Motion Play

Motion Play Magazine (1920-22) was one of many magazines for movie fans, but unique by virtue of being a newspaper supplement distributed free with Sunday papers such as the Washington Herald and the Indianapolis Star, along with a half-dozen others in the Midwest and Northeast. The syndicated magazine expanded the national reach of an earlier 1919 insert in the Philadelphia Record, which provided “news of screen players and plays, in rich sepia rotogravure.” Circulation reached nearly six hundred thousand by the end of 1921.While this was a modest result compared to syndicated color comics, it gave Motion Play a higher circulation than any fan magazine in the 1920s. In 1922, the movie features were folded into a general magazine in 1922 and the title “Motion Play” discontinued. Motion Play’s slim eight pages did not require staples or a glued spine, but its layout and content otherwise fit the form of other fan magazines of its day—a full-page poster cover of a movie star and other “portraits of the foremost cinema stars, together with interesting gossip about them and their work.”

– Paul Moore, March 2024