Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Nobody’s Girl Friday
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1977
WEBSITE: https://jesmyth.co.uk
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2006047592
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2006047592
HEADING: Smyth, J. E., 1977-
000 00436cz a2200121n 450
001 6881554
005 20140506095452.0
008 060616n| azannaabn |n aaa
010 __ |a n 2006047592
040 __ |a DLC |b eng |e rda |c DLC |d DLC
100 1_ |a Smyth, J. E., |d 1977-
670 __ |a Smyth, J. E. Reconstructing American historical cinema, 2006: |b CIP t.p. (J.E. Smyth) data sheet (b. Jan. 31, 1977; lecturer in history at the University of Warwick)
953 __ |a lg14
PERSONAL
Born January 31, 1977.
EDUCATION:Wellesley College, B.A.; Yale University, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, editor, educator, art historian, film critic, and film historian. University of Warwick, Coventry, England, professor of history, 2005—. Also served as an art historian at Yale University. Appeared in documentaries on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and on Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Mixed Race Hollywood, edited by Mary Beltran and Camilla Fojas, New York University Press (New York, NY), 2008; The Blackwell Companion to Historical Film, Wiley-Blackwell (Boston, MI), 2013; The Blackwell Companion to American Film History: Selected Readings, Origins to 1960, Wiley Blackwell (Boston, MI), 2015; Hollywood and the Great Depression, edited by Iwan Morgan, Edinburgh University Press (Edinburgh, Scotland), 2016; and Young Victims of the Nazi Regime: Migration, the Holocaust, and Postwar Displacement, Bloomsbury (London, England), 2016.
Contributor to journals and periodicals, including Rethinking History, Writers Guild Magazine, Written By: The Magazine of the Writers Guild of America, Film Quarterly, Canadian Journal of History, Camera Obscura, American Studies, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and Cineaste.
SIDELIGHTS
J.E. Smyth is a writer, film historian, editor, film critic, and educator. She was born in the United States and currently lives in England, where she is a professor of history at the University of Warwick. As a historian and researcher, she focuses on topics such as “women’s employment and representation in Hollywood, historical gangster films, Westerns, and the history and practice of screenwriting and editing,” noted a writer on the J.E. Smyth website. She had spent more than twenty years working and researching in the Hollywood studio archives, the website writer reported.
She has contributed to magazines such as Film Quarterly, Written By, the Writers Guild Magazine, and Cineaste. She contributed research on writer Edna Ferber’s influence on Hollywood to the PBS documentary, Children of Giant. She has also appeared in documentary films broadcast on both American and British networks, including the BBC and PBS. Smyth holds a B.A. from Wellesley College and a Ph.D. from Yale University.
Smyth is the author of several books on film and Hollywood history. She also served as the editor of Hollywood and the American Historical Film, a collection of interdisciplinary essays looking at both the theory and history of films made about the past in America.
Reconstructing American Historical Cinema and Fred Zinnemann and the Cinema of Resistance
In Reconstructing American Historical Cinema: From Cimarron to Citizen Kane, Smyth “critically studies classical Hollywood cinema’s competence in reassessing U.S. history,” commented Victor Or, writing in Library Journal. The author assesses a number of important films from the middle of the twentieth century, including Cimarron, Scarface, Young Mr. Lincoln, Gone with the Wind, Stagecoach, and Citizen Kane. She bases her work on a careful examination of material such as production records, film scripts, and reviews that appeared in the contemporary press. She finds that, contrary to the formulaic style of filmmaking that Hollywood is famous for, these films offered “serious historical treatment” of the their subjects and still stand as credible portrayals of the American past, Or noted.
Fred Zinnemann and the Cinema of Resistance is Smyth’s “impressive and erudite book based on Zinnemann’s work” as a prominent Hollywood director, commented Cineaste reviewer Brian Neve. Smyth traces Zinnemann’s career in film, first as a director in the Short Subject Department of MGM studios, then as a filmmaker with a political bent, creating such films as The Seventh Cross and Act of Violence. Zinnemann emerged as one of the most important directors in Hollywood in the early 1950s after his work as director on classic films High Noon and from Here to Eternity.
Smyth delves deeply into Zinnemann’s archive of papers at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library to devise her arguments. She looks at how the director’s movies “explore questions of individual and collective resistance to fascism and state power, with particular reference to an emerging historiography of once marginalized women’s voices,” Neve stated. Throughout, Smyth’s “book provides matchless scholarship, with the author exhibiting a broad and authoritative knowledge of other film work, American and European, dealing with these themes of antifascism and women’s resistance,” Neve commented.
Nobody's Girl Friday
Smyth takes a closer look at the concept of women’s work in Hollywood in Nobody’s Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood. She deconstructs the long-held notion that women did not have prominent roles in Hollywood film production. “It was assumed that women could only get jobs as actresses or secretaries in studio-era Hollywood. They were there to be looked at or to take dictation. It was depressing stuff to read. And I didn’t believe it,” Smyth told interviewer Deborah Kalb on the Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb blog. Through her research, she found that women held multiple prominent and influential positions in Hollywood during the 1930s and 40s. They included women who worked both in front of the camera and behind it, within the studios and elsewhere in the quickly growing film industry. “I found that quite a lot of women worked as writers, film editors, producers, executives, designers, agents, and journalists,” Smyth remarked to Kalb. Even secretaries, she noted, sometimes found hard work and dedication paying off in top spots at studios.
Notable names found in the book include Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn, two actresses who were famous as performers but who also were highly influential off screen. Edith Head was one of the most famous costume designers in Hollywood. Smyth also discusses the careers and influence of lesser-known woman such as Mary C. McCall, a writer and two-time president of the Screen Writers Guild who successfully fought for writers’ rights and negotiated pay increases for film writers during World War II. Other personalities include Ida Koverman, a newspaper columnist who worked as assistant to legendary Louis B. Mayer of MGM Studios, who was considered one of the most powerful individuals in Hollywood at the time.
“Smyth’s enlightening tome reveals the power and influence women wielded” in Hollywood during the Depression, World War II, and the postwar years, observed Booklist reviewer Kristine Huntley. A Publishers Weekly contributor commented that Smyth’s book “stands out as especially meaningful in the era of #MeToo and revived resistance of women in Hollywood to gender inequality.” In Kirkus Reviews, a writer called Nobody’s Girl Friday a “fresh, lively examination of women’s places in film history.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, March 1, 2018, Kristine Huntley, review of Nobody’s Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood, p. 14.
Cineaste, winter, 2014, Brian Neve, review of Fred Zinnemann and the Cinema of Resistance, p. 75.
Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2018, review of Nobody’s Girl Friday.
Library Journal, November 1, 2006, Victor Or, review of Reconstructing American Historical Cinema: From Cimarron to Citizen Kane, p. 79.
Publishers Weekly, February 5, 2018, review of Nobody’s Girl Friday, p. 54.
ONLINE
Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb blog, http://deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com/ (June 4, 2018), “Q&A with J.E. Smyth.”
Conversation, http://www.theconversation.com/ (June 29, 2018), biography of J.E. Smyth.
J.E. Smyth website, http://www.jesmyth.co.uk (June 29, 2018).
