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of a Photoplay Fan
Photoplay takes great pride in presenting this most amusing story written by Miss Helen Beat, a 1936 winner of a Pulitzer prize for scholarship. This prize, the greatest accolade of the writing world, is given yearly to the three highest graduate students in the Columbia School of Journalism. Miss Beat, the only girl to carry off this honor, will get $1 ,500 for study in Europe for one year. Our pride is that Photoplay was the first magazine to discover Miss Beal, who wrote this, her very first article.
AT first Mother chose the movies we could see. She picked them by the title. The word "passion" in a title automatically blacklisted it for us. So did words like "sin." "murder." "unholy," "indiscreet," "affair," and that awful syllable, "h— 1."
Even "love" wasn't safe. She had to be darn sure it was married or mother love.
Nice, uplifting pictures like "The Ten Commandments" were attended by the family en masse. Mary Pickford, Fairbanks, Chaplin, Lloyd, Tom Mix and Raymond Griffith rated the "wholesome" list. Thomas Meighan and Baby Peggy
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"Mother picked t h e movies we saw by the title"
Helen Beal
seldom played risque roles. And Douglas MacLean, she had heard, was the son of a Methodist minister, which made him impeccable. But never could we budge her on Pola Negri or Gloria Swanson. On nights when those two sirens were in town, we all stayed home and played Flinch.
Those were the days when I was secretly convinced that I was going to grow up and marry Jackie Coogan. Jackie was the first man who made me feel as if we two were meant for each other through all eternity. Since then I have had the same hunch about William Haines, Phillips Holmes Ronald Colman, George Brent, Clark Gable, and now Gene Raymond.
Thereby hangs my tale — perhaps the first saga of a movie fan known to history. For twelve vears I've been reading about movie stars, and what they think of life, and how they rose to fame, but in all that time I have never read the story of a fan.
"Well, movie fans aren't glamorous," you might object. "No one cares about their love life. They've never starred in photoplays or seen their footprint in cement in a theater lobby." Exactly. That's what makes us fans so interesting: like the Arctic Circle, we're still relatively unexplored. We are fascinating only by proxy. We worship at the feet of the great, and take a certain satisfaction in reflecting that it is our worship (translated at the box-office) that keeps them great.
Just as all stamp collectors and all dog fanciers have certain experiences common to their hobby, so all real fan-atics can remember:
Wanting to break into the movies.
"Don't you know that movies are an instrument of the Devil?"
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