Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
Speaker 1: of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 1: Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Dorothy Arsner got the really
Speaker 1: briefest of mentions in our episode on Billy Burke from
Speaker 1: August of twenty twenty three, which I could have sworn
Speaker 1: was something that came out last year. Yeah, time is
Speaker 1: passing at an alarming rate. It is. We did not
Speaker 1: really say much about Dorothy Arsner in that Billy Burke episode,
Speaker 1: other than that she was the only woman director in
Speaker 1: Hollywood at the time and that there were rumors that
Speaker 1: she and Burke were in a romantic relationship. I stumbled
Speaker 1: across Dorothy Arsner's name again sometime recently. I don't even
Speaker 1: remember exactly when or where, but I was immediately intrigued.
Speaker 1: So I stopped what I was doing, checked in with
Speaker 1: Holly to make sure Holly did not have Dorothy Arsner
Speaker 1: on her list. Nope, uh, and then I got started
Speaker 1: on an episode. Dorothy Arsner was not the first female
Speaker 1: film director in the United States, but she really was
Speaker 1: the only one working in the Hollywood studio system during
Speaker 1: most of the period of her career that's in what's
Speaker 1: known today as the Hollywood Golden Age, and even though
Speaker 1: her career was fairly short, she is still one of
Speaker 1: the most prolific female film directors in Hollywood history. Dorothy
Speaker 1: Emma Arsner was born on January third, eighteen ninety seven,
Speaker 1: although later on she often gave her birth year as
Speaker 1: nineteen hundred. Her father, Ludwig Adolph Arsner, was from Germany
Speaker 1: and he went by Lewis. Her mother, Janet Young, who
Speaker 1: was known as Jenny, was from Scotland. Dorothy had one
Speaker 1: older brother named David, and when she was born, they
Speaker 1: lived in San Francisco, California. So when Dorothy was about five,
Speaker 1: her parents divorced. There's not a lot of detail available here,
Speaker 1: but she did remember them arguing a lot prior to
Speaker 1: that divorce. Lewis got sole custody of Dorothy and David,
Speaker 1: and they did not have contact with their mother again,
Speaker 1: and that includes even after her mother apparently tried to
Speaker 1: track them down a few years later. After the divorce, Lewis, Dorothy,
Speaker 1: and David all moved to Los Angeles, and Lewis got
Speaker 1: married again to a woman named Mabel Mills. This sounds
Speaker 1: like it was all pretty understandably upsetting for both of
Speaker 1: the children. Mabel tried to be nice, but she was
Speaker 1: really a stranger to them, and Dorothy and David refused
Speaker 1: to be left with her while their father went to
Speaker 1: work at the restaurant that he was managing. In a
Speaker 1: partial autobiography that Arsner wrote much later on, she described
Speaker 1: herself as eventually finding sympathy for everyone involved, but only
Speaker 1: much later after she had matured. She describes Mabel as
Speaker 1: kind to her and her brother and never trying to
Speaker 1: force a relationship with them, but it's also clear that
Speaker 1: at least at first, things were just not working. For
Speaker 1: a while, Dorothy and David were sent to live in
Speaker 1: a boarding house, and then they were split up, with
Speaker 1: David going to live with an aunt in Cleveland, Ohio,
Speaker 1: and Dorothy going to live with Mabel's mother, Elizabeth, who
Speaker 1: she knew as Ma'am. Ma'am lived in Oakland, and when
Speaker 1: Dorothy was eight years old. They lived through the nineteen
Speaker 1: oh six earthquake and fire that we have covered on
Speaker 1: the show before that ran as a Saturday Classic on
Speaker 1: May twenty fifth, twenty twenty four. This earthquake is often
Speaker 1: described as happening in San Francisco, but it was severe
Speaker 1: across the Bay in Oakland as well. Ma'am's house was
Speaker 1: one of the few in their neighborhood that still had water,
Speaker 1: and they tried to help their neighbors by sharing what
Speaker 1: they had. Afterward, they housed some of MAM's friends from
Speaker 1: San Francisco who had lost their homes in the fire.
Speaker 1: As we've discussed on the show before, this fire destroyed
Speaker 1: a lot of San Francisco's vital records, and later on
Speaker 1: it seems like Arsner used this as cover to trim
Speaker 1: those few years off of her age, but in the
Speaker 1: more immediate aftermath of the earthquake, her father and stepmother
Speaker 1: decided to reunite the family in Los Angeles. Louis Arsner
Speaker 1: ran a series of restaurants in Los Angeles. One of
Speaker 1: them was the Hoffman Cafe, which was known for its
Speaker 1: Hollywood clientele, including people like Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and
Speaker 1: Charlie Chaplin. A lot of more recent writing about Arsner
Speaker 1: points to this as an early exposure to the Hollywood
Speaker 1: scene that she would later build a career in, something
Speaker 1: that familiarized her with industry lingo and made it feel
Speaker 1: kind of like no big deal to be around a
Speaker 1: bunch of celebrities, But accounts from her lifetime are kind
Speaker 1: of contrad about this. She gave some interviews that made
Speaker 1: it sound like she wasn't allowed to be at the restaurant,
Speaker 1: but in other interviews she said that she was there
Speaker 1: a lot and was always overhearing conversations about show business.
Speaker 1: It's also not really clear whether her time at the
Speaker 1: restaurant might have made her more comfortable around famous people.