PopMatters, https://www.popmatters.com/ (April 25, 2018), Christopher John Stephens, review of Nobody’s Girl Friday.
University of Warwick School of Comparative American Studies website, http://www.warwick.ac.uk/ (June 29, 2018), biography of J.E. Smyth.
About
J. E. Smyth is an American-born film historian and has been working in the Hollywood studio archives for twenty years. Her main interests are women’s employment and representation in Hollywood, historical gangster films, Westerns, and the history and practice of screenwriting and editing. Smyth is Professor of History at the University of Warwick, where she’s worked since 2005.
She began life with two regular forenames like most other people, but while in graduate school, she tried sending an article out to two different journals under two different names. Jennifer’s work on Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) wasn’t published by the first journal, but editor Robert Rosenstone, who ran Rethinking History at the time, liked the work of J. E. Smyth. Maybe a girl isn’t supposed to write about John Ford’s biopics of “great men”– particularly when she points out that producer Darryl F. Zanuck and writer Lamar Trotti had more to do with the film’s development. But she stuck with what worked, and it meant that she could have a laugh when critics and academic organizations address her as “Dear Sir.”
She has written for the Writers Guild Magazine, Written By, Film Quarterly, is a regular contributor to Cineaste, and is a very occasional blogger. Her interviews with Alvin Sargent, Oliver Stone, Walter Murch, Marsha Hunt, Maria Cooper, Sarah Gavron, and others have appeared in a variety of media. Her research on writer Edna Ferber’s impact on Hollywood was a key component of the award-winning PBS documentary, Children of Giant (2015).
Smyth has written five books about Hollywood and edited one, Hollywood and the American Historical Film, with contributions from Robert Sklar, Robert Rosenstone, David Eldridge, and Vera Dika. Her most recent book, published by Oxford University Press’s trade division, is a history of the many high-powered women who worked in Hollywood during the studio system (1924-1954). While all of Smyth’s work on Hollywood can be classed as “revisionist” (meaning: she gives studio-era filmmakers credit for the brains they had), Nobody’s Girl Friday reveals a film industry that supported the careers of many women in a range of creative and administrative work, from executives and producers to writers, editors, designers, actors, agents, critics, and directors.
Faculty listArts School of Comparative American Studies
Applying to study
Current students
Research
People
Professor J. E. Smyth
Professor J. E. Smyth
imgjes.jpg"In this rat-race everybody's guilty till they're proved innocent."-- Margo Channing
Professor of History
B.A. Wellesley College
Ph.D. Yale University
Contact Information
website: https://jesmyth.co.uk
Office: H328
2018-19 Office Hours: TBA
Telephone: 02476 523457
email: j.e.smyth@warwick.ac.uk
Undergraduate Teaching
North America: Themes and Problems (AM102)
The Making of the Modern World (HI153)
The Formation of American Culture, 1876-1929 (HI282)
The Formation of American Culture, 1929-2000 (HI2A8)
The American West (AM414)
The Historical Film (HI33Y)
Postgraduate Teaching and Supervision
Race, Gender, and Hollywood (HI955)
History and Film (HI978)
Selected Publications
Books
Nobody's Girl Friday (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
From Here to Eternity (London: British Film Institute/Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
Fred Zinnemann and the Cinema of Resistance (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014). Theatre Library Association Richard Wall Memorial Award finalist.
Hollywood and the American Historical Film, ed. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
Edna Ferber's Hollywood: American Fictions of Gender, Race, and History, preface by Thomas Schatz (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009). AAP PROSE Award for Media and Cultural Studies.
Reconstructing American Historical Cinema From 'Cimarron' to 'Citizen Kane' (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006; 2009). International Association of Media Historians' Prize in Media and History; Theatre Library Association Richard Wall Memorial Award finalist.
Articles
'Laura Ziskin's Reboot of the Female Producer', Cineaste, XLIII, no. 3 (summer 2018).
'The Lion in Winter', Cineaste, XLIII, no. 3 (summer 2018).
'Babylon Revisited', Cineaste, XLIII, no. 2 (spring 2018).
'I, Tonya', Cineaste, XLIII, no. 2 (spring 2018).
'Battle of the Sexes', Cineaste, XLIII, no. 1 (winter 2017).
'Anatomy of the Prick Flick'. Cineaste: 50th Anniversary Issue XLII, no. 4 (fall 2017): 20-24.
'Marsha Hunt: American Girl, Un-American Woman, Upstanding Centenarian', Sight and Sound (October 2017).
'The McCall Years: When a Woman Called the Shots at the Screen Writers Guild', Written By (September 2017).
'The First Woman President', Written By: The Magazine of the Writers Guild of America West (June 2017).
'Barbara McLean: Editing, Authorship, and the Equal Right to Be the Best', Cineaste XLII, no. 2 (spring 2017).
'High Noon', Cineaste XLII, no. 1 (winter 2016): 54-55.
'Brief Encounter', Cineaste XLI, no. 4 (fall 2016): 53-54.
'Female Editors in Studio-Era Hollywood: Rethinking Feminist “Frontiers” and the Constraints of the Archives', in Patrice Petro, E. Ann Kaplan, Kristin Hole, and Dijana Jelaca, eds., The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender, 279-88 (London: Routledge, 2016).
'Organization Women and Belle Rebels: Hollywood's Working Women in the 1930s', in Iwan Morgan, ed. Hollywood and the Great Depression, 66-85 (Edinburgh University Press, 2016).
'A Woman at the Center of Hollywood's Wars: Mary C. McCall, Jr.', Cineaste XLI, no. 3 (summer 2016): 18-23.
'45 Years', Cineaste XLI, no. 3 (summer 2016): 46-47.
'Children of Lidice: Searches, Shadows, Histories', in Monica Tempian and Simone Gigliotti, eds., Young Victims of the Nazi Regime: Migration, the Holocaust, and Postwar Displacement, 299-320 (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).
'The Past, Present, and Future of Women's History on Screen: An Interview with Sarah Gavron', Cineaste XLI, no. 1 (winter 2015): 18-21.
'Suffragette', Cineaste XLI, no. 1 (winter 2015): 45-46.
'Hollywood as Historian, 1929-45', in Cynthia Lucia, Roy Grundmann, and Arthur Simon (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to American Film History: Selected Readings, Origins to 1960, 361-76 (Boston: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015).
'Hollywood Under Siege', Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d'histoire 49:3 (2014) 477-82.
'The Western That Got Its Content ‘From Elsewhere’: High Noon, Fred Zinnemann, and Genre Cleansing', The Quarterly Review of Film and Video 31 (2014): 42-55.
'Against the Beat: Ragtime, Black History, and Postmodernism', Film Quarterly 67:1 (December 2013): 7-13.
'Julia’s Resistant History: Women’s Historical Films in Hollywood and the Legacy of Citizen Kane', in Robert Rosenstone and Constantin Parvelescu (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to the Historical Film, 91-109 (Boston: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
'The Organization Woman Behind The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit', Camera Obscura (2012) 27(2 80): 61-91.
'Julia (1977) and "The Long Road of Women's Memory"', in Smyth, ed. (2012).
