Dorothy Arzner, the only female director during the "Golden Age" of
Hollywood's studio system--from the 1920s to the early 1940s and the
female director with the largest oeuvre in Hollywood to this day--was
born in San Francisco, California, to a German-American father and a Scottish
mother. Raised in Los Angeles, her parents ran a café which featured
German cuisine and which was frequented by silent film stars including:
Charles Chaplin and
William S. Hart, and director
Erich von Stroheim. She worked as a
waitress at the restaurant, and no one could have foreseen at the time
that Arzner would be one of the few women to break the glass ceiling of
directing and would be the only woman to work during the early sound
era.
In her fifteen-year career as a director (1928-43), Arzner made three silent
movies and fourteen talkies. Her path to the director's chair was different
than that of female directors in the future (indeed, different than most
male directors too). Directors nowadays are typically graduates of film
schools or were working actors prior to directing. Like most of the
directors of her generation, Arzner gained wide training in most
aspects of film-making by working her way up from the bottom. It was the
best way to become a film-maker, she later said.
After graduating from high school in 1915, she entered the University
of Southern California, where she was in the premedical program for two
years. When the U.S. entered World War I in 1917, Arzner was unable to
realize her ambition of serving her country in a military capacity, as
there were no women's units in the armed forces at the time, so she
served as an ambulance driver during the war.
After the cessation of hostilities, Azner got a job on a newspaper. The
director of her ambulance unit introduced her to film director
William C. de Mille (the brother of
Cecil B. DeMille, one of the
co-founders of Famous Players-Lasky, which eventually became known by
the title of its distribution unit--Paramount Pictures). She decided to
pursue a film career after visiting a movie set and being intrigued by
the editing facilities. Arzner decided that she would like to become a
director (there was no strict delineation between directors and editors
in the immediate postwar period as the movie studios matured into a
"factory" industrial production paradigm).
Though she was the sole member of her gender to direct Hollywood
pictures during the first generation of sound film, in the silent era a
woman behind the camera was not unknown. The first movie in history was
directed by a Frenchwoman, and many women were employed in Hollywood
during the silent era, most frequently as scenario writers (some
research indicates that as many as three-quarters of the scenario
writers during the silent era--when there was no requirement for a
screenplay as such as there was no dialogue--were women). Indeed, there
were female directors in the silent era, such as
Frances Marion (though she was more
famous as a screenwriter) and Lois Weber, but
Arzner was fated to be the only female director to have made a
successful transition to talkies. It wasn't until the 1930s and the
verticalization of the industry, as it matured and consolidated, that
women were squeezed out of production jobs in Hollywood.
The introduction to William deMille paid off when he hired her for the
sum of $20 a week to be a stenographer. Her first job for DeMille was
typing up scripts at Famous Players-Lasky. She was reportedly a poor
typist. Ambitious and possessed of a strong will, Arzner offered to
write synopses of various literary properties, and eventually was hired
as a writer. Impressing DeMille and other Paramount powers that be,
Arzner was assigned to Paramount's subsidiary Realart Films, as a film
cutter. She was promoted to script girl after one year, which required
her presence on the set to ensure the continuity of the script as shot
by the director. She then was given a job editing films. She excelled
at cutting: as an editor (she was the first Hollywood editor
professionally credited as such on-screen), she labored on 52 films,
working her way up from cutting
Bebe Daniels comedies to assignments on "A"
pictures within a couple of years. She came into her own as a film-maker
editing the Rudolph Valentino
headliner Blut und Sand (1922),
about a toreador. Her editing of the bull-fighting scenes was highly
praised, and she later said that she actually helmed the second-unit
crew shooting some of the bullfight sequences. Director
James Cruze was so impressed by her work on
the Valentino picture that he brought her on to his team to edit
Die Karawane (1923).
Arzner eventually edited three other Cruze films:
Ruggles of Red Gap (1923),
Merton of the Movies (1924)
and Old Ironsides (1926). Her work
was of such quality that she received official screen credit as an
editor, a first for a cutter of either sex.
While collaborating with Cruze she also wrote scenarios, scripting her
ideas both solo and in collaboration. She was credited as a
screenwriter (as well as an editor) on "Old Ironsides", one of the more
spectacular films of the late silent era, being partially shot in
Magnascope, one of the earliest widescreen processes. She would always
credit Cruze as her mentor and role model. "Old Ironsides" proved to be
the last film on which she was credited as an editor, as her ambitions
to become a director would finally come to fruition. To indulge her,
Paramount gave her a job as an assistant director, for which she was
happy--until she realized it was not a stepping stone to the director's
chair, and she was determined to sit in that chair.
