Dorothy Arzner

Summary

Stuff You Missed in History Class: Episode on Dorothy Arzner

Release Date: March 31, 2025
Hosts: Holly Fry and Tracy V. Wilson

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Introduction

In this captivating episode of Stuff You Missed in History Class, hosts Holly Fry and Tracy V. Wilson delve into the life and legacy of Dorothy Arzner, one of Hollywood's pioneering female film directors. Although briefly mentioned in a previous episode, Arzner's significant contributions to the film industry warrant a dedicated exploration.

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Early Life and Background

[04:05]
Dorothy Emma Arzner was born on January 3, 1897, in San Francisco, California, to Ludwig Adolf Arzner from Germany and Janet Young from Scotland. Growing up, Dorothy faced familial challenges early on, including her parents' divorce when she was about five years old. This tumultuous period led to her and her brother, David, moving to Los Angeles with their father and stepmother, Mabel Mills.

[06:02]
Dorothy's childhood was marked by the resilience required to navigate her new family dynamics. Living with her stepmother's mother in Oakland, Dorothy experienced the devastating 1906 earthquake and fire, events that not only shaped her early years but also influenced her later life choices.

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Entry into Hollywood

[10:07]
Dorothy initially pursued a pre-med education at the University of Southern California but left to support the war effort during World War I. Post-war, encouraged by Anna Starkweather from the Los Angeles Emergency Ambulance Corps, she sought opportunities in the burgeoning Hollywood film industry.

[12:40]
Her first role at Paramount involved script typing, a position she took for financial independence rather than passion for filmmaking. Despite initial challenges, including slow typing speed and frequent errors, Arzner's determination saw her gradually ascend within the studio.

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Rise as a Filmmaker

[20:28]
Dorothy Arzner's relationship with Marion Morgan, a dancer and screenwriter, was both personal and professional, lasting over five decades. Their partnership was an open secret in Hollywood, providing Arzner with both support and collaboration throughout her career.

[23:45]
Her directorial debut came with Fashions for Women (1927), a silent film that marked the beginning of her prolific directing career. Arzner went on to direct several silent films, including Ten Modern Commandments, Get Your Man, and Manhattan Cocktail, the latter being one of the earliest "part-talkies."

[25:46]
During the silent film era, women held significant roles behind the camera, but the transition to talkies and the increasing corporatization of Hollywood marginalized many female directors. Arzner, however, stood out as the only woman director within the Hollywood studio system for much of her career, earning her reputation as an auteur.

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Challenges and Innovations

[27:01]
Arzner faced numerous challenges, from negotiating her role within a male-dominated industry to fighting for creative control. Her insistence on directing films that focused on women's stories and her collaborative approach with female screenwriters and editors set her apart.

[29:12]
Financial hurdles also loomed, exemplified by her housing loan denial in 1929, which inadvertently protected her from the Great Depression's financial fallout. Her innovation continued with technical advancements, such as the reputed invention of the boom mic in The Wild Party (1929), enhancing sound quality in talkies.

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Impact of the Hays Code

[38:14]
The introduction of the Hays Code in 1934 imposed strict moral guidelines on Hollywood productions, significantly restricting the themes and narratives Arzner could explore. Despite these constraints, she continued to produce films that subtly challenged societal norms, focusing on complex female characters and relationships.

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Legacy and Later Years

[43:49]
After leaving Paramount in 1943 due to budget cuts and declining studio interest, Arzner transitioned to freelance work. She contributed to training films for the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps and later directed commercials for Pepsi, thanks to Joan Crawford's influence.

[44:50]
In academia, Arzner imparted her extensive knowledge to future filmmakers as head of the television and motion picture department at Pasadena Playhouse College of Theater Arts and later at UCLA. Her teaching emphasized both conventional filmmaking techniques and the importance of understanding industry rules before attempting to innovate.

[46:26]
One of her most notable students, Francis Ford Coppola, credits her with shaping his career, highlighting her dedication and mentorship.