'Fred Zinnemann's Search: Reconstructing the Voices of Europe's Children', Film History 23:1 (2011): 75-92.
'Hollywood as Historian, 1929-1945', in Cynthia Lucia, Roy Grundmann, and Arthur Simon (eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film, vol. 2 of 4, (Boston: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).
'James Jones, Columbia Pictures, and the Historical Confrontations of From Here to Eternity', in Peter Rollins and John E. O'Connor (eds)., Why We Fought: America's Wars in Film and History, 283-302 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008).
'Classical Hollywood and the Filmic Writing of Interracial History, 1931-1939', in Mary Beltran and Camilla Fojas (eds.), Mixed Race Hollywood , 23-46 (New York: New York University Press, 2008).
'Jim Crow, Jett Rink, and James Dean: Reconstructing Edna Ferber's Giant', American Studies 48:3 (fall 2007): 5-27.
'American History and Classical Hollywood', Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society IX,1 (September/October 2007): 23-5.
'New Frontiers in American Interracial History: Edna Ferber and the Indian Mixed-Blood', in The European Journal of Native American Studies 20:1 (2006): 39-45.
'Hollywood "Takes One More Look": Early Histories of Hollywood and the Fallen Star Biography, 1932-1937', The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 26:2 (June 2006): 179-201.
‘Competing Frontiers: RKO and the Challenge of Cimarron’, in Peter Rollins and John E. O’Connor (eds.), Hollywood’s West (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005): 37-64.
‘The Three Ages of Imperial Cinema from the Death of Gordon to The Return of the King’, in Janet Croft (ed.), Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings (Altadena, CA: Mythopoeic Press, 2004): 3-23.
‘Revisioning Modern American History in the Age of Scarface (1932)’, The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 24:4 (2004): 535-563. Carfax-International Association of Media Historians' Award, best article, 2004.
‘Young Mr. Lincoln: Between Myth and History in 1939’, Rethinking History 7:2 (2003): 193-214.
‘The New Western History in 1931’, Film and History 33:1 (2003): 9-17.
J. E. Smyth is an American historian and film critic. She has held fellowships from the Getty Research Institute, the Huntington Library, the Mellon Foundation, and the British Academy. She is a regular contributor to Cineaste Magazine and has appeared in documentaries for the BBC and PBS. Smyth is Professor of History at the University of Warwick (UK).
Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb
Check back often for new Q&As, and for daily historical factoids about books. On Facebook at www.facebook.com/deborahkalbbooks. Follow me on Twitter @deborahkalb.
Monday, June 4, 2018
Q&A with J.E. Smyth
J.E. Smyth is the author of the new book Nobody's Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood. Her other books include Reconstructing American Historical Cinema from Cimarron to Citizen Kane and Edna Ferber's Hollywood. She is Professor of History at the University of Warwick.
Q: You write of Nobody's Girl Friday, “This book is meant to challenge and to inspire people who love Hollywood and believe in gender equality.” What first inspired you to write the book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?
A: When I started out – years ago – as an art historian at Yale, I got fed up when so much of the curriculum focused on celebrating the achievements of dead white men. So I changed majors and moved into film studies, thinking a younger cultural medium would be more gender inclusive.
But academic and popular understandings of film, and particularly Hollywood, were (and for the most part still are) focused on studies of great male directors (“auteurs”) and stylistic theories which claim the male gaze of the camera objectifies and punishes strong women.
It was assumed that women could only get jobs as actresses or secretaries in studio-era Hollywood. They were there to be looked at or to take dictation. It was depressing stuff to read. And I didn’t believe it.
Few historians bothered to look at the collaborative nature of film production during the studio system, or at the film industry’s employment of women (some estimates were at 40 percent).
In doing research in film archives, I found that quite a lot of women worked as writers, film editors, producers, executives, designers, agents, and journalists—and that sometimes, secretaries rose to the top of their business—not through trading sexual favors, but through hard work.
And these women loved their work, and the industry and the national press celebrated their achievements. There was a lot of camaraderie and support among these women too. Though American feminist historians often contend that feminism and discussions of gender equality vanished between 1930 and 1950, research on women in the film industry reveals quite a different story. It was a story I knew I had to tell.
There is a lot at stake in remembering these women and the Hollywood studio system which enabled them to succeed. Women were powerful film producers in the 1940s; women made up 25 percent of screenwriters; women ran unions, negotiated pay raises, won Academy Awards, and dominated entertainment journalism.
It was adaptations of women’s literature that made the most lucrative films, and producers catered to the female audience with films about independent working women. So why remember any of this?
It’s ironic that in the 1960s, after the “system” had fallen apart due to a combination of political and economic crises, the independent film productions in Hollywood became a closed male shop—it was a Hollywood of “Easy Riders and Raging Bulls.” Not much room for women.
Though women regained a foothold in the 1970s and 1980s as producers, only recently have women started to reclaim their creative power behind the scenes.
We shouldn’t just congratulate ourselves that things are finally changing for women in Hollywood. We should be proud of the earlier generations of women who ran Hollywood, and we should be angry that we lost so much for so many years.
Q: You focus mostly on the period from 1930-1950. What made this period different for women in Hollywood, and why did it end?
A: The first few decades of moviemaking in America saw many women working as directors, producers, writers, and stars. This is certainly another great period we should celebrate and not forget.
But too often, it’s assumed that women disappeared from the industry as soon as film moguls consolidated their business holdings in the 1920s, realizing how much money they could really make.
You can see where this argument is coming from ideologically: When capitalism truly enters the scene, women suffer.
Well, the women in the studio system embraced the system as their best chance for earning as much as men and being recognized for their creative power. They made the system work for them in the late 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, and the industry publicly recognized their worth.
Many of Hollywood’s powerful women in the 1930s, such as story editor Kay Brown (responsible with Silvia Schulman for getting Selznick to buy Gone with the Wind) were college graduates from women’s colleges. They were committed to the Equal Rights Amendment and wanted economic independence.
Some such as Virginia Van Upp were daughters of silent-era Hollywood filmmakers and made use of all of their industry connections. More and more single and married women were entering the American workforce, and women’s white-collar jobs in Hollywood were some of the most stable during the Great Depression.
The trade and national press were sympathetic, and published many stories about the women who ran Hollywood, such as Screen Writers Guild president Mary C. McCall Jr.
This was a period when the Equal Rights Amendment was women’s great political issue. When Roosevelt’s New Deal began to protect workers, Democratic women joined Republicans in arguing that it was time for women to stop being treated like second-class citizens.
This was a time when women across party lines talked to each other and were friends. That is certainly something to celebrate these days! Women also had allies in many Hollywood men.
The greatest surprise to me was Columbia mogul Harry Cohn, who employed more women as producers than all the other studios combined. Nowadays he’s remembered as a foul-mouthed, crass studio head. But as Mary McCall once said, “He might sock you in the jaw, but he would never stab you in the back.”
Q: You begin the book with Bette Davis and end it with Katharine Hepburn. Why did you choose to focus on them, and how would you compare the two?
A: When people put feminism and golden age Hollywood together, the answer is usually Katharine Hepburn. The public loves her now because she followed no rules and went her own way—usually against Hollywood.
