Dorothy Arzner

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Dorothy Arsner got the really
briefest of mentions in our episode on Billy Burke from

(00:23):
August of twenty twenty three, which I could have sworn
was something that came out last year. Yeah, time is
passing at an alarming rate. It is. We did not
really say much about Dorothy Arsner in that Billy Burke episode,
other than that she was the only woman director in
Hollywood at the time and that there were rumors that

(00:45):
she and Burke were in a romantic relationship. I stumbled
across Dorothy Arsner's name again sometime recently. I don't even
remember exactly when or where, but I was immediately intrigued.
So I stopped what I was doing, checked in with
Holly to make sure Holly did not have Dorothy Arsner
on her list. Nope, uh, and then I got started

(01:06):
on an episode. Dorothy Arsner was not the first female
film director in the United States, but she really was
the only one working in the Hollywood studio system during
most of the period of her career that's in what's
known today as the Hollywood Golden Age, and even though
her career was fairly short, she is still one of

(01:28):
the most prolific female film directors in Hollywood history. Dorothy
Emma Arsner was born on January third, eighteen ninety seven,
although later on she often gave her birth year as
nineteen hundred. Her father, Ludwig Adolph Arsner, was from Germany
and he went by Lewis. Her mother, Janet Young, who

(01:50):
was known as Jenny, was from Scotland. Dorothy had one
older brother named David, and when she was born, they
lived in San Francisco, California. So when Dorothy was about five,
her parents divorced. There's not a lot of detail available here,
but she did remember them arguing a lot prior to
that divorce. Lewis got sole custody of Dorothy and David,

(02:14):
and they did not have contact with their mother again,
and that includes even after her mother apparently tried to
track them down a few years later. After the divorce, Lewis, Dorothy,
and David all moved to Los Angeles, and Lewis got
married again to a woman named Mabel Mills. This sounds
like it was all pretty understandably upsetting for both of

(02:37):
the children. Mabel tried to be nice, but she was
really a stranger to them, and Dorothy and David refused
to be left with her while their father went to
work at the restaurant that he was managing. In a
partial autobiography that Arsner wrote much later on, she described
herself as eventually finding sympathy for everyone involved, but only

(03:01):
much later after she had matured. She describes Mabel as
kind to her and her brother and never trying to
force a relationship with them, but it's also clear that
at least at first, things were just not working. For
a while, Dorothy and David were sent to live in
a boarding house, and then they were split up, with

(03:21):
David going to live with an aunt in Cleveland, Ohio,
and Dorothy going to live with Mabel's mother, Elizabeth, who
she knew as Ma'am. Ma'am lived in Oakland, and when
Dorothy was eight years old. They lived through the nineteen
oh six earthquake and fire that we have covered on
the show before that ran as a Saturday Classic on

(03:42):
May twenty fifth, twenty twenty four. This earthquake is often
described as happening in San Francisco, but it was severe
across the Bay in Oakland as well. Ma'am's house was
one of the few in their neighborhood that still had water,
and they tried to help their neighbors by sharing what
they had. Afterward, they housed some of MAM's friends from

(04:02):
San Francisco who had lost their homes in the fire.
As we've discussed on the show before, this fire destroyed
a lot of San Francisco's vital records, and later on
it seems like Arsner used this as cover to trim
those few years off of her age, but in the
more immediate aftermath of the earthquake, her father and stepmother

(04:24):
decided to reunite the family in Los Angeles. Louis Arsner
ran a series of restaurants in Los Angeles. One of
them was the Hoffman Cafe, which was known for its
Hollywood clientele, including people like Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and
Charlie Chaplin. A lot of more recent writing about Arsner
points to this as an early exposure to the Hollywood

(04:46):
scene that she would later build a career in, something
that familiarized her with industry lingo and made it feel
kind of like no big deal to be around a
bunch of celebrities, But accounts from her lifetime are kind
of contrad about this. She gave some interviews that made
it sound like she wasn't allowed to be at the restaurant,

(05:07):
but in other interviews she said that she was there
a lot and was always overhearing conversations about show business.
It's also not really clear whether her time at the
restaurant might have made her more comfortable around famous people.
She gave an interview in nineteen seventy three with director
Francine Parker in which she said she was afraid of
all of the actors because they liked to pick her

(05:29):
up and throw her into the air. So many questions
emerge in that moment. She she didn't like to talk
about herself is the vibe that I got, And she
didn't like to talk about her career and any of that,
And I think that might contribute to why a lot
of her interviews just don't say the same thing. My
thing is more like they were doing what I'm sorry,

(05:50):
were they physically lifting you and tossing you about? Not cool? Uh?
From the time she was very young, people thought of
Dorothy as a tomboy as an adult. She wrote that
she wondered whether this traced back to her relationship with
her brother. David had desperately wanted a baby brother when
she was born, and he basically treated her like one.