---

Recognition and Posthumous Honors

[47:24]
Dorothy Arzner passed away on October 1, 1979, at the age of 82. Despite her groundbreaking work, she received limited recognition during her lifetime, including a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1986 and selection of Dance Girl Dance for preservation in the National Film Registry in 2007.

[48:41]
In 2018, Paramount honored her legacy by naming a dressing room building after her, with Francis Ford Coppola lauding her enduring influence on the industry.

---

Conclusion

Dorothy Arzner's career is a testament to resilience and innovation in a male-dominated industry. As the only woman director in Hollywood's studio system for much of her career, she not only broke barriers but also crafted narratives that centered on women's experiences. Her legacy continues to inspire filmmakers, highlighting the importance of diverse voices in shaping the stories that define our culture.

---

Notable Quotes

• Holly Fry [03:03]: "Time is passing at an alarming rate."

• Dorothy Arzner [22:08]: "Try as a man may, he will never be able to get the woman's viewpoint in telling certain stories."

• Katharine Hepburn via Telegram [37:16]: "Isn't it wonderful that you've had such a great career when you had no right to have a career at all?"

---

Closing Remarks

Arzner's story underscores the struggles and triumphs of women in early Hollywood, paving the way for future generations of female filmmakers. Her dedication to storytelling and mentorship cements her place as a pivotal figure in film history.

---

Thank you for joining Holly and Tracy in exploring the remarkable life of Dorothy Arzner on Stuff You Missed in History Class. Stay tuned for more intriguing historical insights in future episodes.

Transcript

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[Jay Shetty]

Listening to On Purpose with Jay Shetty.

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Than Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco.

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Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartra Apple Podcasts or wherever.

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Welcome to Stuff youf Missed in History.

[Benny Blanco]

Class, a production of I Heart Radio.

[Jay Shetty]

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

[Benny Blanco]

And I'm Holly Fry.

[Jay Shetty]

Dorothy Arzner got the really briefest of mentions in our episode on Billy Burke from August of 2023, which I could have sworn was something that came out last year.

[Benny Blanco]

Yeah, time is passing at an alarming rate.

[Jay Shetty]

It is. We did not really say much about Dorothy Arsener 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.

[Benny Blanco]

Nope.

[Jay Shetty]

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.

[Benny Blanco]

Dorothy Emma Arsner was born on January 3, 1897, although later on she often gave her birth year as 1900. Her father, Ludwig Adolf Arsner, was from Germany and he went by Louis. 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.

[Jay Shetty]

When Dorothy was about 5, 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.

[Benny Blanco]

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.

[Jay Shetty]

In a partial autobiography that Arsener 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.

[Benny Blanco]

Ma'am lived in Oakland, and when Dorothy was 8 years old, they lived through the 1906 earthquake and fire that we have covered on the show before. That ran as a Saturday Classic on May 25, 2024. This earthquake is often described as happening in San Francisco, but it was severe across the bay in Oakland as well. Mam'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.

[Jay Shetty]

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.

[Benny Blanco]

Louis Arzner 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.

[Jay Shetty]

But accounts from her lifetime are kind of contradictory 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 1973 with director Francine Parker in which she said she was afraid of all of the actors because they like to pick her up and throw her into the air.

[Benny Blanco]

So many questions emerge in that moment.

[Jay Shetty]

She.

[Benny Blanco]

I.

[Jay Shetty]

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.

[Benny Blanco]

My thing is more like they were doing what? I'm sorry, were they physically lifting you and tossing you about? Not cool. 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 in a dress with her hair loose and down to her waist. But there are also pictures of her in what would be considered boys 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.

[Jay Shetty]

By 1912, her stepmother had started to see her 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. But as far as Mabel's goal of making her more feminine, in Dorothy's graduation photo taken in 1915, 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 Garthe 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.

[Benny Blanco]

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 I was already underway and the US entered the war. In 1917, Dorothy left school and she started working on various projects to raise funds and gather supplies. She also trained with the Los Angeles Emergency Ambulance Corps, but she was never sent overseas.

