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This article examines how Sydney movie magazines connected provincial audiences to a globalized culture centered on Hollywood. Such publications recognized that they had to mediate both the economic and the geographic gap that existed between images of film-inspired modernity and their readers' lives. By promising an insider's view, movie magazines brought the distant world of Hollywood celebrity to Australian readers with a powerful immediacy, and urged them to incorporate this information into their daily lives. Movie magazines offered a seductive image of society in which a woman's fate was determined not by her wealth, but by the transformative potential of personal style and self promotion learnt from movies. These sources allow for a case study exploring the nexus between the global and the local in the construction of particular models of femininity, consumption, and modernity.
On 9 June 1923, an Australian photographic studio called out enticingly to the young working women of Sydney: "GIRLS-! You're not Satisfied. You would sooner be a movie star than pursue the daily grind of life as it comes now to you."1 Ashby Studios had carefully placed their advertisement. For several weeks, variants of this seductive cry appeared on the regular fashion page of The Photoplayer, a new Australian magazine designed specifically for movie fans. For the price of a photograph taken at their studios, Ashby held out the chance of a trip to Hollywood and a three month trial at Universal Studios for the winner of their "Ashby Film Star Competition." The ninety-nine runners-up would be put in touch with "local and overseas producers."2 "This," they urged, "is an offer beyond the fondest dreams of girlhood."
A Sydney "girl" of the 1920s was not likely to ever set eyes on Hollywood, let alone transform herself into a "movie star" there.3 Yet even those who would never escape "the daily grind of life" might wish to participate in the particular kind of glamour bound up in American movie culture.4 In the early 1920s, two magazines, The Picture Show and The Photoplayer, showed how it might be done. They provided young working-class women in Sydney with an appealing combination of insider celebrity news and hardheaded practical advice in the business of being modern on what Picture Show described as a...