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91 Part tWo Impossibility In February 1919, Carl Laemmle proclaimed Universal to have come “back from hell.”1 Thanks to investment in quality features, he maintained, the company had rebounded from the collapse of its shorts program and from the twin economic blows of the 1917 wartime tax on entertainments and the influenza pandemic of 1918. Historians are less sanguine. Consensus has it that the former giant continued to struggle in an industry increasingly dominated by vertically integrated firms.2 Even understood as the expression of a wish, however, Laemmle’s pronouncement presents a paradox: Universal bet that women would lead it from purgatory at the same time as it excluded them from the march. Marketing and credits reveal that the company considered Ida May Park, Lois Weber, and Elsie Jane Wilson to be among its most reliable producers. Most of the men directing for Universal made titles of a less prestigious sort and worked less often than these three women. Yet despite Universal’s evident admiration for them, the company was in the process of limiting directing opportunities for women as a group: it credited roughly twice as many women in 1917 as in 1918. This contradiction indicates uncertainty about how gender should factor in corporate interpretations of what constitutes a successful director and a profitably reproducible type of film. Accordingly, the three chapters in part 2 describe the play of uncertainty and conviction at work as Universal limited the types of films women would direct. Chapter 4 considers genre as an institutional process in which interpretations of content interact with staffing decisions. For Universal, at least, this process developed in tandem with the shift from the variety program to the feature film. Beginning in 1915, it took several years to complete. During these transitional years, serial action films were a Universal staple, and chapter 5 shows how the practice of genre worked to exclude women directors from these films. A longer chapter concludes this part by tracing in some detail the process that made Universal feel certain that women would be good at directing only particular sorts of feature-length dramas. Uncertainty, one might point out, is a less flattering name for possibility, and the uncertainty was institutional. As individuals, Universal executives and filmmakers may well have been as confident of the way “back from hell” as Laemmle makes it appear. Nonetheless, awkwardness, hesitancy, and confusion are evident in patterns of choices about who would direct what films and how those films would be marketed. Although the historical record does not establish how such selections were made, it is clear that multiple actors made them within an evolving organizational hierarchy. Universal’s constituents may or may not have worried over future prospects for women directors in general. They could not, as individuals, have revised the gendered division of labor. The organization constrained them, favoring certain types of choices while limiting others. At the same time, as constituents of the organization, they participated in the process of setting and revising such limits in response to interpretations of the marketplace and of the material and intellectual resources at hand. By 1920, the confluence of decision makers and decision making had set a new limit: as a general rule, from this year forward women no longer directed for the company.3 In 1918 and 1919, Universal credited twenty-two releases to women. Two were one-offs. A comedy short directed by Ruth Stonehouse had almost certainly been pulled from the company’s backlog of unreleased films. Wilfred Lucas and Bess Meredyth, typically credited as director and screenwriter, respectively, for once shared the credit for directing a civil-war drama. Of the remaining twenty titles, Elsie Jane Wilson directed six. Ida May Park and Lois Weber—working from her own, largely independent studio—directed seven each, although one of Weber’s, Scandal Mongers, was a rereleased 1915 film. Quite unlike the output of women directors as a group before 1918, these films constitute a discernable type. Although they can be described in ways that make them seem various, in truth they resemble one another much more closely than the films directed by Cleo Madison and Weber in 1916, or by Weber, Ruth Ann Baldwin, and E. Magnus Ingleton in 1917. All were feature length (five reels or more) and starred one of Universal’s most popular female leads. All but two were released as “Jewels” or “Special Attractions”—the marquee brands. Advertising mentioned their directors’ names and proclaimed them “women.” 92 [18...

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