Screen and Radio Weekly (Apr 1934 to Aug 1937)

Record Details:

Title:
Screen and Radio Weekly
Date:
Apr 1934 to Aug 1937
Volume:
Screen and Radio Weekly (Apr 1934 to Aug 1937) Promotions
Leaf #:
0003
Language:
English
Subjects:
Motion Pictures, Film Industry Fan Magazine
Collection:
Fan Magazines and Hollywood Studio System
Format:
Contributor:
Media History Digital Library, Canadian Media Magazines Project, Paul Moore and Jessica Whitehead
Coordinator:
Media History Digital Library
Description:

Screen and Radio Weekly

Editor: Douglas Martin (1934-40)

Screen and Radio Weekly (1934-40) was launched by the Detroit Free Press in April 1934 and published with that masthead until 1940, when its material was folded into the paper’s general content Sunday Magazine. By October 1934, it was syndicated nationally in dozens of different newspapers, all offering “a week-end of gala reading enjoyment. Not just ‘another section,’ but a full-size tabloid in brilliant colors and breezy pictorial, FREE with your Sunday Free Press,” or Sunday Oakland Tribune, or Sunday Democrat and Chronicle, or whichever location the novelty began, separated by months and thousands of miles across the entire United States. The sixteen-page tabloid magazine was printed in bold color blocking, featuring rainbow-bright portraits of movie stars on its front and back covers. There are indications it was available as a magazine in its own right, not only as a newspaper supplement, at least in Detroit. Over its six years of publication, Screen and Radio Weekly was included in at least thirty-two papers, at least fifteen concurrently in 1937. Its circulation approached 1.5 million copies weekly at the time, higher than the watermark for Photoplay (1911-80) of 1.4 million circulation in the mid-1950s. Douglas Martin was editor in Detroit and Grace Wilcox, his recently widowed sister-in-law, penned the main gossip column from Los Angeles, “Hollywood Reporter” (apparently no relation to the fledgling magazine of the same name). Wilcox’s bylines also often used her married name, Edith Dietz. She had worked in the publicity departments at Mutual and Universal, then writing for the Los Angeles Express in late 1910s, It Magazine in the early 1920s, and the Los Angeles Times in the late 1920s, before writing screenplays for Anna May Wong. Another near-weekly reporter in the magazine’s first months was Douglas W. Churchill, just before he became Hollywood correspondent for the New York Times.

