Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Petersen, Christina G.

Titel

Laugh and Live Longer: The Mass Marketing and Reception of The Freshman

Ist Teil von

• The Freshman, 2019, p.76-94

Auflage

1

Ort / Verlag

United Kingdom: Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2019

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The Freshman’s mass marketing and cultural reception illuminate how the film captivated contemporary audiences and sparked a cycle of college films in the late 1920s that still influence the conventions of today’s youth films. Through exhibitor exploitation strategies meant to blur the line between the campus and the cinema, including tie-ups with national and local press, clothing stores, and football teams, The Freshman sold campus youth culture as a participatory experience accessible to audiences both young and old. Along the same lines, mainstream critics, college students, and international audiences received the film as akin to a live event, similar to the college football game the film depicts, that prompted a sense of embodied participation regardless of spectators’ temporal and physical distance from the events on the screen. As this chapter traces, The Freshman’s participatory ethos, in particular its emphasis on youthful masculinity as linked to athletics and other physical pursuits, kicked off a collegiate film boom in the second half of the 1920s, during which the American film industry produced over 40 films featuring campus culture. More than pale imitations of Lloyd’s blockbuster success, 1920s collegiate films crystallized the elements of the first American youth culture – campus settings, intercollegiate sports, and athletic male stars – that audiences wanted to see and feel for on the screen. This chapter discusses that The Freshman’s somatic address shaped the popular cycle of ‘collegiate’ films that stormed the box office in the second half of the 1920s. After production wrapped in March 1925, The Freshman premiered in late summer in Los Angeles, opened across the United States that fall, and eventually played in every major international market. A downtown Chicago theater advertised The Freshman with the marquee slogan, ‘Laugh and Live Longer!’ with the tantalizing suggestion that watching Lloyd’s latest comedy would lengthen one’s life. In anticipation of the film’s broad appeal despite its depiction of a small segment of the population, The Freshman’s exploitation examined every angle one could think of, with an emphasis on encouraging a feeling of participation in the film beyond the theater. Beyond such scholarly tie-ups, The Freshman’s most successful collegiate angle came from its association with intercollegiate sports, especially the film’s promotion of an overlap between football and film spectators.