Speaker 1: She gave an interview in nineteen seventy three with director
Speaker 1: Francine Parker in which she said she was afraid of
Speaker 1: all of the actors because they liked to pick her
Speaker 1: up and throw her into the air. So many questions
Speaker 1: emerge in that moment. She she didn't like to talk
Speaker 1: about herself is the vibe that I got, And she
Speaker 1: didn't like to talk about her career and any of that,
Speaker 1: And I think that might contribute to why a lot
Speaker 1: of her interviews just don't say the same thing. My
Speaker 1: thing is more like they were doing what I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: were they physically lifting you and tossing you about? Not cool? Uh?
Speaker 1: From the time she was very young, people thought of
Speaker 1: Dorothy as a tomboy as an adult. She wrote that
Speaker 1: she wondered whether this traced back to her relationship with
Speaker 1: her brother. David had desperately wanted a baby brother when
Speaker 1: she was born, and he basically treated her like one.
Speaker 1: There are pictures of Arsner as a teen that show
Speaker 1: her an ad dress with her hair loose and down
Speaker 1: to her waist, but there are also pictures of her
Speaker 1: in what would be considered boy's clothes. For example, there's
Speaker 1: a scrapbook page labeled Garth for a night Quite a Boy,
Speaker 1: in which she's wearing a suit with a bow tie
Speaker 1: in two of the pictures, and her hair is tucked
Speaker 1: up under a newsboy cap. By nineteen twelve, her stepmother
Speaker 1: had started to see this tomboyishness as a concern, and
Speaker 1: Mabel enrolled Dorothy at Westlake School for Girls, apparently thinking
Speaker 1: that a college preparatory school for girls might make Dorothy
Speaker 1: more feminine. While there, she was on the yearbook staff,
Speaker 1: and she was involved in art, drama, and tennis, as
Speaker 1: far as Mabel's goal of making her more feminine. In
Speaker 1: Dorothy's graduation photo, taken in nineteen fifteen, she's in a
Speaker 1: white dress with a large white bow holding her hair back,
Speaker 1: and she's holding her rose. Her expression really reads to
Speaker 1: me like, here I put on the dress. Are you
Speaker 1: satisfied now? Or maybe kind of a mix of being
Speaker 1: like tolerant and simultaneously very annoyed in these pictures. To me,
Speaker 1: she just seems to feel a lot more at home
Speaker 1: as Garth for a night. But we really don't have
Speaker 1: any information from her from her own point of view
Speaker 1: about how she conceived of her gender. After graduating from Westlake,
Speaker 1: Dorothy enrolled at the University of Southern California as a
Speaker 1: pre med student, and she joined the university rowing team.
Speaker 1: Her plan was to go to medical school, but World
Speaker 1: War One was already under way and the US entered
Speaker 1: the war in nineteen seventeen. Dorothy left school and she
Speaker 1: started working on various projects to raise funds and gather supply.
Speaker 1: She also trained with the Los Angeles Emergency Ambulance Corps,
Speaker 1: but she was never sent overseas. After the war ended,
Speaker 1: and after the end of the nineteen eighteen flu pandemic,
Speaker 1: Arsener didn't go back to school. In a later interview,
Speaker 1: she was quoted as saying that she had decided it
Speaker 1: just wasn't what she wanted. That she wanted to be
Speaker 1: like Jesus, healing the sick and raising the dead instantly
Speaker 1: without surgery or pills, but she also wanted to find
Speaker 1: a way to be financially independent rather than being supported
Speaker 1: by her father. To that end, a friend helped her
Speaker 1: get a job working the switchboard at a coffee wholesaler,
Speaker 1: where she made twelve dollars a week. She kept looking, though,
Speaker 1: for other better paying jobs. While working with the Ambulance Corps,
Speaker 1: Arsener had met William de Mill, brother of filmmaker Cecil B. Demill.
Speaker 1: William was a screenwriter and director in his own right,
Speaker 1: and both of the brothers were working at Famous Player's
Speaker 1: Last Ki, the product and distribution company that would later
Speaker 1: become Paramount Pictures. I feel like they're also a recurring
Speaker 1: character in the show. Yeah, we've had a lot of
Speaker 1: Paramount stuff. Once the war was over, Anna stark Weather,
Speaker 1: commander of the Ambulance Corps, encouraged Arsner to meet with
Speaker 1: William de Mill about getting a job. The Hollywood film
Speaker 1: industry was still in its infancy at this point, having
Speaker 1: moved from the East Coast over the early nineteen teens,
Speaker 1: Arsner didn't really know what she wanted to do with
Speaker 1: her life, aside from the fact that she wanted to
Speaker 1: support herself without her father's help. Stark Weather drove her
Speaker 1: to the appointment with Demil. Zamil asked Arsner what she
Speaker 1: wanted to do in Hollywood. She said she didn't know.
Speaker 1: She thought she could maybe be a set dresser. He
Speaker 1: asked her what period the furniture in his office was from,
Speaker 1: and she did not know that either. In what seems
Speaker 1: to me like an incredibly generous offer on De Mill's part,
Speaker 1: he said that he would give her access to the
Speaker 1: studio's various departments for a week so that she could
Speaker 1: look around and get a sense of how things worked
Speaker 1: and figure out what she might want to do. Her
Speaker 1: mostly self guided tour of the studio lot included seeing
Speaker 1: cecil B. De Mill at work as a director and
Speaker 1: thinking that was the thing, to be the person in
Speaker 1: charge telling everyone else what to do. One of the
Speaker 1: secretaries told her that if she really wanted to get
Speaker 1: into the business, she should start out by typing scripts.
Speaker 1: That was an entry level job, and the script was
Speaker 1: really the backbone of the movie. So when she went
Speaker 1: back to William De Mill, and he asked her what
Speaker 1: she decided. She said she wanted to start at the bottom.
