Screen and Radio Weekly

Screen and Radio Weekly (1934-40) was launched by the Detroit Free Press in April 1934 and published with that masthead until 1940, when its material was folded into the paper’s general content Sunday Magazine. By October 1934, it was syndicated nationally in dozens of different newspapers, all offering “a week-end of gala reading enjoyment. Not just ‘another section,’ but a full-size tabloid in brilliant colors and breezy pictorial, FREE with your Sunday Free Press,” or Sunday Oakland Tribune, or Sunday Democrat and Chronicle, or whichever location the novelty began, separated by months and thousands of miles across the entire United States. The sixteen-page tabloid magazine was printed in bold color blocking, featuring rainbow-bright portraits of movie stars on its front and back covers. There are indications it was available as a magazine in its own right, not only as a newspaper supplement, at least in Detroit. Over its six years of publication, Screen and Radio Weekly was included in at least thirty-two papers, at least fifteen concurrently in 1937. Its circulation approached 1.5 million copies weekly at the time, higher than the watermark for Photoplay (1911-80) of 1.4 million circulation in the mid-1950s. Douglas Martin was editor in Detroit and Grace Wilcox, his recently widowed sister-in-law, penned the main gossip column from Los Angeles, “Hollywood Reporter” (apparently no relation to the fledgling magazine of the same name). Wilcox’s bylines also often used her married name, Edith Dietz. She had worked in the publicity departments at Mutual and Universal, then writing for the Los Angeles Express in late 1910s, It Magazine in the early 1920s, and the Los Angeles Times in the late 1920s, before writing screenplays for Anna May Wong. Another near-weekly reporter in the magazine’s first months was Douglas W. Churchill, just before he became Hollywood correspondent for the New York Times.

– Paul Moore, March 2024