Arzner pressured Paramount to let her direct, threatening to leave the
studio to work for Columbia Pictures on Poverty Row, which had offered
her a job as a director. Unwilling to lose such a talented film-maker,
the Paramount brass relented, and she made her debut with
Fashions for Women (1927). It
was a hit. In the process of directing Paramount's first talkie,
Manhattan Cocktail (1928), she
made history by becoming the first woman to direct a sound picture. The
success of her next sound picture,
The Wild Party (1929), starring
Paramount's top star, Clara Bow,
helped establish Fredric March as a movie
star.
Arzner proved adept at handling actresses. As
Budd Schulberg related in his
autobiography "Moving Pictures", Clara Bow--a favorite of his father,
studio boss B.P. Schulberg--had a thick
Brooklyn accent that the silence of the pre-talkie era hid nicely from
the audience. She was terrified of the transition to sound, and
developed a fear of the microphone. Working with her sound crew, Arzner
devised and used the first boom mike, attaching the microphone to a
fish pole to follow Bow as she moved around the set. Arzner even used
Bow's less-than-dulcet speaking tones to underscore the vivaciousness
of her character.
Though Arzner made several successful films for Paramount, the studio
teetered on the edge of bankruptcy due to the Depression, eventually
going into receivership (before being saved by the advent of another
iconic woman, Mae West). When the
studio mandated a pay cut for all employees, Arzner decided to go
freelance. RKO Radio Pictures hired her to direct its new star,
headstrong young Katharine Hepburn, in
her second starring film,
Christopher Strong (1933). It
was not a happy collaboration, as both women were strong and
unyielding, but Arzner eventually prevailed. She was after all the director. The fiercely independent Hepburn
complained to RKO, but the studio backed its director against its star.
Eventually the two settled into a working relationship, respecting each
other but remaining cold and distant from one another. Ironically,
Arzner would display her directorial flair in elucidating the kind of
competitive rivalries between women she experienced with Hepburn.
The Directors Guild of America was established in 1933, and Arzner
became the first female member. Indeed, she was the only female member
of the D.G.A. for many years.
Arzner's films featured well-developed female characters, and she was
known at the time of her work, quite naturally, as a director of
"women's pictures". Not only did her movies portray the lives of
strong, interesting women, but her pictures are noted for showcasing
the ambiguities of life. Since the rise of feminist scholarship in the
1960s, Arzner's movies have been seen as challenging the dominant, androcentric mores of the times.
Arzner was gay, and cultivated a masculine look in her clothes
and appearance (some feel as camouflage to hide the boy's club that was
Hollywood). Many gay critics discern a hidden gay subtext in her films,
such as "Christopher Strong". Whereas feminist critics see a critique
of gender inequality in "Christopher Strong", gay female critics see a
critique of heterosexuality itself as the source of a woman's troubles.
The very private Arzner, the woman who broke the glass ceiling and had
to survive, and indeed thrive, in the all-male world of studio
film-making, refused to be categorized as a woman or gay director,
insisting she was simply a "director." She was right.
Arzner did have less troubled and more productive collaborations with
other actresses after her experience with Hepburn. She developed a
close friendship with one of her female stars,
Joan Crawford, whom she directed
in two 1937 MGM vehicles,
Eine Dame der Gesellschaft (1937)
and Die Braut trug rot (1937).
Arzner later directed Pepsi commercials as a favor to Crawford's
husband, Pepsi-Cola Company's Chairman of the Board
Alfred Steele.
In 1943 Arzner joined other top Hollywood directors such as
John Ford and
George Stevens in going to work
for the war effort during World War Two. She made training films for
the U.S. Army's Women's Army Corps (W.A.C.s). That same year her health was
compromised after she contracted pneumonia. After the war she did not
return to feature film directing, but made documentaries and
commercials for the new television industry. She also became a
film-making teacher, first at the Pasadena Playhouse during the 1950s
and 1960s and then at the University of California-Los Angeles campus
during the 1960s and 1970s. At U.C.L.A. she taught directing and
screenwriting, and one of her students was
Francis Ford Coppola, the first
film school grad to achieve major success as a director. She taught at
U.C.L.A. until her death in 1979.
She was honored in her own life-time, becoming a symbol and role model
for female directors who desired entry into mainstream cinema. The
feminist movement in the 1960s championed her. In 1972 the First
International Festival of Women's Films honored her by screening "The
Wild Party", and her oeuvre was given a full retrospective at the
Second Festival in 1976. In 1975 the D.G.A. honored her with "A Tribute to
Dorothy Arzner." During the tribute, a telegram from Katharine Hepburn
was read: "Isn't it wonderful that you've had such a great career, when
you had no right to have a career at all?"