Speaker 1: When he asked her what the bottom was, she said,
Speaker 1: typing scripts, and he said for that answer, I'll give
Speaker 1: you a job. There wasn't a typing position open right away,
Speaker 1: so Arsner kept working the switchboard at the coffee wholesaler.
Speaker 1: When the job offer came from Paramount, the pay was
Speaker 1: fifteen dollars a week. That was more than she was
Speaker 1: making at the coffee wholesaler, so she took it. Arsner
Speaker 1: told this story in a lot of different interviews over
Speaker 1: the course of her career, and continuing that theme how
Speaker 1: these don't always have the same details. There are some
Speaker 1: inconsistencies in the exact timeline of how all this played
Speaker 1: out and how much money she was being offered at
Speaker 1: both of the jobs, But a lot of the time
Speaker 1: she really made it sound like she took this job
Speaker 1: for the money, not because she had aspirations of using
Speaker 1: it as her starting point to becoming a filmmaker. We're
Speaker 1: going to talk about Arsner's life in Hollywood after we
Speaker 1: paused for a sponsor break. When Dorothy Arsner started her
Speaker 1: job as a script typist, she ran into an immediate problem,
Speaker 1: which is that she could not type. She hunted and
Speaker 1: pecked on the typewriter with two fingers. That's incredibly slow.
Speaker 1: And on top of being very slow, she made a
Speaker 1: lot of mistakes in her first days of work doing this.
Speaker 1: She was constantly asking herself, like, what did I do?
Speaker 1: She had left the switchboard job, which she was actually
Speaker 1: really good at, for this where she was a miss
Speaker 1: After making sure it was okay to do so, she
Speaker 1: took pages home with her at the end of the
Speaker 1: day and kept typing them from there. Her coworkers also
Speaker 1: felt sorry for her, and some of the fastest typists
Speaker 1: in the pool would pick up some of her pages
Speaker 1: and type them for her so that she could make
Speaker 1: her deadlines. On top of all that, she arrived at
Speaker 1: work one day and accidentally parked in cecil By de
Speaker 1: Mill's parking space, like while he was waiting to get
Speaker 1: in with his driver directly behind her. I feel all
Speaker 1: of this. I could see myself doing some of this,
Speaker 1: I know. One of the other typists told her that
Speaker 1: if she wanted to move up, her next step should
Speaker 1: be as a script girl, also called a script clerk
Speaker 1: or a script continuity supervisor. So that's the person who
Speaker 1: keeps track of every take during filming and who works
Speaker 1: with the director and the editor to try to prevent
Speaker 1: continuity errors. She heard about an opening with actor and
Speaker 1: director Alan Nasimova, who had started her own production company
Speaker 1: and had a distribution contract with Metro Pictures that, of course,
Speaker 1: later became MGM. Nasimova was married to a man, but
Speaker 1: was also known for having relationships with women, and she's
Speaker 1: often credited with being the first to describe Hollywood's community
Speaker 1: of lesbians and bisexual women as the sewing circle. Nasimova
Speaker 1: became one of Arsner's mentors in the film industry, and
Speaker 1: they may have had a romantic relationship as well. After
Speaker 1: Arsner finished working on Nasimova's movie Stronger Than Death, she
Speaker 1: went back to Paramount and started working as a script clerk.
Speaker 1: Her next step up from there was as a film cutter,
Speaker 1: cutting and splicing film negatives based on the decisions of
Speaker 1: the film's director and editor. Her mentor here was Nan Herron,
Speaker 1: who taught her the ropes on the nineteen nineteen comedy
Speaker 1: Too Much Johnson. Arsner came to really love this work.
Speaker 1: She was good at cutting and splicing and making sure
Speaker 1: everything lined up seamlessly, and she could do it pretty quickly.
Speaker 1: She also loved how it let her make subtle improvements
Speaker 1: on the scenes that she was working with, like trimming
Speaker 1: things up if an actor took too long to exit
Speaker 1: a scene or snipping out errors. Soon, Arsner had moved
Speaker 1: to Paramount subsidiary Real Art Studio, where she led the
Speaker 1: editing department and taught other people how to do it.
Speaker 1: In nineteen twenty one, twenty four year old Arsner met
Speaker 1: forty year old dancer, choreographer and screenwriter Marian Morgan on
Speaker 1: a film set. Arsner had, or was at least rumored
Speaker 1: to have had relationships with other women after this, but
Speaker 1: from this point she and Marian were to get for
Speaker 1: the next fifty years. This was kind of an open secret.
Speaker 1: They didn't really try to hide it, but they also
Speaker 1: did not discuss it. As Arsner became more well known
Speaker 1: and started doing more media interviews, she just didn't talk
Speaker 1: about her personal life at all. She could also even
Speaker 1: be reticent to talk about her previous films. She would
Speaker 1: describe them as over and done with and just not
Speaker 1: worth talking about anymore. In nineteen twenty two, Arsner was
Speaker 1: hired to work on Blood and Sand, starring Rudolph Valentino.
Speaker 1: Although she had worked on dozens of films at this point,
Speaker 1: this one was notable. Valentino played a matador, and it
Speaker 1: would have been prohibitively expensive and extremely dangerous to film
Speaker 1: this big film star actually doing bullfights. Arsner oversaw some
Speaker 1: of the filming herself, and she ter cut footage of
Speaker 1: Valentino with stock footage of real bullfights, and that made
Speaker 1: the bullfighting scenes a lot more compelling, while also saving
Speaker 1: the studio a lot of time and expense. Arsner was
Speaker 1: also writing, starting out with scenarios or treatments, and then
Speaker 1: working up to writing full screenplays. Some of these works
Speaker 1: were adapted from existing stories, including When Husband's Flirt and
Speaker 1: The Red Kimona. In nineteen twenty five, she wrote and
Speaker 1: edited Old Ironsides, in which the USS Constitution fights against pirates.
