Hollywood History

Growth and Expansion at the Walt Disney Company (Film Daily, 1939)

Herein is a 1939 article from a defunct Hollywood trade magazine marking the construction of a 20 acre facility for the Disney studio in Burbank, California:

By 1930, the Walt Disney studio had grown in fantastic fashion. Instead of the 25 employees of 1929, there were now 40 people…By the end of the year there were 66 employees…In 1931 the total number of personnel had jumped to 106…When ‘The Three Little Pigs’ came along in 1933, the studio had grown 1,600 square feet of floor space in 1929, to 20,000 square feet. A hundred and fifty people were now turning out the Disney productions… In 1937, all the employees were still jostling each other… From around 600 employees in the summer of 1937, the organization had grown to almost 900 by the winter of 1938.

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Lana Turner (Quick Magazine, 1949)

When this Hollywood profile first appeared on paper, actress Lana Turner (1921 – 1995) was all of twenty-nine years of age and about to begin working on A Life of Her Own
it was her thirtieth movie; her last four films had nearly grossed a record-breaking $20 million, and her smiling mug was on each and every Hollywood fan magazine that could be found.

Today, the sleek, gray-eyed Lana has shed the plumpness of two years ago, keeps her weight between to 118 and 127 lbs… Now Lana is as shapely as she was in those early days. She has the ‘perfect’ figure: 5 ft. 3 in., 34-in. bust, 24-in. waist, 34.5 in. hips.


The article is illustrated with photographs from eight of her pre-’49 movies and lists all the husbands that she’d collected up to that same period (she had acquired eight husbands before she was through).

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The High and the Mighty and the Movies They Loved(Photoplay Magazine, 1937)

Royalty and rulers of the world are movie fans. The cinema tastes of the great are disclosed for the first time in this article.

Listed in the attached 1937 Hollywood fan magazine article are the names of the favorite movies of Gandhi, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco, Hirohito, Roosevelt and many more.

Click here to read about happy Hollywood’s discovery of plastic surgery…

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Edwige Feuillère Gets Liberated (Collier’s, 1946)

A 1946 article in which the beloved French actress Edwige Feuillère (1907 – 1998) is personified as the epitome of wounded French Glamor returned to it’s rightful place following the hasty retreat of those nasty Huns from the boulevards of lovely Paris:

Edwige Feuillère, France’s Number One actress, is wearing evening clothes again – and all fashionable Paris rejoices. It is a sort of symbol, the blooming of the lovely Edwige into full-panoplied formality. For she, along with most women of France, abstained from festivities and the clothes that go with them throughout the war.

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The High and the Mighty and the Movies They Loved(Photoplay Magazine, 1937)

Royalty and rulers of the world are movie fans. The cinema tastes of the great are disclosed for the first time in this article.

Listed in the attached 1937 Hollywood fan magazine article are the names of the favorite movies of Gandhi, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco, Hirohito, Roosevelt and many more.

Click here to read about happy Hollywood’s discovery of plastic surgery…

The High and the Mighty and the Movies They Loved(Photoplay Magazine, 1937) Read More »

One Cartoonist’s View of Depression Era Hollywood…(Ken Magazine, 1939)

A full page drawing of the sound stage-spangled Hollywood landscape picturing all the usual suspects – the Hollywood glory girls, studio yes-men and sub-literate European starlets -all sweltering beneath the intense heat of the occidental sun.

Click here to see cartoons about the silent movie culture.

Click here to read historic magazine articles about American animated films.

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Boris Karloff: Gentle Monster (Collier’s Magazine, 1941)

Adorned with photos of the famous movie-monster-actor mowing his lawn and kissing his wife, this COLLIER’S MAGAZINE article tells the tale of how an English boy named William Henry Pratt became a famous Hollywood actor named Boris Karloff (1887 – 1969). This piece was originally conceived in order to promote the actor’s appearance on Broadway in the roll of Jonathan in Arsenic and Old Lace. The writer makes it quite clear to all that the show-biz career did not in any way come easily to Karloff and involved years of truck driving and traveling about performing in summer-stock theaters throughout the whole of North America before he was able to make a name for himself as a bit actor in the silent films of Hollywood.

Click here to read about the vulgar side of Erroll Flynn.

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