[Jay Shetty]

After the war ended and after the end of the 1918 flu pandemic, Arsner 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 $12 a week.

[Benny Blanco]

She kept looking though, for other better paying jobs. While working with the ambulance corps, Arsener had met William DeMille, brother of filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille. William was a screenwriter and director in his own right, and both of the brothers were working at Famous Players Lasky, the production and distribution company that would later become Paramount Pictures. I feel like they're also a recurring character in the show.

[Jay Shetty]

Yeah, we've had a lot of Paramount stuff.

[Benny Blanco]

Once the war was over, Anna Starkweather, commander of the ambulance corps, encouraged Arsner to meet with William DeMille 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 19 teens.

[Jay Shetty]

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. Starkweather drove her to the appointment with DeMille. DeMille 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 DeMille'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.

[Benny Blanco]

Her mostly self guided tour of the studio lot included seeing Cecil B. DeMille 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 DeMille and he asked her what she'd 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.

[Jay Shetty]

There wasn't a typing position open right away, so Arzner kept working the switchboard at the coffee wholesaler. When the job offer came from Paramount, the pay was $15 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.

[Benny Blanco]

We're going to talk about Archner's life in Hollywood after we pause for a sponsor break.

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[Jay Shetty]

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 mess 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 co workers 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 B. DeMille's parking space, like while he was waiting to get in, with his driver directly behind her.

[Benny Blanco]

I feel all of this. I could see myself doing some of this stuff. 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 Alla Nazimova, who had started her own production company and had a distribution contract with Metro Pictures that of course later became mgm. Nazimova 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. Nazimova became one of Arsner's mentors in the film industry and they may have had a romantic relationship as well.

[Jay Shetty]

After Arzner finished working on Nazimova'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 Heron, who taught her the ropes on the 1919 comedy Too Much Johnson.

[Benny Blanco]

Arsener 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 Arzner had moved to Paramount subsidiary Real Art Studio where she led the editing department and taught other people how to do it.

[Jay Shetty]

In 1921, 24 year old Arzner met 40 year old dancer, choreographer and screenwriter Marion 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 together for the next 50 years. This was kind of an open secret. They didn't really try to hide it, but they also did not discuss it. As Arzner 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.

[Benny Blanco]

In 1922, Arzner 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. Arzner oversaw some of the filming herself and she intercut 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.

[Jay Shetty]

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 Husbands Flirt and the red Kimona. In 1925, she wrote and edited Old Ironsides in which the USS Constitution fights against pirates. In 1926, Arsner had been doing various.

[Benny Blanco]

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.

[Jay Shetty]

The result 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 Marion Morgan edited the film together. This was an early starring role for Esther Ralston, who had started out as a vaudeville child performer and had played smaller roles in dozens of films before this point. This film was released on March 26, 1927.

[Benny Blanco]

From there, Arsener 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. Marion Morgan worked on all three of these films as well.

[Jay Shetty]

This did not make Arsner, the first woman director in the motion picture industry in the United States. We've already talked about Ella Nazimova. And other women directors included Lois Weber, who was a truly prolific director and screenwriter, and Alice Guy 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 10% of feature film credits were to women directors, writers and producers. And women wrote almost 20% 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 true of all of the silent films that Arsner directed.

[Benny Blanco]

But overwhelmingly, these women directors didn't make the transition from silent films to talkies starting in the late 1920s. 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 1920s, 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.

[Jay Shetty]

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 production 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.

[Benny Blanco]

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, 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 an auteur. 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 in the source material into complex people with complicated motives and personality. This amount of control for a 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.

[Jay Shetty]

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. Arsener 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.

[Benny Blanco]

And irony here is that within the industry, Arsener 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 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.

[Jay Shetty]

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 1929, Arsner tried to get a loan to buy a house in the Los Feliz 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 1929, 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.