Speaker 1: In nineteen twenty six, Arsner had been doing various work
Speaker 1: for other studios, but she had always come back to Paramount.
Speaker 1: After Old Ironsides, she started trying to get Paramount to
Speaker 1: give her a directing job. Executives at the studio seemed
Speaker 1: reluctant to do this, and she threatened to leave Paramount
Speaker 1: for Columbia Pictures instead, because she had already been offered
Speaker 1: a contract there. Paramount came back with sort of vague
Speaker 1: promises that they might find something for her in the future,
Speaker 1: and she told them that if she didn't have an
Speaker 1: a list picture in the next two weeks, she was walking.
Speaker 1: The results of this was the silent film Fashions for Women,
Speaker 1: which was the start of Arsner's career as a director
Speaker 1: for Paramount. In addition to directing this movie, Arsner co
Speaker 1: wrote the screenplay, which was adapted from earlier work, and
Speaker 1: she and Marian Morgan edited the film together. This was
Speaker 1: an early starring role for Esther Rawlson, who had started
Speaker 1: out as a vaudeville child performer and had played smaller
Speaker 1: roles than dozens of films before this point. This film
Speaker 1: was released on March twenty sixth, nineteen twenty seven. From there,
Speaker 1: Arsner directed other Silent films, including Ten Modern Commandments, Get
Speaker 1: Your Man, and Manhattan Cocktail. Manhattan Cocktail is sometimes described
Speaker 1: as a part talkie because it had synchronized vocal music
Speaker 1: and silent dialogue. Mary and Morgan worked on all three
Speaker 1: of these films as well. This did not make Arsner,
Speaker 1: the first woman director in the motion picture industry in
Speaker 1: the United States. We've already talked about Allen Asimova, and
Speaker 1: other women directors included Lois Weber, who was a truly
Speaker 1: prolific director and screenwriter, and Alice Gui Blachet, who had
Speaker 1: started her career in France before founding her own studio
Speaker 1: with her husband Herbert back when the film industry was
Speaker 1: still headquartered in New Jersey. According to research by the
Speaker 1: American Film Institute, during the Silent film era, more than
Speaker 1: ten percent of feature film credits were to women directors, writers,
Speaker 1: and producers, and women wrote almost twenty percent of feature
Speaker 1: films during that era. Unfortunately, most of these films are
Speaker 1: lost today because they were not preserved and their film
Speaker 1: stock either deteriorated or was intentionally destroyed because of the
Speaker 1: expense involved with conserving and properly storing it. This is
Speaker 1: its true of all of the silent films that Arsner directed,
Speaker 1: but overwhelmingly these women directors didn't make the transition from
Speaker 1: silent films to talkies starting in the late nineteen twenties,
Speaker 1: and there were a lot of reasons for this. Filmmaking
Speaker 1: had started out as something new and very experimental, and
Speaker 1: the earliest films were typically very short, so there was
Speaker 1: a lot more opportunity for people to kind of try
Speaker 1: their own thing. By the nineteen twenties, even before the
Speaker 1: move away from silent films, production had become a lot
Speaker 1: more expensive and involved, and corporations like Paramount and MGM
Speaker 1: were really dominating Hollywood as smaller independent companies were driven
Speaker 1: out of business. The major studios also kept extremely tight
Speaker 1: control on what was made and how it was made.
Speaker 1: As the industry became more corporate and more male dominated,
Speaker 1: executives and other decision makers gave women fewer and fewer opportunities.
Speaker 1: As studios started to unionize, some of the unions also
Speaker 1: allowed only men as members, and as productions started shifting
Speaker 1: away from silent films, women often were not given access
Speaker 1: to the training and education and experience that they would
Speaker 1: need to just keep up with all the changes in
Speaker 1: the industry. Dorothy Arsner became the lone exception. She managed
Speaker 1: to keep directing movies when other women did not, possibly
Speaker 1: because of her complete refusal to back down and her
Speaker 1: willingness to go somewhere else if a studio wouldn't negotiate.
Speaker 1: Arsener became not only the only woman working as a
Speaker 1: director in the Hollywood studio system, but also in a tour.
Speaker 1: She preferred to have screenwriters on set with her so
Speaker 1: they could work together and with the editor, including turning
Speaker 1: characters that had been written as one dimensional stereotypes and
Speaker 1: the source material into complex people with complicated motives and personality.
Speaker 1: This amount of control director was extremely unusual. At this point.
Speaker 1: The studios were really calling the shots and making a
Speaker 1: lot of those kinds of decisions, but Arsner was willing
Speaker 1: to walk away if they wouldn't give her that authority.
Speaker 1: She was also focused on making movies with other women,
Speaker 1: so those writers and editors that she was working so
Speaker 1: closely with were usually women as well. They also mainly
Speaker 1: focused on women's stories. Arsner was quoted as saying, quote,
Speaker 1: try as a man may he will never be able
Speaker 1: to get the woman's viewpoint in telling certain stories. The
Speaker 1: studios also used this idea in their marketing. They would
Speaker 1: really hype up that this was a woman's film being
Speaker 1: told by the only woman director, and Irony hears that
Speaker 1: within the industry, Arsner seems to have been regarded more
Speaker 1: as one of the boys. A number of people including
Speaker 1: director Robert Aldrich, described her this way. She always kept
Speaker 1: her hair short, and while she she sometimes wore straight
Speaker 1: dresses or conservative skirts and blazers, she was just as
Speaker 1: often in a suit, sometimes with a tie. She could
Speaker 1: also be more dramatic with her dress like There are
Speaker 1: photos of her on the set of a western dressed
Speaker 1: as a cowboy, and production stills from old ironsides show
Speaker 1: her in a sailor suit. Some of the media coverage
Speaker 1: of her career just kind of glosses over this, describing
Speaker 1: her as feminine and as having no patience for vulgarity
Speaker 1: or loudness on her sets. At the same time, it
Speaker 1: does seem like what was tacitly accepted or glossed over
Speaker 1: in Hollywood might have had a negative impact elsewhere in
Speaker 1: her life. In nineteen twenty nine, Arsner tried to get
Speaker 1: a loan to buy a house in the Los Buelist
Speaker 1: neighborhood of Los Angeles, and the bank turned her down.
