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⡘ 122 A “Professional Southerner” in the Hollywood Studio System Lamar Trotti at Work, 1925–1952 Matthew H. Bernstein In the minds of many studio-era Hollywood talents, executives, and administrators of the 1920s through the 1950s—as in the view of many Americans—the South was a region apart, a foreign country, one whose customs and beliefs, particularly concerning race and race relations, were quite strange. Director Rowland Lee casually listed the South among foreign markets when he commented in 1927 that the studios never informed him “why his picture didn’t do well in the South, why his picture didn’t do well in England, why his picture could not be shown in Germany .”1 Twelve years later, this view had not changed: Howard Dietz, from the publicity division of Loews, Inc., wrote Atlanta’s mayor William B. Hartsfield to thank him for treating “us foreigners” (the Hollywood entourage attending the world premiere of Gone with the Wind) so well.2 Given this mindset, and the film industry’s determination, in Richard Maltby’s words, “to displease as few people as little and as seldom as possible,” the South had a definite place on Hollywood’s roll call of groups not to alienate.3 This list included reformers, censors, trade associations , various professions, and most notably, ethnic and racial groups, foreign countries—and domestic regions.4 In conceptualizing their domestic audience, film industry executives might carve up the national marketplace in a number of ways: the sticks versus the city, the sophisticated versus the sentimental, New York versus the rest of the country.5 More than any other region, the South retained a singular position in the national film marketplace as a geographic area with distinctive tastes and sensibilities. As many essays in this volume attest, this distinction was due to Hollywood’s, indeed the entire nation’s, southern imaginary. Sociologist Larry J. Griffin has noted that New England (initially settled by A “Southerner” in the Studio System 123 intolerant Puritans) and the U.S. West (where European settlers decimated Native American tribes) also have discrete identities, “yet neither region was so thoroughly feared and censured, on the one hand, and or so unashamedly embraced and sentimentalized, on the other, as was the South.”6 So powerful was the Hollywood studios’ fear of offending the South, Thomas Cripps argues, that the “Myth of the Southern Box Of- fice” dictated that films must not offend the white South by depicting interracial or African American scenarios. This logic, Cripps claims, held sway in spite of the evidence that southern audiences appreciated black performers on the legitimate stage; such fears, he pointed out, were out of all proportion to the relatively small box office percentage that the southern market constituted for Hollywood.7 By no coincidence, the white South in many ways both concurred with this view of itself as foreign and protested against it. Two years after the Gone with the Wind Atlanta premiere, W. J. Cash opened his landmark study The Mind of the South by stating baldly, “There exists among us by ordinary [sic]—both North and South—a profound conviction that the South is another land, sharply differentiated from the rest of the American nation, and exhibiting within itself a remarkable homogeneity .”8 As Fred Hobson has shown, Cash, in writing his book, took his place in a long line of white southern poets, novelists, journalists, and sociologists who had been defending the South to the rest of the country since the 1820s. They had done this so frequently, according to Hobson, that “explaining the South is almost a regional characteristic in itself,” an activity provoked by criticism from outside the region as well as from an internal sense of guilt about its many flaws. In Hobson’s view, the southerner experiences a “regional inferiority complex, a recognition of failure,” combined with “a perverse and defiant pride in the southerner, a sense of distinction, of superiority, stemming from this inferior status. The southerner, that is to say, wears his heritage of failure and defeat as his badge of honor.”9 Given this ambivalent mix of pride and shame, many white southerners , like many of Hollywood’s dissatisfied constituencies, often felt that the film studios (1915’s The Birth of a Nation aside) had not done their section and their history justice. Southerners had a list of gripes against the industry’s treatment of them on screen and off. Hence those involved in...

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