New Books Network: Interview with Katherine Fusco on "Hollywood's Others: Love and Limitation in the Star System" (Columbia UP, 2025)

Host: Pete Kunze
Guest: Katherine Fusco, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of English, University of Nevada, Reno
Date: September 6, 2025

Episode Overview

This episode features a discussion with Katherine Fusco about her new book, Hollywood's Others: Love and Limitation in the Star System, which explores how early Hollywood constructed and managed the image of "non-normative" stars within the context of the 1920s and 1930s film industry. Through case studies involving race, disability, childhood, and emotional distress, Fusco examines how fan magazines, studios, and affective responses shaped both the star system and wider social norms.

Guest Background and Origins of the Project

• Fusco's Background:
  • From Rochester, NY, grew up watching films at The Little independent theater.
  • Formal film training at Vanderbilt, focusing on silent film and US literature.

    “I always want to shout out my hometown of Rochester, New York, which has a great independent theater called the Little which is where I grew up watching movies...” —Katherine Fusco (02:03)

• How Project Began:
  • Sparked at Silent Film Festival in Pordenone, Italy, by observing Farina, a gender-ambiguous Black child actor in the Our Gang (Little Rascals) films.
  • Noticed the shifting portrayal of Farina's gender and immense popularity during a time of racial violence and Jim Crow.

    "...the seed of this project, which is thinking about how stars who are one or another way, kind of outside of a white, normative, heterosexual kind of mainstream. How are they being marketed to this mainstream?" —Katherine Fusco (05:09)

Entering Star Studies: Influences & Theoretical Frameworks

• Star Studies Traditions:
  • Cites work on “aspirational” and “relatable” stars; classic references to Richard Dyer’s analysis of public persona.
  • Raises question of non-aspirational or "iconoclastic" stars, like Lon Chaney, who disrupt these tropes.
• Picture Personality & Silent Film Studies:
  • Draws on Richard de Cordova's concept of early “picture personality,” where studios emphasized character over actor biography.

    “One thing that I noticed with some of the actors or character types that I'm writing about is that they were behaving a lot like kind of picture personality...” —Katherine Fusco (08:33)

• Notable Moment:
  • Correction about Richard Dyer being mistaken as deceased in Fusco's acknowledgements, adding a touch of levity. (06:14)

Case Study: Lon Chaney and the Power of the Mask

• Book Cover Image:
  • Features a publicity photo of Lon Chaney in Phantom of the Opera, face obscured.
• Chaney’s Resistance to Persona:
  • Sought to keep his personal life private and foregrounded transformative makeup and character work.
  • Fan magazines attempted to reassure the public of his "normality" beneath roles, even as audiences were captivated by his strangeness.

    "Part of what's interesting about Lon Chaney is everybody's showing up to see, like, what's he gonna look like this time?" —Katherine Fusco (10:13) "...what they're clearly so invested in is the strangeness of his appearance from film to film." (11:10)

Fan Magazines: Sources, Pleasures, and Pitfalls

• Sources:
  • Relied on digitized fan magazines during pandemic lockdown, particularly via the Media History Digital Library and Lantern.
• Role of Magazines:
  • Not merely studio mouthpieces—fans’ questions and feedback shaped content.
  • Fan magazines as “a school for fandom in a nervous age”—instructing mainstream America on how to respond to difference, within certain limits.

    “You could see stars being constructed certain ways...teaching fans based on things they already know or other movies they've maybe already seen.” —Katherine Fusco (14:10)

• Trade Magazines:
  • Included practical exhibitor advice (e.g., "dress up" days tied to Our Gang films).
• Limits as Evidence:
  • Fan magazines are unreliable as pure factual sources, better treated as cultural texts for analysis.

    "...they're not a source of truth. Like, you can't count on for anything to be true." (15:53)

Theoretical Deep Dive: Affect, Fandom, and Regulation

• Affect Theory Applied:
  • Fan magazines mediate feelings, instructing mainstream audiences how to feel about “the other.”
  • The period (1920s–1930s) was marked by social tumult: postwar returnees, women's suffrage, civil rights, child labor debates.

    “It's like this very kind of tumultuous time, both in the United States and then also for the film industry. And so what I'm arguing in the book is that you can see fandom as a place where these kinds of things are being worked out.” —Katherine Fusco (16:57)

  • Hollywood's own self-regulation era (pre-Hays Code) foregrounded negotiations of representation.
• Fandom Policed by Stardom:
  • Stars and publicity teach fans which attachments are acceptable; affect is modulated and limited.
  • Example: Jean Harlow’s contract disputes reframed as “misunderstandings among friends,” not labor strife—fans instructed to read industry conflict as personal, not political.

