the earliest days of cinema, local communities had active film cultures with movie fans tracking their favorite films and stars. Unfortunately, much of this has failed to make it into mainstream film histories, and it seems difficult to get a whole picture of film history when so much is neglected. Forgotten Film Stars: Bridging Hollywood and Small Town Audiences proposes to understand film history as a dialogue between Hollywood and small town America, using lesser known silent era film stars as go-betweens, mediating the culture through the values they signified.
Forgotten Film Stars examines the small Midwestern community of Northfield, Minnesota, from 1916-1923, through archival research from newspapers, journals, and scrapbooks. From this research, it becomes clear that Northfielders were avid moviegoers, who wrote about their favorite stars and movies in their journals and scrapbooks. Interestingly, the stars making the biggest splash in town were not the stars still heavily written about today such as Mary Pickford or Douglas Fairbanks, but instead were three actors who are largely unknown today – Marguerite Clark, Wallace Reid, and Sessue Hayakawa. Clark, Reid, and Hayakawa were extremely popular outside of Northfield as well, as is apparent in magazines like Photoplay and Wid’s and the promotional tools used by Famous Players-Lasky (Paramount) Studios. Though they were important stars in their day, they are unknown today largely because few of their films survive, and mostly because film histories tend to ignore local filmgoing audiences. These stars form the case studies for a film history navigating between the local moviegoing audience – in this case Northfield – and the more “official” histories we study today.
Each of these stars were popular in Northfield because of the cultural factors they were signifying. Marguerite Clark and Wallace Reid were seen as ideals of white, American femininity and masculinity. Clark portrayed virginal young girls and Reid starred as dashing, “ ‘andsome ‘eroes.” The Japanese Hayakawa on the other hand, was an exotic sex symbol who negotiated his stardom at a time filled with anti-Japanese anxiety, but also an increased fascination in Japanese art and culture. These stars were each quite different, but as “Forgotten Film Stars” addresses, their popularity in Northfield was enormous.
Forgotten Film Stars argues that without including the perspectives of fans and exhibitors from the communities in which films were received, a significant portion of the film culture dialogue is missing. The approach of this project has been to examine the star images of Marguerite Clark, Wallace Reid, and Sessue Hayakawa as a site where these perspectives come together.