(06:12):
There are pictures of Arsner as a teen that show
her an ad dress with her hair loose and down
to her waist, but there are also pictures of her
in what would be considered boy's clothes. For example, there's
a scrapbook page labeled Garth for a night Quite a Boy,
in which she's wearing a suit with a bow tie
in two of the pictures, and her hair is tucked

(06:33):
up under a newsboy cap. By nineteen twelve, her stepmother
had started to see this tomboyishness as a concern, and
Mabel enrolled Dorothy at Westlake School for Girls, apparently thinking
that a college preparatory school for girls might make Dorothy
more feminine. While there, she was on the yearbook staff,

(06:55):
and she was involved in art, drama, and tennis, as
far as Mabel's goal of making her more feminine. In
Dorothy's graduation photo, taken in nineteen fifteen, she's in a
white dress with a large white bow holding her hair back,
and she's holding her rose. Her expression really reads to
me like, here I put on the dress. Are you

(07:15):
satisfied now? Or maybe kind of a mix of being
like tolerant and simultaneously very annoyed in these pictures. To me,
she just seems to feel a lot more at home
as Garth for a night. But we really don't have
any information from her from her own point of view
about how she conceived of her gender. After graduating from Westlake,

(07:37):
Dorothy enrolled at the University of Southern California as a
pre med student, and she joined the university rowing team.
Her plan was to go to medical school, but World
War One was already under way and the US entered
the war in nineteen seventeen. Dorothy left school and she
started working on various projects to raise funds and gather supply.

(08:00):
She also trained with the Los Angeles Emergency Ambulance Corps,
but she was never sent overseas. After the war ended,
and after the end of the nineteen eighteen flu pandemic,
Arsener didn't go back to school. In a later interview,
she was quoted as saying that she had decided it
just wasn't what she wanted. That she wanted to be

(08:21):
like Jesus, healing the sick and raising the dead instantly
without surgery or pills, but she also wanted to find
a way to be financially independent rather than being supported
by her father. To that end, a friend helped her
get a job working the switchboard at a coffee wholesaler,
where she made twelve dollars a week. She kept looking, though,

(08:43):
for other better paying jobs. While working with the Ambulance Corps,
Arsener had met William de Mill, brother of filmmaker Cecil B. Demill.
William was a screenwriter and director in his own right,
and both of the brothers were working at Famous Player's
Last Ki, the product and distribution company that would later
become Paramount Pictures. I feel like they're also a recurring

(09:05):
character in the show. Yeah, we've had a lot of
Paramount stuff. Once the war was over, Anna stark Weather,
commander of the Ambulance Corps, encouraged Arsner to meet with
William de Mill about getting a job. The Hollywood film
industry was still in its infancy at this point, having
moved from the East Coast over the early nineteen teens,

(09:26):
Arsner didn't really know what she wanted to do with
her life, aside from the fact that she wanted to
support herself without her father's help. Stark Weather drove her
to the appointment with Demil. Zamil asked Arsner what she
wanted to do in Hollywood. She said she didn't know.
She thought she could maybe be a set dresser. He

(09:47):
asked her what period the furniture in his office was from,
and she did not know that either. In what seems
to me like an incredibly generous offer on De Mill's part,
he said that he would give her access to the
studio's various departments for a week so that she could
look around and get a sense of how things worked
and figure out what she might want to do. Her

(10:09):
mostly self guided tour of the studio lot included seeing
cecil B. De Mill at work as a director and
thinking that was the thing, to be the person in
charge telling everyone else what to do. One of the
secretaries told her that if she really wanted to get
into the business, she should start out by typing scripts.
That was an entry level job, and the script was

(10:32):
really the backbone of the movie. So when she went
back to William De Mill, and he asked her what
she decided. She said she wanted to start at the bottom.
When he asked her what the bottom was, she said,
typing scripts, and he said for that answer, I'll give
you a job. There wasn't a typing position open right away,
so Arsner kept working the switchboard at the coffee wholesaler.