    "...the magazine does all this kind of like weird work to be like, you know, hey, 1930s readers, this is not a labor dispute. This is not like somebody basically like walking off set... you are friends." (21:11)

Industry, Authorship, and the Fan Magazine-Studio Nexus

• Complex Relationship:
  • Studios could threaten to limit access if magazines ran unfavorable stories.
  • Magazines offered some editorial independence but were not fully autonomous.

    "...if your reporters, if your writers don't play nice with us, we don't have to make our stars accessible to you." —Katherine Fusco (26:18)

• Editorial Control:
  • Reveals Shirley Temple's mother’s hands-on censorship and approval of copy, demonstrating the layers of image management.

Focus on the Non-Normative: Race, Disability, Depression

• Race:
  • Draws on scholarship by Miriam Petty and Anna Everett regarding Black actors’ struggles for agency within white-controlled productions.
  • Follows fan magazine discourse to see how white mainstream audiences were taught to empathize with—but only up to a point—Black performers like Louise Beavers (Imitation of Life).

    "What does this tell us about the way white audiences are being encouraged to like, empathize with black performers, but only to an extent?" (32:07)

• Disability:
  • Lon Chaney’s physical transformations and rumors of harm highlight complex intersections of sympathy/discomfort.
• Depression and Star Suicide:
  • Discusses how coverage of suicides (e.g., Paul Bern, Thelma Todd) tended to favor murder theories over confronting mental illness, reflecting unease with stars as victims of private emotional suffering.

Structure of the Book: Babies, Nobodies, and the Unhappy

• The Babies:
  • Child stars (Farina, Shirley Temple) represent a form of safe, limited empathy; easier for fans to love.
• The Nobodies:
  • Stars with biographical erasure (Lon Chaney, supporting Black actors)—public fascination mixes with enforced ignorance or conflation with their roles.
• The Unhappy:
  • Focus on depressives and suicides, where affective management becomes most fraught for audiences and industry alike.

    "...the Problem of the Depressive. And so what I found...was like, a real desire in the fan magazines and among fans to interpret star suicides as murders..." —Katherine Fusco (35:55)

• Key Insight:
  • The arc progresses from the most “loveable” or accessible to the most challenging or disturbing to fans’ affective investments.

Impact and Hopes for the Field

• Who Should Read the Book:
  • Scholars of film, star studies, race, and affect; anyone interested in celebrity or media history.
• Provocations for Future Research:
  • Encourages exploration of non-normative stars and messy, ambivalent audience relationships.

    "I hope there's maybe room for more of that kind of research...being attached to a star that you have real ambivalence about..." —Katherine Fusco (39:47)

• Fan Attachments Are Not Always Positive:
  • The book opens intellectual space for examining ambivalent/addictive/negative fan responses and affective complexity.

Katherine Fusco’s Current & Future Projects

• Two New Books:
  • Study of women in slapstick comedy at Hal Roach Studios, focusing on Thelma Todd and Zezu Pitts.
  • Biography of Anita Loos (author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), grappling with biographical complexities and her own mixed feelings as a fan-scholar.

    “I am writing it, feeling all of these, like, mixed feelings about Anita, who I love, but also I'm, like, disappointed in sometimes...” —Katherine Fusco (42:46)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Early Fan Studies:

  "Fan magazines...are not a source of truth. Like, you can't count on for anything to be true. So… I really treated them as items of analysis. Right. Their own kind of cultural objects..." —Katherine Fusco (15:53)

• On Affect Management:

  “There needs to be...some room for, you know, like agency for difficult women, but only so much. Right. There needs to be, like, some nod to what's going on with civil rights...but only to a certain extent.” —Katherine Fusco (17:39)

• On Ambivalence and Fandom:

  “There are strong feelings we might have about different stars that are messy...fascinations with stars that are not necessarily positive or that aren't all about identifying.” —Katherine Fusco (39:45)

Timestamps for Key Segments

• Background and Project Origins: 02:03–05:09
• Entering Star Studies & Theoretical Approaches: 06:05–08:33
• Lon Chaney and Book Cover: 09:32–11:10
• Fan Magazines as Method & Source: 12:17–16:08
• Affect Theory and “School for Fandom”: 16:41–19:33
• Policing Fandom, Jean Harlow Example: 20:12–22:48
• Fan Magazine–Studio Relationship: 25:17–27:23
• Race and Disability: 27:54–33:12
• Book Structure ("Babies," "Nobodies," "Unhappy"): 33:40–37:51
• Hopes for Research: 38:54–41:22
• Fusco’s Upcoming Work: 41:32–43:53

Episode Tone

Insightful, reflective, and collegial, with moments of academic humor and honest engagement with both the pleasures and frustrations of researching early Hollywood stardom and its affective machinery.

For further information, read Katherine Fusco’s Hollywood's Others: Love and Limitation in the Star System, available from Columbia University Press.