The Opinion Leaders

Every month in the U.S., almost 20,000,000 avid readers pore over 20-odd periodicals devoted to the greater glamor of Hollywood's stars. But in recent months the readers have seemed less avid. Movie magazine sales, which rose more than 400% in the 15 years before 1946, slipped sharply when the movie box office slumped last fall and the studios canceled 60% of their movie-magazine advertising.

The six leading cinemag publishers* are now making a strenuous bid to get their movie advertising back. Their method: a $50,000 "presentation" to studio heads, based on a two-year survey made by Columbia University's Dr. Paul Lazarsfeld. The Lazarsfeld survey, made public last week, contends that movie-magazine readers are 1) the "opinion leaders" among moviegoers and thus 2) make or break a film at the box office.

The Untarnished Idyl. The first movie magazine appeared in 1909. All copy in an inexpensive little throwaway called Motion Picture Stories was supplied free by the studios. In the years before censorship, cinemag pages were triple-dipped in juicy Hollywood scandal. But in the early '303 the tattlers were forcibly tongue-tied; the studios threatened to deny them access to the stars. Says one publisher: "We were licked. Without Jean Harlow stories alone, we'd have lost 10% of our circulation."

Surprisingly, the readers did not miss the scandal. Explains one editor, "Fan book readers don't want to hear anything derogatory said about the star. They want the myth. . . . We are writing inverse statements of frustration. We paint beautiful pictures of love, excitement, wealth, prestige, security and glamor. . . . We give the reader a feeling of identification [with] the stylized intimacy of a movie star's existence. Every marriage we describe must have an idyllic, untarnished quality to it. If you want to keep on running stories about a star, you must strongly intimate that everything is just the way it was before they were married."

The Safe Faces. Such restrictions limit stories almost entirely to three types: 1) a wife's (or husband's, or sister's, or laundress') eye view of how the popular favorite "really lives"; 2) the shopgirl-to-star Cinderella story; 3) discreet gossip--usually handled (for up to $1,000 a story) by Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons, Sidney Skolsky or some other expert big enough to flout studio censorship.

There are currently only eight "absolutely safe" cover girls: Ingrid Bergman, Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner, June Allyson, Betty Grable, Shirley Temple, June Haver and Esther Williams. A male star on the cover--some editors except Alan Ladd--can reduce newsstand sales (about 95% of the total) by as much as 20%.

Most movie magazine editors wriggle feebly inside their peculiar, specialized rules. Sighed one: "Sometimes you dream of the freedom you'd have with a more intelligent readership. Lots of us are tempted to get into the comic-book field."

*Dell, Fawcett, Hillman, Hunter, Ideal and Macfadden, with a combined fan magazine circulation of 8,500,000.

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