A Century of Hollywood Publicity
Anne Helen Petersen
Anne Helen Petersen received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, where she wrote her dissertation on the industrial history of celebrity gossip.
Apocryphal myth places the beginning of Hollywood stardom in 1910, when producer Carl Laemmle planted a fake newspaper story concerning the death of “The Biograph Girl” that effectively made that girl, Florence Lawrence, into a household name. Before, stars were known only by their studio-given, anonymous nicknames: “The Girl with the Curls” or “The Girl with the Dimples.” Yet, as several film historians have pointed out, star names were certainly known before that time; in the nineteenth-century theater, stars (Sarah Bernhardt, for example) were consistently employed to hype new attractions. In short, Laemmle did not create stars. Instead, Hollywood stars were the cumulative result of a gradual yet steady release of information concerning those who appeared on the screen.