Introduction: Olympus Moves to Hollywood

Abstract

‘Hollywood is the world’s new Olympus. Hollywood is bringing back the glory that was Greece’.¹ So claimed American fan-magazine Photoplay in a remarkable 1928 feature in which cinema’s contemporary idols were imagined not only to ‘bring back the glory that was Greece’ but to surpass it. These modern deities are thus exemplars of beauty, brain and physical health, qualities scientifically proven here in helpful tables that compare ‘Early Greek’ and a composite of 69 ‘Modern Hollywood’ Apollos and 72 Venuses; their statistics ‘measurement for measurement’ equating flesh with marble, with just a half-inch deviation here and there to show that their figures are slightly more streamlined for the age of Art Deco. It is striking how taken-for-granted the divinising rhetoric is in the article’s subheading: it is the ‘discovery’ of comparative measurements that is presented as ‘startling’, not that the stars be considered ‘gods and goddesses’ in the first place. Yet, lest it be thought this publicity stunt were an exercise in mere kitsch, a contrivance of an industry criticised ‘by the self-elected intelligentsia as glorifying the moron’, the magazine asserts that these truly classical Hollywood idols are instead a modern realisation of the bodies beautiful celebrated by Greece, ‘the most intellectual of all ancient nations’. Thus youth, art and beauty now triumph on the screen in the form of ‘modern living gods’, shining to be worshipped in ‘temples of the motion picture’, in place of the museums that house only broken and half-forgotten marbles, the ‘pale portraits of a vivid life’.