(10:55):
When the job offer came from Paramount, the pay was
fifteen dollars a week. That was more than she was
making at the coffee wholesaler, so she took it. Arsner
told this story in a lot of different interviews over
the course of her career, and continuing that theme how
these don't always have the same details. There are some
inconsistencies in the exact timeline of how all this played

(11:18):
out and how much money she was being offered at
both of the jobs, But a lot of the time
she really made it sound like she took this job
for the money, not because she had aspirations of using
it as her starting point to becoming a filmmaker. We're
going to talk about Arsner's life in Hollywood after we

(11:39):
paused for a sponsor break. When Dorothy Arsner started her
job as a script typist, she ran into an immediate problem,
which is that she could not type. She hunted and
pecked on the typewriter with two fingers. That's incredibly slow.

(12:03):
And on top of being very slow, she made a
lot of mistakes in her first days of work doing this.
She was constantly asking herself, like, what did I do?
She had left the switchboard job, which she was actually
really good at, for this where she was a miss
After making sure it was okay to do so, she
took pages home with her at the end of the

(12:23):
day and kept typing them from there. Her coworkers also
felt sorry for her, and some of the fastest typists
in the pool would pick up some of her pages
and type them for her so that she could make
her deadlines. On top of all that, she arrived at
work one day and accidentally parked in cecil By de
Mill's parking space, like while he was waiting to get

(12:43):
in with his driver directly behind her. I feel all
of this. I could see myself doing some of this,
I know. One of the other typists told her that
if she wanted to move up, her next step should
be as a script girl, also called a script clerk
or a script continuity supervisor. So that's the person who

(13:05):
keeps track of every take during filming and who works
with the director and the editor to try to prevent
continuity errors. She heard about an opening with actor and
director Alan Nasimova, who had started her own production company
and had a distribution contract with Metro Pictures that, of course,
later became MGM. Nasimova was married to a man, but

(13:26):
was also known for having relationships with women, and she's
often credited with being the first to describe Hollywood's community
of lesbians and bisexual women as the sewing circle. Nasimova
became one of Arsner's mentors in the film industry, and
they may have had a romantic relationship as well. After

(13:47):
Arsner finished working on Nasimova's movie Stronger Than Death, she
went back to Paramount and started working as a script clerk.
Her next step up from there was as a film cutter,
cutting and splicing film negatives based on the decisions of
the film's director and editor. Her mentor here was Nan Herron,
who taught her the ropes on the nineteen nineteen comedy

(14:09):
Too Much Johnson. Arsner came to really love this work.
She was good at cutting and splicing and making sure
everything lined up seamlessly, and she could do it pretty quickly.
She also loved how it let her make subtle improvements
on the scenes that she was working with, like trimming
things up if an actor took too long to exit
a scene or snipping out errors. Soon, Arsner had moved

(14:33):
to Paramount subsidiary Real Art Studio, where she led the
editing department and taught other people how to do it.
In nineteen twenty one, twenty four year old Arsner met
forty year old dancer, choreographer and screenwriter Marian Morgan on
a film set. Arsner had, or was at least rumored
to have had relationships with other women after this, but

(14:57):
from this point she and Marian were to get for
the next fifty years. This was kind of an open secret.
They didn't really try to hide it, but they also
did not discuss it. As Arsner became more well known
and started doing more media interviews, she just didn't talk
about her personal life at all. She could also even

(15:18):
be reticent to talk about her previous films. She would
describe them as over and done with and just not
worth talking about anymore. In nineteen twenty two, Arsner was
hired to work on Blood and Sand, starring Rudolph Valentino.
Although she had worked on dozens of films at this point,
this one was notable. Valentino played a matador, and it

(15:40):
would have been prohibitively expensive and extremely dangerous to film
this big film star actually doing bullfights. Arsner oversaw some
of the filming herself, and she ter cut footage of
Valentino with stock footage of real bullfights, and that made
the bullfighting scenes a lot more compelling, while also saving
the studio a lot of time and expense. Arsner was

(16:04):
also writing, starting out with scenarios or treatments, and then
working up to writing full screenplays. Some of these works
were adapted from existing stories, including When Husband's Flirt and
The Red Kimona. In nineteen twenty five, she wrote and
edited Old Ironsides, in which the USS Constitution fights against pirates.

