America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies by Harry M. Benshoff & Sean Griffin

Author:Harry M. Benshoff & Sean Griffin [Benshoff, Harry M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2011-08-26T07:00:00+00:00

Probably the most famous female filmmaker of the classical Hollywood era was Dorothy Arzner, a woman who made 16 films in 15 years for various major studios. Arzner negotiated the all-male world of classical Hollywood cinema production by positioning herself as “one of the boys.” She frequently wore tailored suit-dresses, talked tough, and even smoked cigars, in order to gain the respect of the men she worked among (and who worked for her). Arzner’s career spanned both silent and sound cinema and she worked in a number of different genres, although she was eventually pegged as a director of the “woman’s film” (see below). Arzner had been born into an upper-middle-class family in San Francisco, worked as an ambulance driver during World War I, and entered filmmaking as a typist and then a script girl. Within a few years, she had become an editor, a screenwriter, and then a second unit director (directing minor shots such as crowd scenes, inserts, and special effects). In 1926 she was offered a job directing Fashions for Women (1927), and the success of that film earned Arzner a contract with Paramount Pictures. There she directed Clara Bow in one of her “flapper” pictures, The Wild Party (1929).

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