Dorothy Arzner

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 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 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

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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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.

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

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, 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 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, 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. 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 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,

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 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, 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 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 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

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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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. 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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

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 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 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 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, 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.

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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.

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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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

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

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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

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 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, 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 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. 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. Thank you again for this email. I did not know any of this and I was glad to know of it.

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