(16:26):
In nineteen twenty six, Arsner had been doing various work
for other studios, but she had always come back to Paramount.
After Old Ironsides, she started trying to get Paramount to
give her a directing job. Executives at the studio seemed
reluctant to do this, and she threatened to leave Paramount
for Columbia Pictures instead, because she had already been offered

(16:48):
a contract there. Paramount came back with sort of vague
promises that they might find something for her in the future,
and she told them that if she didn't have an
a list picture in the next two weeks, she was walking.
The results of this was the silent film Fashions for Women,
which was the start of Arsner's career as a director

(17:10):
for Paramount. In addition to directing this movie, Arsner co
wrote the screenplay, which was adapted from earlier work, and
she and Marian Morgan edited the film together. This was
an early starring role for Esther Rawlson, who had started
out as a vaudeville child performer and had played smaller
roles than dozens of films before this point. This film

(17:32):
was released on March twenty sixth, nineteen twenty seven. From there,
Arsner directed other Silent films, including Ten Modern Commandments, Get
Your Man, and Manhattan Cocktail. Manhattan Cocktail is sometimes described
as a part talkie because it had synchronized vocal music
and silent dialogue. Mary and Morgan worked on all three

(17:55):
of these films as well. This did not make Arsner,
the first woman director in the motion picture industry in
the United States. We've already talked about Allen Asimova, and
other women directors included Lois Weber, who was a truly
prolific director and screenwriter, and Alice Gui Blachet, who had

(18:17):
started her career in France before founding her own studio
with her husband Herbert back when the film industry was
still headquartered in New Jersey. According to research by the
American Film Institute, during the Silent film era, more than
ten percent of feature film credits were to women directors, writers,

(18:37):
and producers, and women wrote almost twenty percent of feature
films during that era. Unfortunately, most of these films are
lost today because they were not preserved and their film
stock either deteriorated or was intentionally destroyed because of the
expense involved with conserving and properly storing it. This is

(19:00):
its true of all of the silent films that Arsner directed,
but overwhelmingly these women directors didn't make the transition from
silent films to talkies starting in the late nineteen twenties,
and there were a lot of reasons for this. Filmmaking
had started out as something new and very experimental, and
the earliest films were typically very short, so there was

(19:23):
a lot more opportunity for people to kind of try
their own thing. By the nineteen twenties, even before the
move away from silent films, production had become a lot
more expensive and involved, and corporations like Paramount and MGM
were really dominating Hollywood as smaller independent companies were driven
out of business. The major studios also kept extremely tight

(19:47):
control on what was made and how it was made.
As the industry became more corporate and more male dominated,
executives and other decision makers gave women fewer and fewer opportunities.
As studios started to unionize, some of the unions also
allowed only men as members, and as productions started shifting

(20:08):
away from silent films, women often were not given access
to the training and education and experience that they would
need to just keep up with all the changes in
the industry. Dorothy Arsner became the lone exception. She managed
to keep directing movies when other women did not, possibly
because of her complete refusal to back down and her

(20:30):
willingness to go somewhere else if a studio wouldn't negotiate.
Arsener became not only the only woman working as a
director in the Hollywood studio system, but also in a tour.
She preferred to have screenwriters on set with her so
they could work together and with the editor, including turning
characters that had been written as one dimensional stereotypes and

(20:52):
the source material into complex people with complicated motives and personality.
This amount of control director was extremely unusual. At this point.
The studios were really calling the shots and making a
lot of those kinds of decisions, but Arsner was willing
to walk away if they wouldn't give her that authority.

(21:14):
She was also focused on making movies with other women,
so those writers and editors that she was working so
closely with were usually women as well. They also mainly
focused on women's stories. Arsner was quoted as saying, quote,
try as a man may he will never be able
to get the woman's viewpoint in telling certain stories. The

(21:36):
studios also used this idea in their marketing. They would
really hype up that this was a woman's film being
told by the only woman director, and Irony hears that
within the industry, Arsner seems to have been regarded more
as one of the boys. A number of people including
director Robert Aldrich, described her this way. She always kept

(21:58):
her hair short, and while she she sometimes wore straight
dresses or conservative skirts and blazers, she was just as
often in a suit, sometimes with a tie. She could
also be more dramatic with her dress like There are
photos of her on the set of a western dressed
as a cowboy, and production stills from old ironsides show
her in a sailor suit. Some of the media coverage