Speaker 1: It does not seem like there was a legitimate financial
Speaker 1: reason for this, and Arsner cashed in some investments so
Speaker 1: that she could pay for this house without needing a loan.
Speaker 1: This wound up working out in her favor since Just
Speaker 1: a few months later, in October of nineteen twenty nine,
Speaker 1: the stock market crashed, marking the start of the Great
Speaker 1: Depression that would have wiped out most of the value
Speaker 1: of those investments that she had sold to build the house.
Speaker 1: The stock market crash not long after Arsener had directed
Speaker 1: her first talkie. That was The Wild Party, starring Clara Bow,
Speaker 1: who had previously worked with Arsener on Get Your Man.
Speaker 1: Arsner is often cited as inventing the boom mic during
Speaker 1: the production of this film, although similar rigs were used
Speaker 1: on other films at around the same time. With the
Speaker 1: introduction of spoken dialogue in movies, actors had to hit
Speaker 1: their marks and hold still to deliver their lines, which
Speaker 1: was awkward and often wound up seeming stilted. This was
Speaker 1: also Bow's first talkie and she was struggling with the microphones,
Speaker 1: so Arsner had hung one from a fishing rod which
Speaker 1: could be suspended over the actors and move as they
Speaker 1: moved moved. The Wild Party was a box office success
Speaker 1: and also one of the first leading roles for actor
Speaker 1: Frederick Marsch. Arsner then directed Charming Sinners, which also came
Speaker 1: out in nineteen twenty nine and Behind the Makeup in
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty. Sarah and Son also came out in nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty and starred Ruth Chatterton, who was nominated for an
Speaker 1: Academy Award as Best Actress for the role. By this point,
Speaker 1: Arsner was starting to develop a reputation as a star maker.
Speaker 1: This was Chatterton's second Best Actress nomination, and soon after this,
Speaker 1: Frederick March was named Best Actor for his role in
Speaker 1: Doctor Jekyl and Mister Hyde. Arsner's last film for Paramount
Speaker 1: was Merely We Go to Hell in nineteen thirty two.
Speaker 1: While movies were a hugely popular form of entertainment for
Speaker 1: people hoping to escape from the stresses of the Great Depression,
Speaker 1: Paramount was on the edge of financial disaster. Part of
Speaker 1: this was because of the economy, but the movie studio
Speaker 1: was also facing increasing competition from other Hollywood movie studios.
Speaker 1: Paramount wanted Arsner to sign a new contract that would
Speaker 1: cut her pay by fifty percent, which was happening pretty
Speaker 1: much across the board, but she refused. She spent the
Speaker 1: rest of her career as a freelancer, working for whatever
Speaker 1: company she wanted. We'll talk about her life after leaving
Speaker 1: Paramount after a sponsor break. In nineteen thirty three, Dorothy
Speaker 1: Arsner directed Christopher Strong for RKO Pictures. This was Catherine
Speaker 1: Hepburn's second feature film, and it also featured Billy Burke.
Speaker 1: Arsner and Hepburn butted heads a lot during this film.
Speaker 1: It seems like Hepburn thought Arsner's directing was uninspired and
Speaker 1: Arsner thought Hepburn's tone was too, and they also just
Speaker 1: seemed to clash personally, but this also added to Arsener's
Speaker 1: reputation as a starmaker. Katherine Hepburn earned an Academy Award
Speaker 1: for Best Actress in Morning Glory, which came out later
Speaker 1: that same year. Arsner had actually originally been on board
Speaker 1: to direct Morning Glory, but the production schedule did not
Speaker 1: work out. All of Arsner's films up to this point
Speaker 1: fall under the umbrella of pre code Hollywood, and they
Speaker 1: often had some transgressive themes. The Wild Party is set
Speaker 1: at a women's college and is read as having lesbian undertones.
Speaker 1: In Merrily we Go to Hell, and Heiress marries a
Speaker 1: reporter who turns out to be a very heavy drinker,
Speaker 1: and when she catches him in an affair, they basically
Speaker 1: arranged to have an open marriage. This was way way
Speaker 1: more scandalous in nineteen thirty two than it would be today,
Speaker 1: and some newspapers actually refuse to even advertise Merrily We
Speaker 1: Go to Hell just because of its title. In Christopher Strong,
Speaker 1: Catherine Hepburn plays an aviator who falls in love with
Speaker 1: a married man, and the film involves an out of wedlock, pregnancy,
Speaker 1: and a suicide. Overall, in one way or another, a
Speaker 1: lot of Arsner's pre Code films framed heterosexual marriage as
Speaker 1: a repressive and even oppressive dynamic. But over the nineteen
Speaker 1: twenties and thirties, the industry had become increasingly concerned about
Speaker 1: the moral content of its films. Some of this was
Speaker 1: tied to greater socioeconomic factors. For example, the Great Depression
Speaker 1: was seen as an emasculating force for men as many
Speaker 1: of them lost their jobs as women were entering the workforce,
Speaker 1: so there were a lot of fears around changing gender
Speaker 1: norms and gender roles. Hollywood had also been hit by
Speaker 1: a lot of scandals, including the murder of William Desmond Taylor.
