was published by Macfadden Publications. The magazine ceased publication in 1980.

Robert James Leslie Halliwell was a British film critic, encyclopaedist and television rights buyer for ITV, the British commercial network, and Channel 4. He is best known for his reference guides, Filmgoer's Companion (1965), a single volume film-related encyclopaedia featuring biographies and technical terms, and Halliwell's Film Guide (1977), which is dedicated to individual films.

The Amalgamated Press (AP) was a British newspaper and magazine publishing company founded by journalist and entrepreneur Alfred Harmsworth (1865–1922) in 1901, gathering his many publishing ventures together under one banner. At one point the largest publishing company in the world, AP employed writers such as Arthur Mee, John Alexander Hammerton, Edwy Searles Brooks, and Charles Hamilton. Its subsidiary, the Educational Book Company, published The Harmsworth Self-Educator, The Children's Encyclopædia, and Harmsworth's Universal Encyclopaedia. The company's newspapers included the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror, The Evening News, The Observer, and The Times. At its height, AP published over 70 magazines and operated three large printing works and paper mills in South London.

A fan magazine is a commercially written and published magazine intended for the amusement of fans of the popular culture subject matter that it covers. It is distinguished from a scholarly, literary or trade magazine on the one hand, by the target audience of its contents, and from a fanzine on the other, by the commercial and for-profit nature of its production and distribution. Scholarly works on popular culture and fandoms do not always make this terminological distinction clear. In some relevant works, fanzines are called "fan magazines", possibly because the term "fanzine" is seen as slang.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Screen Gems</span> American film studio

Screen Gems is an American film production company owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment, a subsidiary of Japanese multinational conglomerate, Sony Group Corporation. It has served several different purposes for its parent companies over the decades since its incorporation, initially as a cartoon studio, then a television studio, and later on as a film studio. The label currently serves as a film production that specializes in genre films, mainly horror.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Associated British Picture Corporation</span> Film production company, 1927 to 1970

Associated British Picture Corporation (ABPC), originally British International Pictures (BIP), was a British film production, distribution and exhibition company active from 1927 until 1970 when it was absorbed into EMI. ABPC also owned approximately 500 cinemas in Britain by 1943, and in the 1950s and 60s owned a station on the ITV television network. The studio was partly owned by Warner Bros. from about 1940 until 1969; the American company also owned a stake in ABPC's distribution arm, Warner-Pathé, from 1958. It formed one half of a vertically integrated film industry duopoly in Britain with the Rank Organisation.

Screen International is a British film magazine covering the international film business. It is published by Media Business Insight, a British B2B media company.

<i>The Film Daily</i> Former film trade news magazine

The Film Daily was a daily publication that existed from 1918 to 1970 in the United States. It was the first daily newspaper published solely for the film industry. It covered the latest trade news, film reviews, financial updates, information on court cases and union difficulties, and equipment breakthroughs.

<i>Kinematograph Weekly</i> British film trade newspaper

Kinematograph Weekly, popularly known as Kine Weekly, was a trade paper catering to the British film industry between 1889 and 1971.

Harrison's Reports was a New York City-based motion picture trade journal published weekly from 1919 to 1962. The typical issue was four letter-size pages sent to subscribers under a second-class mail permit. Its founder, editor and publisher was P. S. Harrison (1880–1966), who previously had been a reviewer for Motion Picture News, in which his column was titled "Harrison’s Exhibitor Reviews".

<i>Motion Picture Herald</i> American magazine

The Motion Picture Herald (MPH) was an American film industry trade paper first published as the Exhibitors Herald in 1915, and MPH from 1931 to December 1972. It was replaced by the QP Herald, which only lasted until May 1973.

<i>Motion Picture Magazine</i> American magazine

Motion Picture was an American monthly fan magazine about film, published from 1911 to 1977. It was lastly published by Macfadden Publications.

<i>Picture Show</i> (magazine)

Picture Show was a weekly film magazine, published in the United Kingdom between 3 May 1919 and 31 December 1960. It was one of the longest-running film entertainment magazines in Britain.

<i>Film Weekly</i> Defunct British film magazine

Film Weekly was one of the leading popular film magazines published in the United Kingdom during the late 1920s and 1930s.

Vitaphone Varieties is a series title used for all of Warner Bros.', earliest short film "talkies" of the 1920s, initially made using the Vitaphone sound on disc process before a switch to the sound-on-film format early in the 1930s. These were the first major film studio-backed sound films, initially showcased with the 1926 synchronized scored features Don Juan and The Better 'Ole. Although independent producers like Lee de Forest's Phonofilm were successfully making sound film shorts as early as 1922, they were very limited in their distribution and their audio was generally not as loud and clear in theaters as Vitaphone's. The success of the early Vitaphone shorts, initially filmed only in New York, helped launch the sound revolution in Hollywood.

<i>Filmindia</i> Indian cinema magazine

filmindia is an Indian monthly magazine covering Indian cinema and published in English language.

Iskusstvo Kino was a film magazine published in Moscow, Russia. It was one of the earliest magazines in Europe which specialize on film theory and review alongside the British magazine Sight & Sound and the French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. It was a print publication between 1931 and 2023.

City Magazines was a British publisher of weekly comics and men's magazines that operated from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. The company's most notable publications were comics magazines based on licensed television properties, including TV Century 21 and Lady Penelope, both of which featured comics based on Gerry Anderson's Century 21 Productions Supermarionation shows.

<i>Princess</i> (comics) British weekly girls publication

Princess was a British weekly girls' comic anthology published by Fleetway Publications and, later, IPC Magazines. The first version was published between 30 January 1960 and 16 September 1967, and featured a mix of comic strips, text stories and a large proportion of features; it was merged with Tina to form a new title - Princess Tina - after 399 issues.

C. Arthur Pearson Ltd was a British publisher of newspapers, periodicals, books, and comics that operated from 1890 to c. 1965. The company was founded by C. Arthur Pearson, later to be known as Sir Arthur Pearson, 1st Baronet.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "The Pictures/Pictures For The Picturegoer/Pictures: The Screen Magazine". Movie Mags. Retrieved 1 January 2017.
  2. 1 2 "Picturegoer". Cinema St Andrews. Retrieved 1 January 2017.
  3. "100 Years of cinema fan magazines". University of Exeter. 20 October 2011. Retrieved 1 January 2017.
  4. British Library- Cinema and Film Periodicals: British and Irish, Picturegoer Retrieved 12 November 2012
  5. Mark Glancy, "Picturegoer: The Fan Magazine and Popular Film Culture in Britain During the Second World War'", Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 31:4 (2011), 453-478.
  6. "About Us". Picturegoer.

Commons-logo.svg Media related to Picturegoer at Wikimedia Commons