(22:21):
of her career just kind of glosses over this, describing
her as feminine and as having no patience for vulgarity
or loudness on her sets. At the same time, it
does seem like what was tacitly accepted or glossed over
in Hollywood might have had a negative impact elsewhere in
her life. In nineteen twenty nine, Arsner tried to get

(22:43):
a loan to buy a house in the Los Buelist
neighborhood of Los Angeles, and the bank turned her down.
It does not seem like there was a legitimate financial
reason for this, and Arsner cashed in some investments so
that she could pay for this house without needing a loan.
This wound up working out in her favor since Just
a few months later, in October of nineteen twenty nine,

(23:06):
the stock market crashed, marking the start of the Great
Depression that would have wiped out most of the value
of those investments that she had sold to build the house.
The stock market crash not long after Arsener had directed
her first talkie. That was The Wild Party, starring Clara Bow,
who had previously worked with Arsener on Get Your Man.

(23:28):
Arsner is often cited as inventing the boom mic during
the production of this film, although similar rigs were used
on other films at around the same time. With the
introduction of spoken dialogue in movies, actors had to hit
their marks and hold still to deliver their lines, which
was awkward and often wound up seeming stilted. This was

(23:49):
also Bow's first talkie and she was struggling with the microphones,
so Arsner had hung one from a fishing rod which
could be suspended over the actors and move as they
moved moved. The Wild Party was a box office success
and also one of the first leading roles for actor
Frederick Marsch. Arsner then directed Charming Sinners, which also came

(24:12):
out in nineteen twenty nine and Behind the Makeup in
nineteen thirty. Sarah and Son also came out in nineteen
thirty and starred Ruth Chatterton, who was nominated for an
Academy Award as Best Actress for the role. By this point,
Arsner was starting to develop a reputation as a star maker.
This was Chatterton's second Best Actress nomination, and soon after this,

(24:35):
Frederick March was named Best Actor for his role in
Doctor Jekyl and Mister Hyde. Arsner's last film for Paramount
was Merely We Go to Hell in nineteen thirty two.
While movies were a hugely popular form of entertainment for
people hoping to escape from the stresses of the Great Depression,
Paramount was on the edge of financial disaster. Part of

(24:58):
this was because of the economy, but the movie studio
was also facing increasing competition from other Hollywood movie studios.
Paramount wanted Arsner to sign a new contract that would
cut her pay by fifty percent, which was happening pretty
much across the board, but she refused. She spent the
rest of her career as a freelancer, working for whatever

(25:21):
company she wanted. We'll talk about her life after leaving
Paramount after a sponsor break. In nineteen thirty three, Dorothy
Arsner directed Christopher Strong for RKO Pictures. This was Catherine

(25:43):
Hepburn's second feature film, and it also featured Billy Burke.
Arsner and Hepburn butted heads a lot during this film.
It seems like Hepburn thought Arsner's directing was uninspired and
Arsner thought Hepburn's tone was too, and they also just
seemed to clash personally, but this also added to Arsener's

(26:07):
reputation as a starmaker. Katherine Hepburn earned an Academy Award
for Best Actress in Morning Glory, which came out later
that same year. Arsner had actually originally been on board
to direct Morning Glory, but the production schedule did not
work out. All of Arsner's films up to this point
fall under the umbrella of pre code Hollywood, and they

(26:29):
often had some transgressive themes. The Wild Party is set
at a women's college and is read as having lesbian undertones.
In Merrily we Go to Hell, and Heiress marries a
reporter who turns out to be a very heavy drinker,
and when she catches him in an affair, they basically
arranged to have an open marriage. This was way way

(26:51):
more scandalous in nineteen thirty two than it would be today,
and some newspapers actually refuse to even advertise Merrily We
Go to Hell just because of its title. In Christopher Strong,
Catherine Hepburn plays an aviator who falls in love with
a married man, and the film involves an out of wedlock, pregnancy,
and a suicide. Overall, in one way or another, a

(27:14):
lot of Arsner's pre Code films framed heterosexual marriage as
a repressive and even oppressive dynamic. But over the nineteen
twenties and thirties, the industry had become increasingly concerned about
the moral content of its films. Some of this was
tied to greater socioeconomic factors. For example, the Great Depression

(27:35):
was seen as an emasculating force for men as many
of them lost their jobs as women were entering the workforce,
so there were a lot of fears around changing gender
norms and gender roles. Hollywood had also been hit by
a lot of scandals, including the murder of William Desmond Taylor.