But Hepburn admitted that she was not a feminist; she was out for herself alone. And she didn’t like Hollywood.
Davis, on the other hand, was committed to working with other women and to the cause of equal rights. She learned to play the game and work within the system to empower herself and other women. This is why I knew Davis’s story had to begin Nobody’s Girl Friday.
Davis was nicknamed “the Fourth Warner Brother” and was elected head of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She later ran the Hollywood Canteen. She was consistently Hollywood’s most popular and cooperative star among American women. Even columnist Hedda Hopper loved her.
Throughout her career, Davis cultivated a network of likeminded women inside and outside of Hollywood. It’s the network and the social goals that make a feminist as much as her individual attitude.
But Hollywood’s great women of the studio system weren’t just glamorous actresses—most of my book is about women producers, writers, film editors, executives, and designers, and how they made the system work for them.
Hepburn was not particularly popular with audiences during the 1930s and 1940s, but unlike Davis, Hepburn’s career outlived the studio system.
Her popularity as a star and “feminist” role model really developed after the collapse of the studio system. Three of her four Oscars were awarded for work in the 1960s and 1980s.
And in many ways, contemporary popular admiration of Hepburn the feminist goes hand-in-hand with dismissals of the male-dominated Hollywood studio system. Both myths need to be examined more carefully.
Q: What do you see looking ahead when it comes to women in Hollywood?
A: When Nobody’s Girl Friday went to the printers last fall, the discussion about women and gender equality in Hollywood was focused on equal pay for actresses and more female directors. Given how stagnant wages have been for ordinary workers everywhere, there wasn’t much sympathy for underpaid Hollywood stars!
Then Harveygate exposed other hideous obstacles women face on a daily basis. The repercussions have moved far beyond the experiences of a few actresses.
Interestingly, Harvey Weinstein blamed some of his criminal behavior on the culture of the 1960s and its widespread tolerance of violence and pornography.
I often wonder if the end of Hollywood’s self-censorship under the Production Code in the 1950s had something to do with the rise of toxic masculinity and entitlement among mostly white men in the Hollywood workplace.
I have high hopes for the #MeToo movement and for new gender equality initiatives in the film industry. But we are far from seeing the gender pay gap disappear, and women are still vastly underrepresented as screenwriters, editors, production designers, and directors of photography.
That said, Hollywood has more problems than gender inequity to deal with. And it’s not just declining theater attendance. Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu have changed what we see and how we see it. Marvel and Disney’s comic book franchises have the stranglehold on Hollywood content.
Add all the new female directors you want, but it may not matter so much anymore on a certain level. And sometimes, of course, women direct lousy films—just like men.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m writing the biography of Screen Writers Guild president Mary C. McCall Jr. Some of her story features in Nobody’s Girl Friday, but one chapter is not enough for one of the most powerful women in Hollywood’s history. Her daughters are remarkable women as well, and I don’t know what I would do without their great memories and generosity.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Contemporary film culture is focused on the director as a film’s author, but during the studio system, screenwriters and producers were far more influential in developing material.
Directors were assigned only when the script was ready and much of the cast and budget had been determined. And many of the top directors we now call “auteurs”—such as John Ford—did not edit their own films.
Many film editors were women who would be on set and call for protection shots, retakes, or close-ups. These editors were the ones who assembled the films, using their own artistic judgment in combination with producers. So those classic films you love look the way they do because of the decisions film editors made about continuity and rhythm.
Barbara McLean and Margaret Booth were two of the industry’s most powerful film editors. “Bobbie” McLean was known as Hollywood’s “Editor-in-Chief,” and her career features prominently in Nobody’s Girl Friday. She’s the woman on the cover, too!
Director-based authorship still dominates the way we see films. It drives retrospectives at Lincoln Center and the British Film Institute, DVD sales at Criterion, blogs, and university curricula. But there’s more to “classic” Hollywood than a bunch of dead white male directors. It’s time to recalibrate what we know about the history of Hollywood’s women.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
Print Marked Items
Nobody's Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood
Kristine Huntley
Booklist.
114.13 (Mar. 1, 2018): p14.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Nobody's Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood. By J. E. Smyth. Apr. 2018. 304p. Oxford, $29.95(9780190840822). 791.43.
History professor Smyth takes a look at Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s, when women held positions of power behind the scenes in the
booming film industry. The careers of women profiled here run the gamut, from actresses who were influential off camera, as well, such as Bette
Davis and Katharine Hepburn, to significant but largely forgotten female writers, producers, editors, and costumers who wielded just as much
power as their male counterparts. For every recognizable name, such as legendary costume designer Edith Head, there are numerous mentions of
women whose contributions have been neglected by historians, such as Mary C. McCall Jr., a gifted writer and two-time president of the Screen
Writers Guild, who saw her career snuffed out by the persecution of Communists, despite the fact that she was a political moderate. Aimed at
readers with a knowledge of and keen interest in Hollywood of yesteryear, Smyth's enlightening tome reveals the power and influence women
wielded in Tinseltown during the Great Depression, WWII, and the postwar era.--Kristine Huntley
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Huntley, Kristine. "Nobody's Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2018, p. 14. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532250785/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c37c6cba. Accessed 26 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532250785
Nobody's Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood
Publishers Weekly.
265.6 (Feb. 5, 2018): p54.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Nobody's Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood
J.E. Smyth. Oxford Univ., $29.95 (328p)
ISBN 978-0-19-084082-2
Smyth (Fred Zinnemann and the Cinema of Resistance) presents a timely study built on detailed research into Golden Age Hollywood. She
examines women's roles in Hollywood from the 1920s up to I960, challenging second wave feminist ideas of female disempowerment in the
industry during this time. The book showcases women in a variety of positions, "from secretaries to stars," and Smyth argues that "the studio era
remains the most important and empowering chapter in women's employment in the film industry." Smyth's effort to "name as many names as
possible," at times creates a roll call effect, hindering reader engagement with the overarching argument. The strongest sections focus more
intently on specific people, both famous ones, such as the "Fourth Warner Brother," Bette Davis, who fought both for better roles and for
progressive causes like the Equal Rights Amendment, first introduced in 1923, and lesser-known figures like Mary McCall, a screenwriter turned
Screen Actors Guild head. Smyth reveals that McCall proved one of the union's most effective presidents, securing writers' rights, developing the
Motion Picture Relief Fund, and negotiating pay increases during WWII. Smyth's work stands out as especially meaningful in the era of #MeToo
and revived resistance of women in Hollywood to gender inequality. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Nobody's Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood." Publishers Weekly, 5 Feb. 2018, p. 54. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A526810431/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4511d583. Accessed 26 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A526810431
Smyth, J.E.: NOBODY'S GIRL FRIDAY
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Smyth, J.E. NOBODY'S GIRL FRIDAY Oxford Univ. (Adult Nonfiction) $29.95 4, 2 ISBN: 978-0-19-084082-2
A history of women who held prominent positions in Hollywood from 1930 to 1950.