– Paul Moore, March 2024

Date Added:
April 11, 2024
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Acclaimed in Hollywood Hollywood has stopped making pictures to talk about Detroit. | The announcement that the Detroit Free Press will add a complete Screen & Radio Weekly magazine to each copy of its Sunday paper has created more interest than any other innovation publishing has brought to the picture town. Every copy of next Sunday's Free Press will include a copy of the first edition of the magazine. | Hollywood heard the news Wednesday and within an hour tele-_ grams began to arrive in Detroit. The first was from Cecil B. DeMille, who wired: “Please accept my congratulations for your new Screen & Radio Weekly. It is cheering to note this new venture of yours as an indi-| cation of the interest your readers take in what | we are doing in Hollywood, I shall be happy et | to co-operate with you in any way within my power whenever you may wish to call on me.” B, P. Schulberg, president of B. P. Schulberg Productions, independent producer for Paramount, wired as follows: “It is indeed gratifying to see a metropolitan newspaper like the Detroit Free Press adopting a photoplay and radio magazine with its Sunday paper. Such enterprise deserves the wholehearted backing it will assuredly receive from all Detroit and Michigan newspaper readers. I want to be one of the first to congratulate you for taking a new step in journalism.” Charles R. Rogers, independent producer for Paramount, stressed a similar point in his telegram. He wired: “The Detroit Free Press is to be congratulated for setting a pace that will surely be copied by newspapers all over America. The Screen & Radio Weekly free with the Sunday paper is a service that I know the readers will enjoy, Please do not fail to call on me for anything my organization Please Turn to Page 3—Column 4 Cecil B. DeMille | New Free Press Magazine Acclaimed in Hollywood Continued from Page One can do to co-operate with you in helping you contact stars for personal interviews or in supplying you with any information you may need.” Another telegram came from Mack Sennett, who said: “It strikes me you have something very different and interesting in a motion picture and radio magazine offered with your Sunday paper. “Accept my congratulations on the new idea and my best wishes for its success.” Edward Eckels, director of national publicity for RKO-Radio Pictures calls the announcement “the best news that Hollywood has heard in a long time.” His telegram reads: “Word that the Detroit Free Press is to publish its own weekly motion picture magazine is the best news that Hollywood has had in a long time. “The establishment of such a magazine by a great newspaper like the Free Press is of tremendous benefit to the entire motion picture industry. So while congratulating the Free Press management upon its vision and initiative, I also want to express the appreciation of the RKO-Radio Studios, and add the thanks of those of us whose job it is to keep the public informed of the news and human interest happenings of Hollywood. “With its representative right on the cinema front, the Free Press Screen & Radio Weekly will be able to carry its readers through the studio gates and into the homes of the stars. There will be a personal tcuch to this linking of Detroit and Hollywood that should prove of great interest to Free Press readers. “Coming right at this time, the action of the Free Press in enlarging its cinema news and feature service is of particular interest to us at RKO-Radio, as we are launching into a new and larger field with our ‘Hollywood on the air program,’ in which we take our listeners as guests at informal parties in the homes of the stars. “Please feel free to call upon us at RKO-Radio at any time for any service. My entire department is at your disposal in providing such | material as you may desire. Again congratulations and: thanks.” The Free Press has established its own bureau in the heart of Hollywood and placed it in charge of Grace Wilcox, nationally known Hollywood news and feature writer, | Her page’of Hollywood chatter and her features stories will appear in each issue of the magazine, the first issue of which will be included in every copy of next Sunday’s Free Press. Mack Sennett Detroit Free Press Thursday, April 26, 1934, p.1 & p.3 ;see me lolling back ibeing hurried from one studio to | jall, you New Free Press Magazine | Goes Behind Scenes in Filmland | GRACE WILCOX Heads of Studios Welcome Free Press Correspondent Stars and Executives Eagerly Await First Issue of New Cinema Magazine By Grace Wilcox (Free Press Staff Correspondent) HOLLYWOOD, April 27—Greet,ings, screen and radio fans--from ‘your Hollywood staff correspond ent, I wish all of you could be out here with me. Not because I'm so wild about the climate of California, but because I could use some of you to answer my telephone calls. The phone rings every other minute. Everybody out here knows The Detroit Free Press and the stars and studio heads are positively ex ] cited over the new development in motion picture and radio publishing. The opinion I hear expressed on every side is--“A Sunday screen and radio magazine in colors what a swell idea, It's funny no one ever thought of that before.” Film Head Told of Venture Strickland, one of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, who his start on the same paper I did—hit his desk a slap with his hand when I told him about it "For the love of Pete,” he said, “what a ‘natural’! To think it’s been lying around waiting for some newspaper to pick up. It's too bad you can't copyright ideas, You Howard heads’ of rot ,would have half the Sunday circulation in the country.” As for me--your staff correspondent—I've never had such a gorgeous time in my life, There's nothing quite like being in on something utterly new and different in the newspaper business. Misses Office Thrills Of course I miss sitting at a desk in the home office where I can be an actual spectator of the work of putting the magazine together. I miss the thrill of seeing the makeup man from the composing room come in with the proofs of the pages, and of opening the packages of halftones and studying the lovely proofs of the colored illustrations, 3ut I'ma long way from being out of touch with the office. The telegraph companies must have made a pretty penny out of my editors. They think up something new for me to do every 15 or 20 minutes. You can't beat editors once they have an idea and take the bit in their teeth, Cerrespondent Kept Busy But I'm not chained to my type| writer by any means. You should | in studio cars } another, The studios take care of your correspondent. good | After | see, it isn’t every screen | the magazine that starts with a_ circulation of asquarter of a million as ours does, And how they feed me, The way I eat mvself in and out of studios is something scandalous. | It's nothing for me to consume three luncheons a day; one at 11:30 at Paramount another at RKORadio at 1:30, a snack at 3 at M-G-M's restaurant and a= substantial high tea with English kippers in Fox's Cafe de Paris at 5 o'clock. And I have never eaten such chicken soup as they have at Louis B. Mayer's. Eight boiling hens a day! Was Born in Michigan Tt is a great thrill for me to be working on the staff of Michigan's oldest and gYeatest newspaper. 1 wis born in Michigan, went to school and college there and think of it always as my Hollywood is and will never even though I have been living here and doing newspaper work among screen folks since the days when they began to make the first big spectacles in the silent pictures home, home more, my second be anything Never mind looking up how long ago that was, ‘You'll Like Weekly’ T know you will like the first edition of the first Sereen & Radio Weekly magazine ever published by any newspaper when it comes out with Sunday's Free Press, I have been close enough tn the plans for features to know that it will) be something that strikes a entirely new and colorful note I can scarcely wait for my own copy to reach me. (Note to the boss. Can you send one air mail?) So, once again, greetings, from your Hollywood staff correspond ent in her Free Press office on the coast, I'll be seeing you tomorrow --in the new weekly magazine. Detroit Free Press Saturday April 28, 1934, p.3