Modern Screen

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Modern Screen was a popular American magazine for over 50 years featuring articles, pictorials and interviews with movie stars (and later television and music personalities.) Modern Screen debuted in November 1930 (some sources say December 1930) and quickly became Photoplay magazine's main competition among dozens of monthly movie magazines published during the era, selling millions of copies each month during the 1930s and 1940s with one of the highest circulations of any magazine in America. By 1933 the magazine was able to boast "The Largest Circulation of Any Screen Magazine" and used the line on its magazine covers. During the early 1930s, the magazine featured artwork portraits of film stars on the cover, by 1940 it had gone to featuring natural color photographs on the cover.

Modern Screen remained a major success through the 1950s but the swift downturn in movie ticket sales at the end of the decade led to a sales decline although the magazine remained popular well into the late 1970s. In the early 1980s, however, the popularity of general interest celebrity publications like People Magazine proved to be the end of old-fashioned movie magazines and Modern Screen quit being published in 1985 after several years of being a bimonthly magazine.

The magazine was published by the Dell Magazines, from New York City. Modern Screen had many different editors in chief over the years, including Richard Heller and Mark Bego, the latter of whom edited the book The Best of Modern Screen (St. Martin's Press, 1986).

[edit] Trivia

  • Lily Tomlin released a comedy album in 1975 that was a parody of celebrity magazines and titled in "Modern Scream".