(27:57):
We just ran our episode on that as a sad
Saturday classic. Various religious and political groups were calling on
Hollywood to regulate itself over issues like obscenity, violence, and
indecency in films. This led to the adoption of the
Motion Picture Production Code, better known as the Hayes Code.

(28:20):
The Hayes Code grew out of earlier standards and rules,
and it went through numerous revisions from the time it
was introduced in nineteen thirty four to the creation of
the modern film rating system in nineteen sixty eight, But
for the most part, the code always had the same
three general principles. One, no picture shall be produced which

(28:41):
will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence,
the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to
the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil, or sin. Two. Correct
standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama
and entertainment, shall be presented. Law natural or human shall

(29:03):
not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation.
There are a lot of specifics that were spelled out
in various ways over the years as well, like that
films should not make their audiences sympathize with murderers or
other criminals. They should not make adultery, miscegenation, or homosexuality

(29:25):
seem acceptable. Obscenity and profanity were also forbidden. While these
standards restricted some of what she could do in the
post code era, Arsener's films continued to be focused on women.
Craig's Wife, starring Rosalind Russell, came out in nineteen thirty six.
I was based on a Pulitzer Prize winning play. It

(29:46):
told the story of a very strong, willed woman who
approached her marriage as more of a business arrangement than
a romance, and what happened as she alienated the people
around her. In nineteen thirty seven, Arsener directed The Ride
Wore Red starring Joan Crawford, which was a romantic comedy
that was layered with issues of class and identity. In

(30:07):
nineteen thirty eight, Arsner became the first woman to join
the Screen Director's Guild, later the Director's Guild of America.
In nineteen forty, Arsner directed Dance, Girl Dance, starring Lucille
Ball and Marine O'Hara, Even though the film industry had
really locked down the more subversive elements of a lot
of Arst's earlier career. Today, this movie has a reputation

(30:31):
as a feminist film. Ball played Bubbles, a chorus girl,
and O'Hara was Judy, a classically trained ballet dancer. Toward
the end of the film, Bubbles offers Judy a job,
and Judy doesn't realize she has been hired to play
a stooge, meaning that she's supposed to be ridiculed and
booed off the stage before Bubble's performance. Judy takes this

(30:55):
job because she's desperate for work, and she eventually stops
the show and delivers a monologue to the audience, saying,
in part quote, go ahead and stare. I'm not ashamed,
go on laugh, get your money's worth. Nobody's going to
hurt you. I know you want me to tear my
clothes off so you can look your fifty cents worth
fifty cents for the privilege of staring at a girl

(31:17):
the way your wives won't let you. Arsner's last Hollywood
film was First Comes Courage, which came out in nineteen
forty three. It was a wartime drama starring Merle Oberon
as a member of the Norwegian Resistance. Arsner got sick
during filming. In some accounts it was pneumonia, and in
others it was pleurisy. Charles Vidor had to be brought

(31:40):
in to take her place. Over the next few years,
there were various news reports about her being the top
choice to direct a number of films, but none of
those films ever happened, or if they did go forward,
someone else directed them. There's a lot of speculation about
why Arsner left Hollywood. It's possible that she just wasn't

(32:01):
enjoying the work as much in the face of increasingly
strict enforcement of the Hayes Code. While she'd had a
reputation as quote one of the boys, Hollywood was also
just becoming increasingly homophobic. The House an American Activities Committee
had been established in nineteen thirty eight, and a few
years later it became really focused on the idea of

(32:23):
communist infiltration in Hollywood. It's possible that Arsner just thought
it was better for her not to be there. Some
of her final films, including The Bride war Red, also
just had not been as well received as some of
her earlier work. After her departure from the industry in
nineteen forty three, there were no women working as directors

(32:44):
from major Hollywood studios until Ida Lupino, who started an
independent Film Company with her husband. They started producing films
for RKO in nineteen forty nine. Arsner had been very
careful with her earnings and her innson. She was able
to live comfortably for the rest of her life, and
she did do some other work. She helped direct training

(33:07):
films for the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps during World War II,
and she taught whack trainees to make training films of
their own. These training films are unfortunately presumed to be
lost today. In the late nineteen fifties, Joan Crawford, who
was married to Pepsi executive Alfred Steel, convinced Arsner to
direct a series of commercials for Pepsi. In nineteen fifty one,