In a fresh, lively examination of women's places in film history, Smyth (History/ Univ. of Warwick; Fred Zinnemann and the Cinema of
Resistance, 2015, etc.) has uncovered abundant evidence for their significant roles as producers, writers, agents, editors, designers, union leaders,
and, of course, performers. Besides focusing on a few well-known actresses--e.g., Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn--the author brings to light
scores of women whom many film critics and historians have relegated to "obscure footnotes." By focusing on "director-auteurs and glamorous
stars," these critics fail to account for the diverse, collaborative nature of film production. "Nearly two dozen women worked as producers or
associate producers," writes Smyth, and more than 60 as film editors. They served on executive committees of the Screen Writers Guild (where
they made up a quarter of the membership), the Academy's Board of Governors, and the Women's Press Club, among other organizations. The
author identifies many women whose influence was well-known by their contemporaries: in 1938, newspaper columnist Ida Koverman, feisty
assistant to Louis B. Mayer at MGM, was "one of the most powerful personages in the entire motion picture industry; when she pulls the strings,
world-famous stars dance, like puppets." In 1942, prolific screenwriter Mary C. McCall Jr. was elected as president of the Screen Writers Guild,
where she demonstrated "a take-no-prisoners commitment to collective bargaining." Fired from Warner Bros., where she was one of only two
women writers, she happily moved to Columbia Pictures, where Harry Cohn eagerly promoted women's careers "at all levels of production."
Although the infamous "casting couch" and sexist attitudes posed challenges, the women Smyth profiles "proved that Hollywood was not a man's
world and that hard work, mental toughness, and professionalism were not inherently masculine." The studio system offered "a negotiable artistic
hierarchy" in which women's perspectives were welcomed and rewarded. Even "classic patriarchs" like Sam Goldwyn admitted "Women Rule
Hollywood."
An exuberant celebration of empowered women.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Smyth, J.E.: NOBODY'S GIRL FRIDAY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525461320/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8f92a6e5. Accessed 26 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525461320
High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of
an American Classic
J.E. Smyth
Cineaste.
42.4 (Fall 2017): p74+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Cineaste Publishers, Inc.
http://www.cineaste.com/
Full Text:
High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic. by Glenn Frankel. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. 400 pp., illus.
Hardcover: $28.00.
Although scholars of the Western have always been more than a little ambivalent about High Noon (1952) when it goes up against the FordHawks-Peckinpah
canon, there has been no shortage of historians, film and cultural critics, journalists, pundits, politicians, and filmmakers ready
to condemn or defend one of Hollywood's most controversial horse operas.
In 1992, neatly timed for the film's fortieth birthday, film historian Philip Drummond wrote a succinct and insightful production history for the
BFI Film Classics series--a lean, quick, and enjoyable read stylistically in sync with High Noon's no-frills, riveting eighty-five minutes. I
particularly enjoyed Drummond's perspective, because, unlike so many others who had looked at the film, he interviewed director Fred
Zinnemann and considered his take on the production and his unique interpretation of the West. As many Cimaste readers probably know, the
tendency within film criticism has been to focus on screenwriter Carl Foreman, the Blacklist, and, to a lesser extent, the sanctimonious "bad-guy"
producer Stanley Kramer, who forced Foreman's resignation when the writer's communist past caught up with him.
High Noon is sixty-five this year, and evidently the anniversary was just too good to pass up. Rather than the BFI's low-key, often poorly
marketed fare, this new book on High Noon is much more obviously packaged as a landmark publishing event. The book arrived through my
letterbox accompanied by the author's impressive advance press blurbs and schedule of his lengthy national book tour--in case I wanted to meet
him in Helena, Montana (star Gary Cooper's birthplace). Author Glenn Frankel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter who made a
career shift a few years ago--trading journalism for the life of a popular film historian--certainly knows how to put a book together. His first foray
into the world of Hollywood Westerns, The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend (far more than just a book about John Ford's
legendary 1956 film), was praised to the skies back in 2013. With his second book on another classic Western from the 1950s, Frankel is well on
his way to becoming the Dan Brown of the Hollywood Western--or the Ron Chernow. I am always mixing them up.
From the outset, Frankel acknowledges that "Each generation has read into the film its own politics and values." U.S. presidents--Democrats and
Republicans--have claimed the film as their personal favorite. Gary Cooper became a poster boy for Polish Solidarity in the 1980s when they
adapted an iconic promotional image of him as protagonist Will Kane, walking alone down the main street of Hadleyville (carrying a ballot rather
than a gun in his hand). And everyone should know what John Wayne said about the film in a Playboy interview. It's a good excuse to dig out one
of your 1971 issues, if you can't remember.
Frankel's book was written before the calamitous election of Donald Trump, but it appeared late enough into the game of vicious Tea Partyinfused
politics to note the similarities between High Noon's anticommunist production era and the rightwing rhetoric against "gays, Muslims,
and undocumented immigrants" that surrounds us today. And so, revisiting High Noon's backstory and reassessing its liberal political philosophy
becomes something of a necessity for American citizens wondering just what happened to their democracy. Frankel gives us a well-timed civics
and history lesson, but sugarcoats it with a strong narrative, deft prose, amusing anecdotes, and chapters focused on the "great men" who made
the film.
Of course, as a hook, we begin with the only real Westerner who had a significant role in making the picture: Gary Cooper. As Zinnemann once
said, Cooper was like a white kitten or a baby--when he was on screen, you just couldn't look at anyone or anything else. Stunningly handsome,
projecting a unique sense of American simplicity, gentleness, and humor since he first appeared on screens in the mid-1920s, Gary Cooper had
the kind of face that would comfort you if everything was not going to be all right. He was the perfect choice for Will Kane and his drama of
American political conscience. By the time he made High Noon, however, the face was a ravaged mask from his days as Owen Wister's iconic
Virginian (The Virginian, 1929) and backwoods war hero Alvin York (Sergeant York, 1941). He was all but washed-up, his affair with Patricia
Neal had left his marriage in tatters, and his "one-trick" cowboy act was no longer paying dividends at the box office.
High Noon regenerated his career.
But as much as Cooper's star story is meant to draw readers in, Frankel's focus shifts quickly to writer Carl Foreman and how High Noon evolved
within the political melodrama of his life. The writer's early struggles in Hollywood, and his slow rise to prominence as a gifted screenwriter in
the era of socially conscious Hollywood fare, and ... er ... his political "awakening," if I can put it delicately (yes, he was a member of the
Communist Party for a while), are covered with insight. Frankel places Foreman's life in the wider context of the Hollywood Blacklist. We get the
big and the small picture, and while Frankel acknowledges that the Hollywood red scare was a mere "sideshow" in the political crisis facing the
country in the postwar era, the naming-names game certainly has enough drama and intrigue for a Netflix series.
Frankel is possibly less successful at persuading readers to like producer Stanley Kramer, but that may be because the man was basically
unlikable. If only we could ask Zinnemann for more on that subject, particularly in light of the authorship battles over this film that have intrigued
a number of historians over the years. Frankel's coverage here is slightly less rigorous. His consultation of the script drafts is sporadic, he mixes a
lot of oral histories from aged and self-serving participants alongside contemporaneous production material, and he could have handled the fracas
over who "saved" and edited the picture with greater clarity.
