Yahoo News This New Coffee Table Book Celebrates Hollywood’s Most Stylish Eras
There’s just something special about the power of celluloid. Though the movie business as we know it has moved on to digital tools, the analog films from the first half of the 20th century that remain a collective benchmark for storytelling and creative vision. But how we think about Hollywood—its stars, its mighty executives, its almost untouchable glamour—is really owed as much to the printed page as the silver screen. More specifically, the pages of LIFE Magazine, whose iconic imagery of Tinseltown is celebrated in Taschen’s latest tome, LIFE. Hollywood.
From 1936 until its shuttering in 1972, LIFE was a cultural force, a weekly periodical focused on photography that allowed the average American unprecedented access to news and culture. The inner workings of the film industry were a consistent topic for the magazine whose documentation ended up formulating much of the visual language for Hollywood still widely in use today.
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To better contextualize the impact of LIFE’s Hollywood coverage, Taschen has compiled a two-volume set totaling 708 pages containing over 600 annotated photographs from the magazine’s most renowned contributors such as Gordon Parks, Margaret Bourke-White and Gjon Mili. Each of the respective volumes (along with each section within) opens with an essay by author and photography critic Lucy Sante. We spoke with Sante to learn more about what made LIFE’s Hollywood pictorials so potent, how its depiction of movie stars changed over time and why it couldn’t exist today.
How did this project first come your way, and what made you intrigued enough to say yes?
I’ve worked with the editor Reuel Golden before on two projects, one on the photographs of Stanley Kubrick. When he asked me to do this book, it was funny because I used to be a movie critic and I have immense stacks of LIFE Magazine here at my home because I make collages. I’ve got tons of issues from the ‘40s and ‘50s, and I actually worked for Time Life as a proofreader at Sports Illustrated once upon a time. Life and the movies are two subjects in which I felt comfortable.
LIFE Magazine more or less captured every aspect of modern life. How did the magazine’s coverage of the movie business slot into its overall approach to photojournalism?
LIFE started in 1936 and it only took about six months for the first movie star to appear on the cover. After that, it was off to the races, especially by 1939, which was a banner year for movies with Stagecoach and The Wizard of Oz and many others. It just kept on that way through the war years until about the mid-‘50s when the studio system started falling apart. Then the tenor of it changed.
But the thing about LIFE was that it was immensely powerful. It’s hard for people today to wrap their brains around how powerful a single magazine could be if its demographics were the same as television, which is ultimately what wiped it out. It reached everyone: urban, rural, all ethnic groups, rich, poor, in between. It had an unparalleled audience. When a movie studio would announce a new movie, they would often agree to have Life cover it. Sometimes it would be a two-pager, but sometimes it would be a full story. They might even include shots of the movie as it was being filmed.
All this unprecedented access that the movie companies were giving to LIFE Magazine was amply repaid because it was better than a trailer of coming attractions. You had everybody in America, essentially, seeing it and saying, “Next time I’ve got a nickel for the movies, I’m willing to go see that one.” It was symbiotic. The movies gave LIFE access, and LIFE gave the movies the best publicity money could buy.
You mentioned that the tenor of LIFE’s movie coverage changed post-studio system. How did that play out in the magazine’s pages?
The old studio system started falling apart in the early ‘50s after various judicial decisions. Coverage prior to that was intensely choreographed. You might see a major star off duty, having a smoke in some rural area, but they would always be immaculately groomed. They would be posed so it didn’t even look like they were posing. Every detail was attended to.
When the studio system started falling apart and a large number of productions were suddenly made by independent producers, a lot of things changed. For one thing, they tended to close ranks more than the studios had because they didn’t have the same sort of top-down cooperation. The hierarchy of movie decisions was no longer as clear, so then you had moody stars who liked to be shown off duty with their hair messed up and unshaven sitting next to the bathtub. It was just no longer the kind of monolithic spectacle that it had been, although it was still pretty huge with big stories on big movies. They were still able to elevate stars, but the industry wasn’t speaking with one voice as had been the case previously.
In one your essays in the book, you mention that LIFE propagated the idea of Hollywood as a real industry with nuts and bolts components, but also never shied away from its glamorous side. Do you think that LIFE shaped the public’s idea of Hollywood perhaps even more than the movies themselves?
Oh, absolutely. Those divisions had a lot to do with the demographics involved. They didn’t have algorithms in those days, but they could figure out that showing the technical side of Hollywood was going to appeal to dad, and showing the romantic side of Hollywood was going to appeal to mom. And then you had songs and you had drama and you had danger – the stuff that kids could relate to. It was like a whole family representing all the branches of the film industry that they targeted through its various octopus arms.