(33:31):
Arsner and Marian Morgan moved to Laquinta, California, southwest of
Palm Springs, where they lived for the rest of their lives,
but Arsner continued to go back to the Los Angeles
area for work. In nineteen fifty two, she was named
head of the Television and Motion Picture department at Pasadena
Playhouse College of Theater Arts, and she taught the first

(33:52):
filmmaking course there. She also produced stage plays at the theater.
Arsner left Pasadena Playhouse in the late night nineteen fifties,
and started teaching at the Graduate Film School at the
University of California, Los Angeles. She remained in that position
until nineteen sixty three. By this point Arsner had lived

(34:12):
and worked through the transition from silent films to talkies
and from pre code to post code Hollywood. Her teaching
work was part of another transition from virtually all filmmaking
education happening on the job or through apprenticeships, to the
existence of film schools. She didn't really love her first

(34:34):
year of teaching at UCLA, which was almost entirely lecture based.
Over her time there, her classes became progressively more hands on,
from working with a viewfinder and asking students how they
would compose a scene, to bringing TV cameras into the classroom,
to turning the room into a miniature set and having
her students make short films with professional actors. Eventually she

(34:58):
was supervising fifty graduate A student filmmakers at a time.
While her own films had had a lot of groundbreaking
elements at the time that they were made, her teaching
was overall very conventional in terms of how to compose
a scene, light it and direct it to tell a story.
It seems like some of this was really about her

(35:19):
wanting her students to be able to work in Hollywood,
which was still very conventional and very constrained by the
Hays Code, but also some of it was about learning
the rules of film before breaking them. Arsner's most famous
student was Francis Ford Coppola. Coppola described her as having
a heart that was as big as the world, and

(35:41):
also as always having cookies and crackers on hand for
her students who she knew were starving. Marian Morgan died
in nineteen seventy one at the age of ninety A
year later, Arsner's film The Wild Party was screened at
the first International Festival of Women's Films, which sparked a
revival and interest in her work. The festival hosted a

(36:02):
retrospective of her films the following year. In nineteen seventy five,
the Director's Guild of America hosted a tribute to Arsner
that included a telegram that was read from Katherine Hepburn.
This telegram said, quote, isn't it wonderful that you've had
such a great career when you had no right to
have a career at all. That same year, Dorothy Arsner

(36:25):
Towards a Feminist Cinema was published by the British Film Institute,
edited by Claire Johnston. Dorothy Arsner died on October first,
nineteen seventy nine, at the age of eighty two. She
had directed eighteen feature films over the course of her career,
but she was never given any industry awards during her lifetime.

(36:45):
In nineteen eighty six, she was given a star on
the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In two thousand and seven,
Dance Girl Dance was selected for preservation in the National
Film Registry. The Librarian of Congress's announcement set of the
film quote. Although there were numerous women filmmakers in the
early decades of Silent cinema, by the nineteen thirties, directing

(37:07):
in Hollywood had become a male bastion. With one exception,
Dorothy Arsner graduated from editing to directing in the late
nineteen twenties, often exploring the conflicted roles of women in
contemporary society in Dance Girl Dance. Her most intriguing film,
two women, Lucille Ball and Marine O'Hara pursue life in

(37:28):
show business from opposite sides of the spectrum, burlesque and ballet.
The film is a meditation on the disparity between art
and commerce. The dancers strive to preserve their own feminist
integrity while fighting for their place in the spotlight and
for the love of male lead Lewis Hayward. In twenty eighteen,

(37:49):
Paramount named the dressing room building on its studio lot
in Los Angeles after Dorothy Arsner. Francis Ford Coppola was
a big part of getting this building named for her,
and that the dedication. He talked about how much he
respected her and how much she had taught him. He
has also credited her encouragement with keeping him in film
school when he was thinking of quitting. There is not

(38:13):
currently a full biography of Drothy Arsner, at least not
one I could find. There is a book of collected interviews,
and also a book that's largely focused on her film work.
Like It has an autobiographical section, but a lot of
it is film criticism. Neither of these is just strictly
a biography. She started on an autobiography that she never finished.