Connoisseurs of the Western will not be treated to any close analyses of the film which point out its uniqueness within the genre in terms of form
and content (setting the Blacklist momentarily aside), and surprisingly little attention is paid to the radical choice of stark, high-contrast
cinematography that almost got Floyd Crosby sacked. In other words, a discussion of the film as a film--or even as a Western genre film--tends to
get lost in the fascinating political (and other) details. At one point, Frankel dismisses the intense critical discussions over its status as a true
Western as "a bit silly." Perhaps some of them are, but he seems remarkably unaware of how the film's left-wing, outsider take on Western history
on- and off-screen was a political act.
While these historical and critical questions have energized the filmmakers, their colleagues, and critics over the years, they do not fit within
Frankel's script. These ideas would take up too much space in a book that, although impressive in its detail, spends more than enough space on
Cooper's sex life, Zinnemann's alleged affair with Grace Kelly, and the like. But, perhaps this is in keeping with how Frankel relates to his
characters: they are just "Stanley," "Fred," and "Carl." Whether this is Frankel getting closer to his subjects or a juvenile editor's suggestion to
make the material more "accessible" to the average reader (who no longer reads at all), I occasionally felt like I was absorbed in a rather wellconstructed
fictional thriller instead of a work of history (Frankel does have enough sense not to call the star "Gary"--or worse--"Coop").
The book is rich with Hollywood lore, everything from Columbia mogul Harry Cohn's dismissive comment about the film (typically priceless) to
Patricia Neal's abortion (necessary?). The discussion of the 1947 hearings and the events leading up to Foreman's 1951 testimony are particularly
well-handled (Frankel was smart enough to consult several Blacklist historians in the early stages), and the section on the filmmakers' afterlives is
interesting.
This is essentially a very readable, deftly packaged narrative about the men who made High Noon in a politically divisive era, fell out over the
classic question of "whose is bigger," but left us all with a cinematic masterpiece that resonates in any fraught political age. Yet, the film historian
in me wanted more meticulous engagement with sources and the book's press build-up begged for some groundbreaking new research. I could
also have done without the rather crass (and, for what it's worth, inaccurate) comment about the Jewish director Fred Zinnemann's "large nose."
I'd like to see any shiksa film historian getting away with that crack in print.
Given Foreman's "feminist" backstory for Amy Fowler Kane (Grace Kelly), as well as my appreciation of a period in Hollywood when women
were not excluded from Western films and histories of the West, I have always looked back on High Noon with affection. Foreman and
Zinnemann went on to make a number of films with sympathetic and articulate female protagonists, from The Guns of Navarone (1961) and
Living Free (1972) to The Nun's Story (1959) and Julia (1977).
In Frankel's sweeping grand narrative of High Noon, though he briefly acknowledges Joanna Rapf s 1990 Journal of Popular Culture article on
High Noon's women, questions of women in Westerns are marginal. The real story is the now canonical, androcentric Blacklist drama and the
martyrdom of the male Hollywood liberal. This book is nevertheless an impressive addition to a popular franchise.--J. E. Smyth
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Smyth, J.E. "High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic." Cineaste, Fall 2017, p. 74+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A504622038/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b9b986c5. Accessed 26 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A504622038
Fred Zinnemann and the Cinema of Resistance
Brian Neve
Cineaste.
40.1 (Winter 2014): p75+.
COPYRIGHT 2014 Cineaste Publishers, Inc.
http://www.cineaste.com/
Full Text:
Fred Zinnemann and the Cinema of Resistance by J. E. Smyth. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014. 317 pp., illus. Hardcover: $60.00.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Born to Jewish parents in Vienna in 1907, Fred Zinnemann sought wider opportunities in America at the end of the Twenties and eventually
established himself at MGM's Short Subject Department, before making the wartime antifascist drama, The Seventh Cross, with Spencer Tracy,
and the postwar, politically inflected film noir, Act of Violence. Yet, it was the success of High Noon and in particular From Here to Eternity,
from the best-selling James Jones novel, that made him a leading director in the early Fifties. He resettled in London at the end of the decade but
continued making periodic international productions, the last being Five Days One Summer, shot in the Swiss Alps in the early Eighties.
Although J. E. Smyth has written an impressive and erudite book based on Zinnemann's work, it is certainly not a conventional auteur study. It is
not a biography--there is little on his early years. Nor is there a filmography, and of the director's twenty odd features Smyth concentrates almost
exclusively on nine (and one unrealized project, Man's Fate, from the Andre Malraux novel) that explore questions of individual and collective
resistance to fascism and state power, with particular reference to an emerging historiography of once marginalized women's voices. With these
themes in mind the writer draws heavily, and for the first time, on the director's comprehensive archive of papers at the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences Library. Although one would sometimes wish to hear more about the other films, including Act of Violence, The
Member of the Wedding (Zinnemann's personal favorite), and A Man for All Seasons (we are told of the director trying to drive the saintliness
out of Paul Scofield's stage performance), the book makes a powerful case for a re-evaluation of the filmmaker, making particular use of his
complex and nuanced interrogation of story, script, and research material.
In assessing the director's early work, Smyth's approach is particularly fruitful in recording his extended and rigorous postwar research into the
experiences and testimonies of European refugee children. For The Search, Montgomery Clift's first film, Zinnemann subsequently cited the
influence of Robert Flaherty, more perhaps for his model of steely commitment to commanding the detail of a project than for a particular
documentary style. This was also the film, with its scenes of children being confined in an ambulance, suddenly gripped by panic, that reflected
the director's own awareness at the time that neither of his Polish-born parents had survived the Holocaust.
High Noon, and in particular Carl Foreman's allegorical screenplay, is often treated in the context of the Hollywood blacklist. The account here
draws attention to the film's visual motifs: the bunched figures in tight close-up, the converging railway tracks, and the lack of conventional,
"wide-open spaces" Western iconography. Smyth rightly defends the work from political criticism and from a tradition of genre "cleansing," and
instead draws attention to the role played by the two key female characters, played by Grace Kelly and Katy Jurado. There is a parallel here with
the strength and self-awareness of the Deborah Kerr and Donna Reed figures in From Here to Eternity, both of them given the final word as
private lives give way to public myth. Revisiting the film, one is struck by this motif of stoic but unbowed female testimony, and also by the
work's early and courageous treatment of fascist elements within the U.S. military, against the political pressures of the day, and in a story set on
the eve of the "good war."
The leading men in these early films are often sensitive and vulnerable: Clift as Prewitt cries in saluting his buddy Maggio (Frank Sinatra), while
Zinnemann was impressed by Gary Cooper both for his performance as an aging, sometimes desperate hero, and for his loyalty to the project, and
specifically to Foreman, despite his own conservative politics. Perhaps the test of Smyth's approach comes in a central chapter on Behold a Pale
Horse, the 1964 fable on Spanish politics released over twenty years after the Civil War. Gregory Peck plays a veteran from the losing side, a
radical who makes, after much indecision, a final, fateful raid on the Spanish capital from his base in France. The book reveals the director's
interest in the stories of such resisters, and in particular the life of the former anarchist figure Francisco Sabate. While the painstaking research
and preparation is a fascinating insight into the director's intense if distanced political concern, not everyone will be convinced that all this
preparation enriches the completed film. Smyth's focus on testimonies of resistance is more effective in exploring the real-life sources for the
Audrey Hepburn role in The Nun's Story--an account of Sister Luke's internal struggle against the organizational power of the church and her
final decision to renounce her calling for antifascist engagement.