Speaker 1: We just ran our episode on that as a sad
Speaker 1: Saturday classic. Various religious and political groups were calling on
Speaker 1: Hollywood to regulate itself over issues like obscenity, violence, and
Speaker 1: indecency in films. This led to the adoption of the
Speaker 1: Motion Picture Production Code, better known as the Hayes Code.
Speaker 1: The Hayes Code grew out of earlier standards and rules,
Speaker 1: and it went through numerous revisions from the time it
Speaker 1: was introduced in nineteen thirty four to the creation of
Speaker 1: the modern film rating system in nineteen sixty eight, But
Speaker 1: for the most part, the code always had the same
Speaker 1: three general principles. One, no picture shall be produced which
Speaker 1: will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence,
Speaker 1: the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to
Speaker 1: the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil, or sin. Two. Correct
Speaker 1: standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama
Speaker 1: and entertainment, shall be presented. Law natural or human shall
Speaker 1: not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of specifics that were spelled out
Speaker 1: in various ways over the years as well, like that
Speaker 1: films should not make their audiences sympathize with murderers or
Speaker 1: other criminals. They should not make adultery, miscegenation, or homosexuality
Speaker 1: seem acceptable. Obscenity and profanity were also forbidden. While these
Speaker 1: standards restricted some of what she could do in the
Speaker 1: post code era, Arsener's films continued to be focused on women.
Speaker 1: Craig's Wife, starring Rosalind Russell, came out in nineteen thirty six.
Speaker 1: I was based on a Pulitzer Prize winning play. It
Speaker 1: told the story of a very strong, willed woman who
Speaker 1: approached her marriage as more of a business arrangement than
Speaker 1: a romance, and what happened as she alienated the people
Speaker 1: around her. In nineteen thirty seven, Arsener directed The Ride
Speaker 1: Wore Red starring Joan Crawford, which was a romantic comedy
Speaker 1: that was layered with issues of class and identity. In
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty eight, Arsner became the first woman to join
Speaker 1: the Screen Director's Guild, later the Director's Guild of America.
Speaker 1: In nineteen forty, Arsner directed Dance, Girl Dance, starring Lucille
Speaker 1: Ball and Marine O'Hara, Even though the film industry had
Speaker 1: really locked down the more subversive elements of a lot
Speaker 1: of Arst's earlier career. Today, this movie has a reputation
Speaker 1: as a feminist film. Ball played Bubbles, a chorus girl,
Speaker 1: and O'Hara was Judy, a classically trained ballet dancer. Toward
Speaker 1: the end of the film, Bubbles offers Judy a job,
Speaker 1: and Judy doesn't realize she has been hired to play
Speaker 1: a stooge, meaning that she's supposed to be ridiculed and
Speaker 1: booed off the stage before Bubble's performance. Judy takes this
Speaker 1: job because she's desperate for work, and she eventually stops
Speaker 1: the show and delivers a monologue to the audience, saying,
Speaker 1: in part quote, go ahead and stare. I'm not ashamed,
Speaker 1: go on laugh, get your money's worth. Nobody's going to
Speaker 1: hurt you. I know you want me to tear my
Speaker 1: clothes off so you can look your fifty cents worth
Speaker 1: fifty cents for the privilege of staring at a girl
Speaker 1: the way your wives won't let you. Arsner's last Hollywood
Speaker 1: film was First Comes Courage, which came out in nineteen
Speaker 1: forty three. It was a wartime drama starring Merle Oberon
Speaker 1: as a member of the Norwegian Resistance. Arsner got sick
Speaker 1: during filming. In some accounts it was pneumonia, and in
Speaker 1: others it was pleurisy. Charles Vidor had to be brought
Speaker 1: in to take her place. Over the next few years,
Speaker 1: there were various news reports about her being the top
Speaker 1: choice to direct a number of films, but none of
Speaker 1: those films ever happened, or if they did go forward,
Speaker 1: someone else directed them. There's a lot of speculation about
Speaker 1: why Arsner left Hollywood. It's possible that she just wasn't
Speaker 1: enjoying the work as much in the face of increasingly
Speaker 1: strict enforcement of the Hayes Code. While she'd had a
Speaker 1: reputation as quote one of the boys, Hollywood was also
Speaker 1: just becoming increasingly homophobic. The House an American Activities Committee
Speaker 1: had been established in nineteen thirty eight, and a few
Speaker 1: years later it became really focused on the idea of
Speaker 1: communist infiltration in Hollywood. It's possible that Arsner just thought
Speaker 1: it was better for her not to be there. Some
Speaker 1: of her final films, including The Bride war Red, also
Speaker 1: just had not been as well received as some of
Speaker 1: her earlier work. After her departure from the industry in
Speaker 1: nineteen forty three, there were no women working as directors
Speaker 1: from major Hollywood studios until Ida Lupino, who started an
Speaker 1: independent Film Company with her husband. They started producing films
Speaker 1: for RKO in nineteen forty nine. Arsner had been very
Speaker 1: careful with her earnings and her innson. She was able
Speaker 1: to live comfortably for the rest of her life, and
Speaker 1: she did do some other work. She helped direct training
Speaker 1: films for the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps during World War II,
Speaker 1: and she taught whack trainees to make training films of
Speaker 1: their own. These training films are unfortunately presumed to be
Speaker 1: lost today. In the late nineteen fifties, Joan Crawford, who
Speaker 1: was married to Pepsi executive Alfred Steel, convinced Arsner to
Speaker 1: direct a series of commercials for Pepsi. In nineteen fifty one,
Speaker 1: Arsner and Marian Morgan moved to Laquinta, California, southwest of
Speaker 1: Palm Springs, where they lived for the rest of their lives,
Speaker 1: but Arsner continued to go back to the Los Angeles
Speaker 1: area for work. In nineteen fifty two, she was named
Speaker 1: head of the Television and Motion Picture department at Pasadena
Speaker 1: Playhouse College of Theater Arts, and she taught the first
Speaker 1: filmmaking course there. She also produced stage plays at the theater.
