Advertising and femininity: The case of Our Mutual Girl

Screen

Volumn 40, Issue 4, 1999, Pages 363-382

  Luckett, Moya ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60950202476     PISSN: 00369543     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/screen/40.4.363     Document Type: Review

References (88)

1. For further discussion of early cinema attractions see Tom Gunning, 'The cinema of attractions: early film, its spectator, and the avant garde', Wide Angle, vol. 8. nos 3-4 (1986), pp. 63-77
2. Tom Gunning, '"Now you see it, now you don't": the temporality of the cinema of attractions', The Velvet Light Trap, no. 32 (Fall 1993), pp. 3-12
3. Linda Williams also discusses the erotic and gendered ancestry of the cinematic look and its attractions from its prehistory in the protocinematic photographic experiments of Eadweard Muybridge and others to the genre of early stag films. Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power. Pleasure and the 'Frenzy of the Visible' (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 34-92
4. For further discussion of these trends, see Jane Gaines, 'From elephants to Lux soap: the programming and "flow" of early motion picture exploitation', The Velvet Light Trap, no. 25 (Spring 1990), pp. 29-43
5. Moya Luckett, 'Cities and spectators: a historical analysis of film audiences in Chicago, 1910-1915' (University of Wisconsin-Madison PhD thesis, 1995), pp. 209-66
6. For further discussion of women's leisure during this period, see Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1986)
7. See, for example, Lauren Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies and Culture in Turn-of-the Century Chicago (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998)
8. Shelley Stamp Lindsey, 'Is any girl safe?; female spectators at the white slave films', Screen, vol. 37. no. 1 (1996), pp. 1-15
9. Janet Staiger, 'Announcing wares, winning patrons, voicing ideals: thinking about the history and theory of film advertising', Cinema Journal, vol. 29, no. 3 (1990), p. 27, fn. 37
10. It is also important to stress that Mutual planned to handle its feature films separately at the time it launched its Our Mutual Girl campaign through a subsidiary called Federal Features. 'Mutual features ready', Variety, vol. 33, no. 2 (12 December 1913), p. 13
11. For a more detailed discussion of early film advertising see Janet Staiger, 'Combination and litigation: structures of US film distribution, 1896-1917', Cinema Journal, vol. 23, no. 2 (1983), pp. 3-31
12. 'Lederer a movie maker: to produce feature films', Variety, vol. 31, no. 12 (22 August 1913), p. 14
13. See, for example, John D. Rathburn, Motion Picture Making and Exhibiting (Chicago, IL: Charles C. Thompson Company, 1914)
14. Epes Winthrop Sargent, Picture Theatre Advertising (New York: The Moving Picture World/Chalmers Publishing Company, 1915)
15. 'Independent combination against "picture trust"', Variety, vol. 32, no. 10 (7 November 1913), p. 15
16. Unlike the 1908-12 battles for control of distribution outlined by Janet Staiger, these struggles favoured such strategies as: advertising; the adoption of new technologies; the innovation of new production trends, such as serials and feature-length films; and the move to showcase films within larger and more lavish movie theatres. Staiger, 'Combination and litigation', pp. 41-72, esp. pp. 41-56
17. 'Mutual's novelty', Variety, vol. 32, no. 2 (21 November 1913), p. 8
18. See Mutual's advertisements: 'Making patrons for your theater', The Moving Picture World, vol. 13, no. 12 (20 December 1913), p. 1471
19. 'MUTUAL movies service supplies more than films', Variety, vol. 33, no. 4 (26 December 1913), p. 34
20. Warren I. Susman, Culture As History: the Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1973), pp. 271-80
21. See Sargent, Picture Theater Advertising, esp. p. 3. His regular columns in The Moving Picture World espouse the same philosophy throughout 1914
22. 'Novel ad for Mutual exhibitors', The Moving Picture World, vol. 18 no. 12 (20 December 1913), p. 1427
23. 'David W. (Lawrence) Griffith with Mutual', The Moving Picture World, vol. 18, no. 6 (8 November 1913), p. 591 states that Griffith was hired 'to produce large screen attractions for the Reliance and Majestic Companies and [to] supervise the pictures in script form for the entire Mutual program as well as act[ing] in an advisory capacity to alt the Mutual's producing companies'
24. Also see 'Independent combination against "picture trust"', p. 15
25. 'New Reliance plant', Variety, vol. 33, no. 2 (12 December 1913), p. 13
26. 'Mutual's experiment', Variety, vol. 33, no. 13 (27 February 1914), p. 21
27. 'Mutual signs Mindil', Variety, vol. 32, no. 11 (14 November 1913), p. 14. Norma Phillips - star of Our Mutual Girl - was also a Variety cover girl this week, her photo taking centre stage, flanked by smaller images of Vivian Martin, Florence LaBadie and Pauline Bush
28. Staiger, 'Announcing wares', p. 8
29. 'Independent combination against "picture trust"', p. 15
30. 'First to Broadway', Variety, vol. 32, no. 12 (12 November 1913), p. 8 (emphasis mine)
31. Descriptions from Reel Life, vol. V, no. 10 (21 November 1914), p. 29
32. The Saturday Evening Post, vol. 186, no. 21 (22 November 1913)
33. Variety, vol. 33, no. 1 (13 December 1913), p. 26
34. Mutual's advertisement in The Moving Picture World (13 December 1913), p. 1325, promised 'they will keep asking for "The Mutual Girl" for months to come'
35. Advertisement in Variety, vol. 32, no. 13 (28 November 1913), p. 23