[Benny Blanco]

The stock market crashed not long after Arsner had directed her first talkie. That was the Wild Party, starring Clara Bow, who had previously worked with Arsner on Get yout 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 Bo'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.

[Jay Shetty]

The Wild Party was a box office success and also one of the first leading roles for actor Frederick March. Arsner then directed Charming Sinners, which also came out in 1929, and behind the makeup in 1930. Sarah and son also came out in 1930 and starred Ruth Chatterton, who was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actress for the role. By this point, Arzner was starting to develop a reputation as a star maker. This was Chatterton's second Best Actress nomination and soon after this, Frederic March was named Best Actor for his role in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

[Benny Blanco]

Arsner's last film for Paramount was Merrily We Go to Hell in 1932. 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 Arzner to sign a new contract that would cut her pay by 50%, 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.

[Jay Shetty]

We'll talk about her life after leaving Paramount after a sponsor break.

[Benny Blanco]

When you're.

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[Selena Gomez]

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[Larison Campbell]

There's a type of soil in Mississippi called Yazoo Clay. It's thick, burnt orange and it's got a reputation.

[Selena Gomez]

It's terrible, terrible dirt.

[Larison Campbell]

Yazoo clay eats everything, so things that get buried there tend to stay buried until they're not In 2012, construction crews at Mississippi's biggest hospital made a shocking discovery.

[Jay Shetty]

7,000 bodies out there or more, all.

[Larison Campbell]

Former patients of the old state asylum and nobody knew they were there.

[Benny Blanco]

It was my family's mystery.

[Larison Campbell]

But in this corner of the south, it's not just the soil that keeps secrets.

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Nobody talks about it. Nobody has any information.

[Larison Campbell]

When you peel back the layers of mystery, Mississippi's Yazoo Clay, nothing's ever as simple as you think.

[Selena Gomez]

The story is much more complicated and nuanced than that.

[Larison Campbell]

I'm Larison Campbell. Listen to Under Yazu Clay on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

[Jay Shetty]

In 1933 three Dorothy Arzner directed Christopher Strong for RKO Pictures. This was Katharine 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 Arsener's directing was uninspired and Arsener thought Hepburn's tone was too harsh, and they also just seemed to clash personally. But this also added to Arsner's reputation as a star maker. Katharine 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.

[Benny Blanco]

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, an heiress marries a reporter who turns out to be a very heavy drinker, and when she catches him in an affair, they basically arrange to have an open marriage. This was way, way more scandalous in 1932 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, Katharine 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.

[Jay Shetty]

But over the 1920s and 30s, 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 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 Hays Code.

[Benny Blanco]

The Hays Code grew out of earlier standards and rules, and it went through Numerous revisions from the time it was introduced in 1934 to the creation of the modern film rating system in 1968. But for the most part, the code always had the same three general 1. 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. 2. Correct standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama and entertainment shall be presented. 3. Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation.

[Jay Shetty]

There were 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.

[Benny Blanco]

While these standards restricted some of what she could do in the post code era, Arsner's films continued to be focused on women. Craig's Wife, starring Rosalind Russell came out in 1936 that 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 1937, Arsner directed the Bride Wore Red, starring Joan Crawford, which was a romantic comedy that was layered with issues of class and identity. In 1938, Arzner became the first woman to join the Screen Directors Guild, later the Directors Guild of America.

[Jay Shetty]

In 1940, Arzner directed dance Girl Dance, starring Lucille ball and Maureen O'Hara. Even though the film industry had really locked down the more subversive elements of a lot of Arnster'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 Bubbles 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 50 cents worth.50 cents for the privilege of staring at a girl the way your wives Won't let you.

[Benny Blanco]

Arsner's last Hollywood film was First Comes Courage, which came out in 1943. It was a wartime drama starring Merle Oberon. As a member of the Norwegian Resistance. Arsener 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.