Speaker 1: Arsner left Pasadena Playhouse in the late night nineteen fifties,
Speaker 1: and started teaching at the Graduate Film School at the
Speaker 1: University of California, Los Angeles. She remained in that position
Speaker 1: until nineteen sixty three. By this point Arsner had lived
Speaker 1: and worked through the transition from silent films to talkies
Speaker 1: and from pre code to post code Hollywood. Her teaching
Speaker 1: work was part of another transition from virtually all filmmaking
Speaker 1: education happening on the job or through apprenticeships, to the
Speaker 1: existence of film schools. She didn't really love her first
Speaker 1: year of teaching at UCLA, which was almost entirely lecture based.
Speaker 1: Over her time there, her classes became progressively more hands on,
Speaker 1: from working with a viewfinder and asking students how they
Speaker 1: would compose a scene, to bringing TV cameras into the classroom,
Speaker 1: to turning the room into a miniature set and having
Speaker 1: her students make short films with professional actors. Eventually she
Speaker 1: was supervising fifty graduate A student filmmakers at a time.
Speaker 1: While her own films had had a lot of groundbreaking
Speaker 1: elements at the time that they were made, her teaching
Speaker 1: was overall very conventional in terms of how to compose
Speaker 1: a scene, light it and direct it to tell a story.
Speaker 1: It seems like some of this was really about her
Speaker 1: wanting her students to be able to work in Hollywood,
Speaker 1: which was still very conventional and very constrained by the
Speaker 1: Hays Code, but also some of it was about learning
Speaker 1: the rules of film before breaking them. Arsner's most famous
Speaker 1: student was Francis Ford Coppola. Coppola described her as having
Speaker 1: a heart that was as big as the world, and
Speaker 1: also as always having cookies and crackers on hand for
Speaker 1: her students who she knew were starving. Marian Morgan died
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy one at the age of ninety A
Speaker 1: year later, Arsner's film The Wild Party was screened at
Speaker 1: the first International Festival of Women's Films, which sparked a
Speaker 1: revival and interest in her work. The festival hosted a
Speaker 1: retrospective of her films the following year. In nineteen seventy five,
Speaker 1: the Director's Guild of America hosted a tribute to Arsner
Speaker 1: that included a telegram that was read from Katherine Hepburn.
Speaker 1: This telegram said, quote, isn't it wonderful that you've had
Speaker 1: such a great career when you had no right to
Speaker 1: have a career at all. That same year, Dorothy Arsner
Speaker 1: Towards a Feminist Cinema was published by the British Film Institute,
Speaker 1: edited by Claire Johnston. Dorothy Arsner died on October first,
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy nine, at the age of eighty two. She
Speaker 1: had directed eighteen feature films over the course of her career,
Speaker 1: but she was never given any industry awards during her lifetime.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty six, she was given a star on
Speaker 1: the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In two thousand and seven,
Speaker 1: Dance Girl Dance was selected for preservation in the National
Speaker 1: Film Registry. The Librarian of Congress's announcement set of the
Speaker 1: film quote. Although there were numerous women filmmakers in the
Speaker 1: early decades of Silent cinema, by the nineteen thirties, directing
Speaker 1: in Hollywood had become a male bastion. With one exception,
Speaker 1: Dorothy Arsner graduated from editing to directing in the late
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties, often exploring the conflicted roles of women in
Speaker 1: contemporary society in Dance Girl Dance. Her most intriguing film,
Speaker 1: two women, Lucille Ball and Marine O'Hara pursue life in
Speaker 1: show business from opposite sides of the spectrum, burlesque and ballet.
Speaker 1: The film is a meditation on the disparity between art
Speaker 1: and commerce. The dancers strive to preserve their own feminist
Speaker 1: integrity while fighting for their place in the spotlight and
Speaker 1: for the love of male lead Lewis Hayward. In twenty eighteen,
Speaker 1: Paramount named the dressing room building on its studio lot
Speaker 1: in Los Angeles after Dorothy Arsner. Francis Ford Coppola was
Speaker 1: a big part of getting this building named for her,
Speaker 1: and that the dedication. He talked about how much he
Speaker 1: respected her and how much she had taught him. He
Speaker 1: has also credited her encouragement with keeping him in film
Speaker 1: school when he was thinking of quitting. There is not
Speaker 1: currently a full biography of Drothy Arsner, at least not
Speaker 1: one I could find. There is a book of collected interviews,
Speaker 1: and also a book that's largely focused on her film work.
Speaker 1: Like It has an autobiographical section, but a lot of
Speaker 1: it is film criticism. Neither of these is just strictly
Speaker 1: a biography. She started on an autobiography that she never finished.
Speaker 1: We've mentioned that a couple of times in the episode.