Julia, an adaptation of one chapter from Pentimento, Lillian Heilman's memoir, is also discussed in terms of Zinnemann's interest in the historical
record and in the testimony of women in the European struggle against fascism. Heilman's involvement also points back to the HUAC saga in the
United States, although Smyth's complex and illuminating archival account of the film's gestation points to the director's own shift in approach,
toward a more nostalgic presentation of his two female characters, as he became more doubtful of the precise veracity of Heilman's "true" story.
Some might find this production story--of memory, history, and narrative--to be more engrossing than the film itself, but there is certainly much in
the account that illuminates the director's unique approach and his lifelong resistance, as a studio filmmaker, to the notion of "pure entertainment."
The book provides matchless scholarship, with the author exhibiting a broad and authoritative knowledge of other film work, American and
European, dealing with these themes of antifascism and women's resistance. Zinnemann is portrayed as a director whose origins, concerns, and
sensibility, as well as his shifting abode, distinguishes him as a genuinely "international" director. This is also an original response to the
dilemmas of using a director's archive, an intellectual exercise that combines issues of process, text, and theme, thereby illuminating the complex
interaction of art and commerce, as well as the dialectic of ideas in filmmaking.
Enriching the publication are seventy illustrations, most of them providing a model for the careful and productive use of screen captures, while
there is also a striking image--new to me--of cast members of High Noon, camped out on the main street set and in character dress, watching
baseball on television. Fred Zinnemann was famously "allergic" to Andrew Sarris's auteur theories and harsh verdict on his career ("Less than
Meets the Eye"). J. E. Smyth, by concentrating on the heart of his work, observes and reveals the director's fierce assertion of control, as well as
his respect for his key artistic collaborators. She brings passion as well as scholarly skills to the task, and makes a challenging case for reassessing
the director's life-long commitment, and the complexity of addressing personal struggle and conscience in film.--Brian Neve
Neve, Brian
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Neve, Brian. "Fred Zinnemann and the Cinema of Resistance." Cineaste, Winter 2014, p. 75+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A395305912/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=613427be. Accessed 26 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A395305912
Smyth, J.E. Reconstructing American Historical
Cinema: From Cimarron to Citizen Kane
Victor Or
Library Journal.
131.18 (Nov. 1, 2006): p79.
COPYRIGHT 2006 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Smyth, J.E. Reconstructing American Historical Cinema: From Cimarron to Citizen Kane. Univ. Pr. of Kentucky. 2006. c.456p. photogs. bibliog.
index. ISBN 0-8131-2406-9 [ISBN 978-0-8131-2406-3]. $50. FILM
Keeping pace with the current practice of historians to examine the problems and failures of the past, this book critically studies classical
Hollywood cinema's competence in reassessing U.S. history. Smyth (history, Univ. of Warwick, U.K.) begins with the 1931 version of Cimarron,
which presents an eclectic, complex, multiracial, and feminist approach unconventional to American cinema, and ends with two efforts by Orson
Welles, Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), which portray history in a disjunctive, episodic, and contradictory style.
Although Hollywood is noted for its formulaic filmmaking, Smyth argues that serious historical treatment is evident in different genres in the
form of "forwards, projected text insert, use of extensive research, and the employment of one dominant screenwriter." Her endorsement of
certain films as honest reflections of the American past will pique readers' interest, although the book does seem a little incomplete without
comparisons between the remakes Smyth considers and the original movie. Nevertheless, Smyth's work leaves us hoping for a follow-up that
looks at how current Hollywood filmmakers portray history. Recommended for large public and academic libraries.--Victor Or, Vancouver &
Surrey P.L., B.C.
Or, Victor
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Or, Victor. "Smyth, J.E. Reconstructing American Historical Cinema: From Cimarron to Citizen Kane." Library Journal, 1 Nov. 2006, p. 79.
General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A154513287/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=49ee2a1d. Accessed 26 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A154513287
Film History 'Nobody’s Girl Friday' Is a Wise Counterpoint to the "Great Man" Auteur Theory
CHRISTOPHER JOHN STEPHENS 25 Apr 2018
WE'VE ALWAYS BEEN AWARE THAT FILMS ARE NOT IMMACULATELY CREATED. SMYTH'S WORK IS A METICULOUSLY RESEARCHED HISTORY OF HOW WOMEN ENTERED, DEVELOPED, SUSTAINED, AND GREW WITHIN THE HOLLYWOOD DREAM FACTORY.
NOBODY'S GIRL FRIDAY: THE WOMEN WHO RAN HOLLYWOOD
J. E. SMYTH
Oxford University Press
Apr 2018
OTHER
Concerns about pay equity and realistic gender representation in front of and behind the screens of major Hollywood films have always hovered around the atmospheres of what's produced and displayed at our local multiplexes. No matter how we consume this product now, even "big screen" fare displayed on smartphone screens, the issue of representation has always been paramount to our appreciation of films. Certainly 21st century sexual identity is more open to fluidity and non-binary status, so it can get complicated to view cinematic gender status from a financial and thematic perspective. In the days of the mainstream Hollywood studio system things were hidden, closeted, and concealed. Men were leaders and women were supporting players. This was the conventional party line from approximately 1930-1960, but like any commonly understood "truth", there are many complex shades to consider.
J.E. Smyth's Nobody's Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood is a rich history of the studio systems in the times when many might have believed feminism was either dead are dormant, waiting for the next wave to surface. Like any examination of a movement, it's always difficult to conclusively determine the start and end times of these waves. The women Smyth profiles in this book run from the legends like Bette Davis, Katherine Hepburn, Ida Lupino and Hedda Hopper to lesser-known yet equally important players like Writers Guild President Mary C. McCall, Jr. and producer Joan Harrison. They were products of mothers who had come of age at the apex of the early suffrage movement (19th Amendment Women's Right to Vote 1920) and their own work during the glory days of the studio system laid a foundation for contemporary Hollywood stars like Reese Witherspoon and Angelina Jolie. Smyth writes:
This book is meant to challenge and to inspire people who love Hollywood and believe in gender equality. It targets the beliefs… that feminism died between 1930-1950, that women were not important … had little creative control, that directors called all the shots…
Her points are clear and effectively laid out. While we may easily cite Dalton Trumbo as a resistance hero against the House on Un-American Activities, there were just as many women. Smyth notes that these women were loyal to the system that provided and nurtured their careers. There were financial and professional opportunity gains for women in the industry during the dominance of the studio system from roughly 1925-1960, but those benefits did not sustain through the system that followed. Smyth is determined to prove that male film historians seemed focused on erasing the role of women in the development of cinema as an art, business, and representation of American culture. Mary Pickford and Mae West were powerful on-screen presences who also had significant accomplishments as producers.