36. 'David W. (Lawrence) Griffith with Mutual', p. 591
37. The Moving Picture World, vol. 18, no. 10 (6 December 1913), pp. 1176-7
38. Advertisement, The Moving Picture World, vol. 18. no. 10 (6 December 1913)
39. Mary Beth Haralovich, 'Advertising heterosexuality', Screen, vol. 23, no. 2 (1982), pp. 179-98
40. Sime, review of Our Mutual Girl episodes 4 and 5, Variety, vol. 33, no. 11 (13 February 1914), p. 24
41. Richard de Cordova, Picture Personalities: the Emergence of the Star System in America (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990), pp. 7-97
42. An interview with Phillips in Reel Life underscores this point. The interviewer asks the following question: 'Miss Phillips ... though many people know and love you all over the United States, you're still a great mystery to us all. Is your real name Margaret?' The personal side of the pictures', Reel Life, vol. IV, no. 17 (11 July 1914), p. 19
43. The National Commercial Gas Association advertising campaign, The Saturday Evening Post, 1913-14
44. 'Mutual Girl series', The Moving Picture World, vol. 18, no. 13 (27 December 1913), p. 1525
45. 'Mutual Starts things', The Moving Picture World, vol. 18. no. 11 (13 December 1913), p. 1260
46. Judith Still, Feminine Economies: Thinking Against the Market in the Enlightenment and the Late Twentieth Century (Manchester Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 1-34, 181-6
47. Advertisement in Variety, vol. 33, no. 3 (19 December 1913), p. 36
48. Advertisement in Reel Life, vol. IV, no. 11 (30 May 1914), p. 36
49. Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 56
50. Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, quoted in Schor, Reading in Detail, pp. 57-8
51. Ben Singer, 'Female power in the serial-queen melodrama: the etiology of an anomaly', Camera Obscura, vol. 22 (January 1990), p. 100
52. 'Mutual Girl entertains Broadway', The Moving Picture World, vol. 19, no. 5 (31 January 1914), p. 523
53. 'Exhibitors news', Billy Bison's report from North Western New York and Murray's report from Missouri, The Moving Picture World, vol. 19, no. 8 (21 February 1914), pp. 854, 981
54. William's report from Indiana. The Moving Picture World, vol. 19. no. 11 (14 March 1914), p. 1402
55. Cinema, 'From our London correspondent', Reel Life, vol. IV, no. 9 (16 May 1914), p. 26
56. The Eavesdropper, 'Heard in studio and exchange', Reel Life, vol. IV, no. 6 (25 April 1914), p. 14
57. 'Stories of the new photoplays', Reel Life, vol. IV. no. 25 (5 September 1914), p. 8
58. See, for example, Luce Irigary, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985)
59. Helene Cixous, Coming to Writing and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992)
60. Schor, Reading In Detail
61. Sime, review of Our Mutual Girl episodes 4 and 5, p. 24
62. Schor, Reading in Detail, p. 4
63. See, for example, Elizabeth Cowie, Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997)
64. Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: the Woman's Film of the 1940s (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987)
65. Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989)
66. Constance Penley, The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989)
67. Singer, 'Female power in the serial-queen melodrama', pp. 91-9
68. Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907-1915 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1990), p. 185
69. '"Our Mutual Girl" and Walter Damrosch assist a deserving musician', p. 12
70. Our Mutual Girl advertisement, Reel Life, vol. IV, no. 9 (16 May 1914), p. 3
71. 'Our Mutual Girl is exonerated', Reel Life, vol. V, no. 5 (17 October 1914), p. 17
72. '"Our Mutual Girl"and Walter Damrosch assist a deserving musician', p. 12
73. 'Our Mutual Girl keeps baby Lily', Reel Life, vol. V, no. 2 (26 September 1914) (emphasis in original)
74. 'Our Mutual Girl adopts a baby', p. 17 (emphasis mine)
75. '"Our Mutual Girl" and Walter Damrosch assist a deserving musician, p. 12
76. Advertisement, Variety, vol. 33. no. 10 (6 February 1914), p. 26
77. See, for example, Pam Cook's discussion of national identity in Fashioning the Nation: Costume and Identity in British Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1996), esp. pp. 36-8
78. 'Our Mutual Girl meets Commander Evans', narrative for episode 12, Reel Life, vol. IV, no. 3 (4 April 1914), p. 12
79. Advertisement for Our Mutual Girl Weekly, Reel Life, vol. IV, no. 23 (22 August 1914), p. 30
80. 'Facts and figures and such', Reel Life, vol. IV, no. 17 (11 July 1914), p. 6
81. Alternatively, exhibitors personalize the front, as favoured by Mrs George Krupa, wife of the manager of The Hippodrome in Lancaster, PA: 'This space could be divided so as to net ten dollars from advertising ... but we think it to our advantage to use the largest space for our program, as that seems to be an inducement to get it in the home where it should be, as it is such a delightfully, interesting magazine for the ladies.... Expect in the future to increase our weekly order to 1000 copies.' 'House advertising without cost', Reel Life, vol. V, no. 2 (26 September 1914), p. 4
82. Cook, Fashioning the Nation, p. 47
83. 'The listener chatters', p. 6
84. Advertisement, Reel Life, vol. IV, no. 11 (30 May 1914), p. 31
85. advertisement, Reel Life, vol. IV, no. 23 (22 August 1914), p. 30
86. F.R. Richardson, 'Women and children', The Moving Picture World, vol. 19, no. 8 (21 February 1914), p. 962
87. Reel Life, vol. V, no. 8 (7 November 1914), p. 6
88. This description of the female spectator is drawn from Doane, The Desire to Desire, p. 1