Speaker 1: It stops shortly before meeting Mariyan Morgan. It is possible
Speaker 1: that that is why she did not continue it. There
Speaker 1: was really no way to tell her life story without
Speaker 1: Marian and she was still living at a time when
Speaker 1: there was so much stigma and hostility around lesbianism that
Speaker 1: you might not have thought it was workable. This partial
Speaker 1: autobiography was not published until decades after her death, as
Speaker 1: part of work that is more focused on film criticism
Speaker 1: than on her life. There are rumors of a biopic
Speaker 1: that would be directed by Todd Haynes that have been
Speaker 1: circulating for more than twenty years. I have no idea
Speaker 1: of anything else about this other than that it has
Speaker 1: been rumored for more than twenty years. Uh, let's start
Speaker 1: the arsener. I love her. I'm so glad you picked
Speaker 1: this one, was I? Yes? Yes? Do you also have
Speaker 1: some listener mail? I do I have listener mail from Caitlin.
Speaker 1: Caitlyn is a frequent correspondent, and I think we have
Speaker 1: read another Kaitlin email in the not too long ago past.
Speaker 1: Caitlin wrote after our episode on Pelagra and said, Hi,
Speaker 1: Tracy and Holly, I was so excited to see the
Speaker 1: first part of the Pelagra two parter are in my
Speaker 1: feed and when you alluded to the fortification of grain
Speaker 1: products to provide more niacin imediately made me think of
Speaker 1: a story my grandmother told me about some of her
Speaker 1: advocacy work. My grandmother got involved in the spina bifida
Speaker 1: community when my aunt was born with it in nineteen seventy.
Speaker 1: Spina bifida is a congenital disability that's classified as a
Speaker 1: neural tube defect, and it occurs very early in a pregnancy,
Speaker 1: between four and six weeks, often before a person knows
Speaker 1: they are pregnant. One of the risk factors is a
Speaker 1: lack of enough full ate vitamin B twelve during those
Speaker 1: very early days of fetal development. My grandmother vividly remembers
Speaker 1: when fullate started being included as one of the vitamins
Speaker 1: in enriched grains and how quickly it seemed to affect
Speaker 1: the number of children born with spina bifida. According to Graham,
Speaker 1: though Hispanic families in our part of Texas continued to
Speaker 1: seek out the Spina Bifida Association at the same rate,
Speaker 1: she said very confidently that it was due to the
Speaker 1: enriched grain programs primarily focusing on wheat products, while Hispanic
Speaker 1: families tended to use corn products and specifically said MASSA
Speaker 1: was not enriched like in a good historian. I tried
Speaker 1: to find resources to back this up, and it seems
Speaker 1: Graham is correct. The FDA does not require MASSA to
Speaker 1: have fullic acid the synthetic form of full eight added,
Speaker 1: although it does recommend manufacturers do so. There's still a
Speaker 1: documented disparity in rates of neural tube defects, including spina bifida,
Speaker 1: between Hispanic and non Hispanic populations in the United States.
Speaker 1: I thought that this connection to another form of B
Speaker 1: vitamin was really interesting, and I hope you did too.
Speaker 1: I enjoyed the Pelagra episodes. It fascinates me to try
Speaker 1: and imagine the paradigm shifts society underwent as concepts like
Speaker 1: tiny animalcules are causing disease and foods have invisible properties
Speaker 1: that we need to survive for being introduced, especially the
Speaker 1: time period where those overlap. Of course, people were for
Speaker 1: a bacterial or viral cause of pelagra. They just accepted
Speaker 1: that's how sickness worked. Thank you, as always for the
Speaker 1: work you do. I've attached some pet tax photos of
Speaker 1: Dmitri My orange guy who recently got some teeth pulled
Speaker 1: but hasn't seemed to notice and shark to puss the
Speaker 1: queen tority of the house, as well as the photo
Speaker 1: of my grandmother and uncle circa nineteen seventy three to
Speaker 1: seventy four. Best Caitlin. Hey, Caitlin, thanks so much for
Speaker 1: this email. I loved this email a lot. We have talked,
Speaker 1: I think in the recent behind the scenes about my
Speaker 1: mom and my mom's work with disabled people for most
Speaker 1: of her career, and that included working with some kids
Speaker 1: with spina bifida. And I also what would volunteer with
Speaker 1: some of the programs that my mom worked with when
Speaker 1: I was a teen and worked with some kids who
Speaker 1: had this condition. It would not have occurred to me
Speaker 1: to think about that. With the full late and disparities
Speaker 1: and where full late is being enriched, I mostly had
Speaker 1: heard about this. I am not giving this as advice.
Speaker 1: I'm saying this is what the advice was. When I
Speaker 1: was taking high school health class. The advice in health
Speaker 1: class was that anyone who was thinking of becoming pregnant
Speaker 1: should go ahead and start taking prenatal vitamins because of
Speaker 1: those be vitamins that are in there that are really
Speaker 1: important to fetal development from the very earliest points of pregnancy,
Speaker 1: before a person might be aware that they are pregnant. Yeah. Boy,
Speaker 1: do we have some cute kitty cats. We have an
Speaker 1: orange kitty with a little blup looking on the floor
Speaker 1: like a silly orange kitty cat face. Uh oh, man,
Speaker 1: we have another collection of orange cat fluffy cat. We
Speaker 1: just read another listener male that was similarly orange cat
Speaker 1: and fluffy cat. This fluffy cat stretched out on some carpet. Man,
Speaker 1: we have multiple kitty cats in these pictures, or multiple
Speaker 1: pictures subduced to kitty cats. Thank you so much, Caitlin.
Speaker 1: Thank you again for this email. I did not know
Speaker 1: any of this and I was glad to know of it.
Speaker 1: If you'd like to send us a note about this
Speaker 1: or any other podcast, we are at History Podcasts at
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio dot com. You can subscribe to our show on
Speaker 1: the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you like to get
Speaker 1: your podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is a
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