Was that the case with your family growing up? What was your earliest interaction with LIFE?
My parents started subscribing to LIFE in the late ‘60s, so I was a passive recipient at first. My parents were immigrants and my mother never really learned to speak English very well. So, LIFE was this colorful thing that presented America on a platter and idealized America. They started subscribing in about ‘66 and kept it up until the magazine died in ‘72.
Looking through both volumes, I was continually struck by how inventive, well-composed and beautiful basically every single image was. Are there any specific photographic conventions related to Hollywood that you feel emerged from LIFE that have stuck around?
Definitely. The movie-stars-are-people-just-like-us theme is one. That was huge because the predecessors to Life in covering the movies in America on the magazine front were all the great fan magazines of the ‘20s and ‘30s. But they never broke character. The stars were the stars. Sometimes celebrities would be shown having tea parties or playing croquet, but they were still the stars, whereas LIFE gave the impression of seeing backstage when they were no longer in costume. There was Jimmy Stewart as dad at the old drugstore. This is something that the fan magazines wouldn’t have done. And then, of course, all the technical stuff, which also never appeared in the fan magazines. And the party shots. We know little about the process of making LIFE, but there is something to the cinematic way they put their pages together and how pages flowed into one another.
Taken as a whole, what are some of the things that these images from LIFE tell us about how Hollywood was placed in the broader culture and how it evolved during the magazine’s run? What are some of the most significant differences that set those images apart compared to Hollywood imagery today?
The silver screen was important. It dominated people’s dreams. One thing that struck me while I was looking at all of this material was the transfer of that imagery to LIFE magazine, where people could actually study the images. It modeled a lot of people’s self-presentation, the way people learned how to dress and how to comport themselves at parties. It was a role model for many, many different kinds of people. At the same time, you’re given a glimpse into this kingdom, especially under the studio system, this magical preserve of Hollywood. That started to crumble in the ‘50s and then it was kind of stomped all over in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
Today, it’s quite a different animal. There have been all kinds of changes, yet it’s amazing that some vestiges of the major studios still exist. Now there’s streaming with Amazon and Netflix as these big players. It’s just very different. But I think LIFE has a lot to do with instilling this kind of tribal memory of what the movies are supposed to be. It’s almost like the sacred texts of the elders. The younger ones haven’t looked at it, but they know from the elders that this is how heaven operates, so to speak. I think the mythology of Hollywood was to quite a considerable degree created by LIFE. A magazine like LIFE would be redundant today because magazines barely exist.
There’s a lot more skepticism in the way that the movies are approached now, there’s a lot more criticism. Scandal is allowed to emerge, where it was clamped down on tightly until about the mid-‘50s or even into the ‘60s when they finally got rid of the Hays Code. There’s a certain amount of antagonism on the part of the public when it comes to Hollywood. It’s no longer the kind of worshipful master that it was in the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s. There was still a mystique, but it’s been demystified so many times.
The other thing that is really important is the fact that during the studio system era, there was no such thing as a targeted audience. Every movie was supposed to target every audience. That’s why you have movies that have a little suspense, a little romance, some jokes and a song—they had it all. That’s no longer the case. Now, it’s micro-targeted.
Absolutely. Monoculture, as we say so often today. I imagine over the course of this project that you had the pleasure of reviewing many, many of the images. Do you have a favorite photograph you stumbled across?
For some reason, the one that keeps recurring in my head whenever I think of this book is an amazing picture of the entire crew on a set. It’s like an illustrated list, a vertical panoramic with all the departments holding signs naming their department. That is so LIFE Magazine as it loved to deconstruct things. It’s such a beautiful use of photographic economy. I think of that, and I think of this particularly lovely picture of Veronica Lake, wearing a sheer top with flames in the background so you know she’s the bad woman. She looks so great.
This piggybacks off of something you mentioned earlier. The LIFE Magazine that we all think of was a relaunch in 1936 and it was an illustrated periodical before that. It was announced a few months ago that LIFE Magazine is going to be relaunched again. Does that kind of resurrection make sense today, and what would it need to feel relevant and meaningful?
When I worked at Time Life for six or seven years in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, Life still vestigially existed. But it was targeted as a nostalgia pitch. It was going out to older folks. And then the present was covered strictly in candy-colored tones. All the hard news was out of the picture. By then, it was strictly a comfort item. So now, we’re coming up to a time where a majority of the prospective audience will not have known LIFE when it existed as a vital magazine. What the hell would they do with it? I don’t know. I could see LIFE being a compendium of the great photographs of the week and printed on paper as a kind of keepsake. We have no shortage of images. They’re all over our screens every day. LIFE doesn’t exist anymore.
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