Universal Women: Filmmaking and Institutional Change in Early Hollywood

Preface: A Puzzle, Some Premises, and a Hypothesis

xiii Preface A Puzzle, Some Premises, and a Hypothesis This book describes how institutions transform the possible into the all-but impossible. It tells the story of how the Universal Film Manufacturing Company , arguably the most enthusiastic employer of women directors the U.S. film industry has ever known, decided that women should no longer direct. The company reached this decision by the end of 1919 and made it during a time of important changes in the U.S. film industry and the world at large. Scholars of American modernity often mark 1920 as the end of a period of intense social, political, and economic transformation than began around 1880.1 By 1920, too, filmmakers had developed the type of film that became familiarly known as “a Hollywood movie” along with the industrial apparatus necessary to produce, distribute, and exhibit that type of film globally for profit. Universal’s participation in these changes informed its gendered division of labor. Accordingly, the transformation of possibility into impossibility cannot be understood merely as a foreclosure. It enabled a new configuration at the expense of an older one—new types of films, new sorts of business organization , and a new sense of audience. When Universal banished its women directors, it simultaneously participated in broader cultural and industrial changes and redefined itself. This book describes how a particular division of labor was instituted, made regular by and within the corporate movie studio. In the process, it strives to explain what it means to conceive of the Universal Film Manufacturing Company as agent and object—an entity that, like all institutions, acts and also forms the setting for action. But that gets ahead of the story. the Puzzle From its inception in 1912 through 1919, the Universal Film Manufacturing Company thought women might make excellent directors. The studio credited eleven women with directing more than 170 films during these years, and its publicity department trumpeted their successes. The superstar Lois Weber accounts for most of the pre-1916 credits, but beginning in 1916 Universal created something of a pipeline. It attributed at least nine titles each to the supervision of Ruth Ann Baldwin, Cleo Madison, Ruth Stonehouse, Elsie Jane Wilson, and Ida May Park. Evidence suggests that these women and others, such as the serials star Grace Cunard, actually directed more often than official credits indicate.2 Even allowing for an undercount, however, women directors amounted to a small proportion of Universal’s total when considered in absolute terms. Yet, in relation to historical figures, their proportion is significantly larger. At their most numerous in 1917, eight out of 113 named Universal directors were women (about 7 percent), and Universal credited them with slightly more than 6 percent of its films.3 Overall, the average of titles credited to women for the years 1916–19 is lower, about 4 percent. Intriguingly , however, women were concentrated in feature films, as opposed to the large volume of shorts and serials Universal released. In the same three-year period, the studio assigned 12 percent of its Bluebird brand feature films to the direction of women. In the 1990s, Directors Guild of America statistics demonstrate, the industry paid women to direct between 7 and 9 percent of the days worked in film production.4 Martha Lauzen’s survey of credits shows that early in the twenty-first century the proportion of woman-directed titles declined from an anomalous high of 11 percent in 2000 to 5 percent in 2004 and had rebounded to 6 percent in 2007.5 Allowing for variations in the way work has been organized and irregularities in the way it has been recorded, one can safely say that during the 1910s Universal’s record of crediting women directors exceeds the historical industrial average and argue that it exceeds the average for feature films by a substantial margin. Habits change. In 1919, Universal credited five feature films to women directors . The following year, for the fist time in its history, it credited not a single title to a woman. With the sole exception of Weber, who returned to supervise three features in the mid-1920s, the studio did not name a women director again until 1982, when Amy Heckerling made Fast Times at Ridgemont High.6 The change certainly seems decisive, yet it is far from clear who decided or xiv p r E f a c E xv how a decision to change...