In her Introduction, Smyth's mission is clear. She wants to provide a comprehensive picture of the diverse careers Hollywood opened up for women from 1925 to 1960. Smyth explains: "Not all of Hollywood's working women were single, pretty girls waiting for husbands to come along… [m]any were graduates of women's colleges…" Nobody's Girl Friday certainly meets the mission statement, and that works both for and against it as a compelling text. As an astute film history text, Smyth manages to fill in the missing pieces in the standard view of the roles women played in Hollywood. She's working with an embarrassment of riches here, so in that respect any sense of deficiencies in the overall effect are not her fault. Readers unfamiliar with the major names Smyth cites may want to do some homework to best understand the role of the supporting players.
The strengths of this book, however, are effective enough to make the limitations negligible. Among the strongest is the profile of Bette Davis, a woman whose mere presence at the start of her career, in the 30s, was indicative of how strong women could be in Hollywood. She had an unconventional beauty. She never stopped battling for equal pay and treatment. Consider her redefining role as Mildred in director John Cromwell's 1934 film Of Human Bondage: "It was the first of many shocking physical transformations she made to achieve the cinematic realism she craved." We think of Lon Chaney's painful transformations, but we don't always give as much credit to people like Davis. Smyth writes:
What is striking about Davis's development… [is that]… she quickly formed a network of like-minded… working women to support and encourage their careers and those of other women. This was Hollywood feminism in action.
There were other supporting rebels that can be seen as Davis's contemporaries (if not friends), like Olivia DeHaviland and Ann Harding, but Davis stayed a stalwart feminist, an Equal Rights Amendment supporter. In 1941, she became the first female president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. She spearheaded the creation of two separate Academy Awards for documentary (short subject and feature.) Her outspoken liberal political leanings were one element that led to down times in the '40s, and Smyth brings Davis into the '50s, at the Academy Awards. She quotes Davis and her reaction to presenting Marlon Brando with his Best Actor Award for the 1954 Elia Kazan film On the Waterfront:
I felt a strange kinship with Marlon [Brando] as I stood there with him. Both of us were nonconformists, battling for realism and individuality.
Smyth's allegiances are clearly with Davis, and focusing on her this early in the book effectively proves the point. "Of all women in studio-era Hollywood, Bette Davis came close to having it all… she maintained her commitment to engaging a community of women in and outside of Hollywood, and to making New Deal equal-rights feminism a way of life."
Chapter 2, "Organization Women", tells the story of Derek Granger Katherine 'Kay" Brown, who was pivotal in pre-production of Gone With the Wind. She also discovered Ingrid Bergman. This chapter also sheds light on the fact that columnist Hedda Hopper was "…a committed studio era feminist" in her time. The perception now is that she easily caved to the demands of the Communist Witch Hunts of the '40s and '50s. This is certainly true, but Smyth manages to effectively put into context the feminist angle. Other stories, such as that of studio executive Anita Colby, paint a clearer picture of the effective roles women played in the production of Hollywood films and the perpetuation of the machine.
In Chapter 3, "Jill of all Trades", Smyth introduces Ida Lupino, a known name as an actress in her time who was able to effectively segue into production. To Smyth, "Lupino was one of the rare women who, at the height of her career, managed to combine work, marriage, and motherhood." This theme is strong and can be seen in the life and times of Joan Harrison, who managed as a bit player in front of the screen before settling into life as a producer for TV's Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
Mary C. McCall, Jr., featured in Chapter 4, "Madam President", is probably too strong a figure to be contained in this volume. That's another problem Smyth encounters with mixed success. McCall was first female president of the Writer's Guild of America. Her story is certainly compelling, from the story of the purchase and development of the Maisie film series to the end, when the Blacklist got her down and basically squeezed her out of the business of show. What works is the potential for something bigger, something more expanded. The comparison is similar to the way people always described Ginger Rogers, that she did everything her dance partner Fred Astaire did, except backwards and in high heels. Smyth sets out a thesis here that's worthy of further exploration:
…historians… marginalization of McCall in favor of an almost exclusively male cast of valiant… Hollywood lefties is… unsettling. Those same… historians who lambast studio-era Hollywood for institutionalized sexism are even more guilty by omission than the industry that once respected… Mary C. McCall, Jr.
How did female editors factor into the story? As Smyth details it, with the story of the pioneering editor Barbara McLean, their diminished strength and presence seemed to coincide with film critic Andrew Sarris's auteur theory of the director as sole author of the product. The chapter effectively details the ways editors worked directly in consort with their directors to create a singular vision. McLean discounted director John Ford's claim that his films were editor proof. Smyth is justifiably frustrated here when she notes:
Film historians remain wedded to the idea that directors such as [Joseph] Mankiewicz did all his own editing on All About Eve even when Mankiewicz himself revealed in an interview that McLean cut the picture without him at her elbow.
Contemporary film students will note that editor Thelma Schoonmaker has worked with director Martin Scorsese for over half a century to help make his classics Raging Bull (1980), Goodfellas (1990), and The Departed (2006) such strong films. (That their themes were distinctly "masculine" are irrelevant; Schoonmaker helped make them brilliant.) This is not covered in Smyth's book, nor should it be, but the connection is clear. Women have played vital roles in all areas of film production from the Golden Age and beyond. Smyth's chapter on costume designers Edith Head and others, like Thea Van Runkle and Dorothy Jeakins, is equally compelling. The story of Jeakins's apparently Dickensian youth is worthy of a separate book. However, it's Head that garners most attention and deserves more room to breathe. Consider this anecdote about Bette Davis's classic 1950 film All About Eve and the unforgettable "Fasten your seat belts!" scene:
When the famous 'bumpy night' cocktail dress didn't fit Davis' bust properly and began to slide off her shoulders, the actress merely laughed at the mortified Head and pulled the neckline lower, saying 'Don't you like it better like this, anyway?' Davis, always a rule breaker, knew the attraction of casual disarray.
Smyth ends her story with Katherine Hepburn and a chapter suitably titled "Last Woman Standing". After reading about female writers, producers, union presidents, and actresses who came of age in Hollywood's Golden age and faded away for one reason or another, Hepburn managed to stay relevant through to the end. Joan Crawford and Bette Davis had to take horror films to remain employed. Politics and a variety of complications took other women, but Hepburn prevailed:
You could leave Hollywood for Europe… You could work for the United Nations… You could keep working, be nice to your colleagues, and brazen it out-but only if you were Bette Davis. Or, if you were Katherine Hepburn, you could kiss Hollywood goodbye twice in one lifetime and live to tell the tale.
Overall, Nobody's Girl Friday is a meticulously researched history of how women entered, developed, sustained, and grew within the Hollywood dream factory in that mid-century period before World War II and through to the end of the system in the early '60s. The informed film student might feel that figures like Bette Davis, Katherine Hepburn, and Edith head are shoe-horned into the narrative in an almost obligatory fashion, but it's probably unavoidable. What works best is the fact that Smyth's mission is fulfilled. She's provided a wise counterpoint to the "Great Man" auteur theory on two levels. We have always been aware that films are not immaculately created. They're a collaboration between many essential parties. Now, with Nobody's Girl Friday, we can be assured that the "Great Man" theory is wrong on literal as well as figurative levels.