(38:34):
We've mentioned that a couple of times in the episode.
It stops shortly before meeting Mariyan Morgan. It is possible
that that is why she did not continue it. There
was really no way to tell her life story without
Marian and she was still living at a time when
there was so much stigma and hostility around lesbianism that

(38:54):
you might not have thought it was workable. This partial
autobiography was not published until decades after her death, as
part of work that is more focused on film criticism
than on her life. There are rumors of a biopic
that would be directed by Todd Haynes that have been
circulating for more than twenty years. I have no idea

(39:16):
of anything else about this other than that it has
been rumored for more than twenty years. Uh, let's start
the arsener. I love her. I'm so glad you picked
this one, was I? Yes? Yes? Do you also have
some listener mail? I do I have listener mail from Caitlin.
Caitlyn is a frequent correspondent, and I think we have

(39:38):
read another Kaitlin email in the not too long ago past.
Caitlin wrote after our episode on Pelagra and said, Hi,
Tracy and Holly, I was so excited to see the
first part of the Pelagra two parter are in my
feed and when you alluded to the fortification of grain
products to provide more niacin imediately made me think of

(40:01):
a story my grandmother told me about some of her
advocacy work. My grandmother got involved in the spina bifida
community when my aunt was born with it in nineteen seventy.
Spina bifida is a congenital disability that's classified as a
neural tube defect, and it occurs very early in a pregnancy,
between four and six weeks, often before a person knows

(40:22):
they are pregnant. One of the risk factors is a
lack of enough full ate vitamin B twelve during those
very early days of fetal development. My grandmother vividly remembers
when fullate started being included as one of the vitamins
in enriched grains and how quickly it seemed to affect
the number of children born with spina bifida. According to Graham,

(40:45):
though Hispanic families in our part of Texas continued to
seek out the Spina Bifida Association at the same rate,
she said very confidently that it was due to the
enriched grain programs primarily focusing on wheat products, while Hispanic
families tended to use corn products and specifically said MASSA

(41:06):
was not enriched like in a good historian. I tried
to find resources to back this up, and it seems
Graham is correct. The FDA does not require MASSA to
have fullic acid the synthetic form of full eight added,
although it does recommend manufacturers do so. There's still a
documented disparity in rates of neural tube defects, including spina bifida,

(41:28):
between Hispanic and non Hispanic populations in the United States.
I thought that this connection to another form of B
vitamin was really interesting, and I hope you did too.
I enjoyed the Pelagra episodes. It fascinates me to try
and imagine the paradigm shifts society underwent as concepts like
tiny animalcules are causing disease and foods have invisible properties

(41:51):
that we need to survive for being introduced, especially the
time period where those overlap. Of course, people were for
a bacterial or viral cause of pelagra. They just accepted
that's how sickness worked. Thank you, as always for the
work you do. I've attached some pet tax photos of
Dmitri My orange guy who recently got some teeth pulled

(42:13):
but hasn't seemed to notice and shark to puss the
queen tority of the house, as well as the photo
of my grandmother and uncle circa nineteen seventy three to
seventy four. Best Caitlin. Hey, Caitlin, thanks so much for
this email. I loved this email a lot. We have talked,
I think in the recent behind the scenes about my
mom and my mom's work with disabled people for most

(42:34):
of her career, and that included working with some kids
with spina bifida. And I also what would volunteer with
some of the programs that my mom worked with when
I was a teen and worked with some kids who
had this condition. It would not have occurred to me
to think about that. With the full late and disparities

(42:55):
and where full late is being enriched, I mostly had
heard about this. I am not giving this as advice.
I'm saying this is what the advice was. When I
was taking high school health class. The advice in health
class was that anyone who was thinking of becoming pregnant
should go ahead and start taking prenatal vitamins because of

(43:17):
those be vitamins that are in there that are really
important to fetal development from the very earliest points of pregnancy,
before a person might be aware that they are pregnant. Yeah. Boy,
do we have some cute kitty cats. We have an
orange kitty with a little blup looking on the floor
like a silly orange kitty cat face. Uh oh, man,

(43:40):
we have another collection of orange cat fluffy cat. We
just read another listener male that was similarly orange cat
and fluffy cat. This fluffy cat stretched out on some carpet. Man,
we have multiple kitty cats in these pictures, or multiple
pictures subduced to kitty cats. Thank you so much, Caitlin.

(44:01):
Thank you again for this email. I did not know
any of this and I was glad to know of it.
If you'd like to send us a note about this
or any other podcast, we are at History Podcasts at
iHeartRadio dot com. You can subscribe to our show on
the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you like to get

(44:22):
your podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.

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