Category: Stephens College

Months of research went into the creation of the essays in “When Women Wrote Hollywood.” Here are some of the resources used to enlighten today’s film lovers to the female pioneers who helped create it.

From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 34: Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood by Karen Ward Mahar

 

Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood explores when, how, and why women were accepted as filmmakers in the 1910s and why, by the 1920s, those opportunities had disappeared. In looking at the early film industry as an industry―a place of work―Mahar not only unravels the mystery of the disappearing female filmmaker but untangles the complicated relationship among gender, work culture, and business within modern industrial organizations.

In the early 1910s, the film industry followed a theatrical model, fostering an egalitarian work culture in which everyone―male and female―helped behind the scenes in a variety of jobs. In this culture women thrived in powerful, creative roles, especially as writers, directors, and producers. By the end of that decade, however, mushrooming star salaries and skyrocketing movie budgets prompted the creation of the studio system. As the movie industry remade itself in the image of a modern American business, the masculinization of filmmaking took root.

Mahar’s study integrates feminist methodologies of examining the gendering of work with thorough historical scholarship of American industry and business culture. Tracing the transformation of the film industry into a legitimate “big business” of the 1920s, and explaining the fate of the female filmmaker during the silent era, Mahar demonstrates how industrial growth and change can unexpectedly open―and close―opportunities for women. — Amazon

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Months of research went into the creation of the essays in “When Women Wrote Hollywood.” Here are some of the resources used to enlighten today’s film lovers to the female pioneers who helped create it.

From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 33: Blood and Sand. Wr: June Mathis, Dir: Fred Fred Niblo, Paramount Pictures, 1922, USA 80 mins.

Juan Gallardo (Valentino), a village boy born into poverty, grows up to become one of the greatest matadors in Spain. He marries a friend from his childhood, the beautiful and virtuous Carmen (Lee), but after he achieves fame and fortune he finds himself drawn to Doña Sol (Naldi), a wealthy, seductive widow.

They embark on a torrid affair with sadomasochistic overtones, but Juan, feeling guilty over his betrayal of Carmen, tries to free himself of Doña Sol. Furious at being rejected, she exposes their affair to Carmen and Juan’s mother, seemingly destroying his marriage. Growing more and more miserable and dissipated, Juan becomes reckless in the arena. He is eventually killed in a bullfight but does manage to reconcile with Carmen moments before he dies.

There is also a subplot involving a local outlaw whose career is paralleled to Juan’s throughout the film by the village philosopher: Juan’s fatal injury in the bullring comes moments after the outlaw is shot by the police. — Wikipedia

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Months of research went into the creation of the essays in “When Women Wrote Hollywood.” Here are some of the resources used to enlighten today’s film lovers to the female pioneers who helped create it.

From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 33: “Elinor Glyn.”, Denise Cummings , Women Film Pioneers Project. Columbia University

Perhaps most remembered in the United States for her best-selling 1907 novel of exotic sensuality Three Weeks and her brainchild “It,” that enigmatic characteristic embodied in actress Clara Bow and dramatized in the silent motion picture It (1927), English-born journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and actress Elinor Glyn, born Elinor Sutherland, embarked on her American career in 1920 during her second visit to the United States. In October of 1907, at forty-two, Glyn, traveling as Elinor Glyn, the authoress of romantic fiction, boarded the Lusitania and set sail for New York on her first American tour in order to promote Three Weeks. According to her British biographer, Joan Hardwick, “the reception of Three Weeks in the States had renewed [Glyn’s] confidence and she decided to try her hand at dramatizing it” (133). Before that version materialized, however, Glyn returned to England, but only after lengthening her stay with a journey by rail through the American West to California. Her 1907 tour of the United States and her introduction to American culture and way of life may very well have laid the fertile groundwork for her 1920 return and subsequent work as writer, director, producer, and actress in Hollywood.

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Months of research went into the creation of the essays in “When Women Wrote Hollywood.” Here are some of the resources used to enlighten today’s film lovers to the female pioneers who helped create it.

From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 32: The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild by Miranda J Banks

Screenwriters are storytellers and dream builders. They forge new worlds and beings, bringing them to life through storylines and idiosyncratic details. Yet up until now, no one has told the story of these creative and indispensable artists. The Writers is the only comprehensive qualitative analysis of the history of writers and writing in the film, television, and streaming media industries in America.

Featuring in-depth interviews with over fifty writers–including Mel Brooks, Norman Lear, Carl Reiner, and Frank Pierson–The Writers delivers a compelling, behind-the-scenes look at the role and rights of writers in Hollywood and New York over the past century. Granted unprecedented access to the archives of the Writers Guild Foundation, Miranda J. Banks also mines over 100 never-before-published oral histories with legends such as Nora Ephron and Ring Lardner Jr., whose insight and humor provide a window onto the enduring priorities, policies, and practices of the Writers Guild.

With an ear for the language of storytellers, Banks deftly analyzes watershed moments in the industry: the advent of sound, World War II, the blacklist, ascension of television, the American New Wave, the rise and fall of VHS and DVD, and the boom of streaming media. The Writers spans historical and contemporary moments, and draws upon American cultural history, film and television scholarship and the passionate politics of labor and management. Published on the sixtieth anniversary of the formation of the Writers Guild of America, this book tells the story of the triumphs and struggles of these vociferous and contentious hero-makers.

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** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!
† Available from the LA Public Library