[Jay Shetty]

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 Hays Code. While she'd had a reputation as, quote, one of the boys, Hollywood was also just becoming increasingly homophobic. The House UN American Activities Committee had been established in 1938, and a few years later it became really focused on the idea of communist infiltration in Hollywood. It's possible that Arzner just thought it was better for her not to be there. Some of her final films, including the Bride Wore Red, also just had not been as well received as some of her earlier work.

[Benny Blanco]

After her departure from the industry in 1943, there were no women working as directors for major Hollywood studios until Ida Lupino, who started an independent film company with her husband. They started producing films for RKO in 1949.

[Jay Shetty]

Arsner had been very careful with her earnings and her investments, and 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 1950s, Joan Crawford, who was married to Pepsi executive Alfred Steele, convinced Arsner to direct a series of commercials for Pepsi.

[Benny Blanco]

In 1951, Arsener and Marion Morgan moved to La Quinta, California, southwest of Palm Springs, where they lived for the rest of their lives. But Arsener continued to go back to the Los Angeles area for work. In 1952, 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.

[Jay Shetty]

Arsner left Pasadena Playhouse in the late 1950s and started teaching at the graduate Film school at the University of California, Los Angeles. She remained in that position until 1963. 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.

[Benny Blanco]

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 50 graduate student filmmakers at a time.

[Jay Shetty]

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.

[Benny Blanco]

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.

[Jay Shetty]

Marion Morgan died in 1971 at the age of 90. A year later, Arzner's film the Wild Party was screened at the first international festival of women's films, which sparked a revival in interest in her work. The festival hosted a retrospective of her films the following year. In 1975, the Directors Guild of America hosted a tribute to Arsner that included a telegram that was read from Katharine 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 Towards a Feminist Cinema was published by the British Film Institute, edited by Claire Johnston.

[Benny Blanco]

Dorothy arsner died on October 1, 1979, at the age of 82. She had directed 18 feature films over the course of her career, but she was never given any industry awards during her lifetime. In 1986, she was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of fame.

[Jay Shetty]

In 2007, Dance Girl Dance was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. The Librarian of Congress's announcement said of the film, quote, although there were numerous women filmmakers in the early decades of silent cinema, by the 1930s, directing in Hollywood had become a male bastion, with one exception. Dorothy Arsner graduated from editing to directing in the late 1920s, often exploring the conflicted roles of women in contemporary society. In Dance Girl Dance, her most intriguing film, two women, Lucille ball and Maureen 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.

[Benny Blanco]

In 2018, 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 at 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.

[Jay Shetty]

There is not currently a full biography of Dorothy 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 Marian 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 I too 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 20 years. I have no idea of anything else about this other than that it has been rumored for more than 20 years. That's Dorothy Arsener.

[Benny Blanco]

I love her. I'm so glad you picked this one.

[Jay Shetty]

I yes, yes.

[Benny Blanco]

Do you also have some listener mail?

[Jay Shetty]

I do. I have listener mail from Caitlin. Caitlin is a frequent correspondent and I think we have read another Caitlin email in the not too long ago past. Caitlin wrote after our episode on Pellagra and said hi Tracy and Holly. I was so excited to see the first part of the Pellagra 2 parter in my feed and when you alluded to the fortification of grain products to provide more niacin, it immediately 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 1970. Spina bifida is a congenital disability that's classified as a neural tube defect, and it occurs very early in a pregnancy, between and six weeks, often before a person knows they are pregnant. One of the risk factors is a lack of enough folate, vitamin B12 during those very early days of fetal development. My grandmother vividly remembers when folate 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 masa was not enriched. Like any 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 folic acid, the synthetic form of folate, 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 pellagra episodes. It fascinates me to try and imagine the paradigm shift society underwent as concepts like tiny animalcules are causing disease and foods have invisible properties that we need to survive. We're being introduced, especially the time period where those overlap. Of course people were looking for a bacterial or viral cause of pellagra. They just accepted that's how sickness worked. Thank you as always for the work you do. I've attached some pet text photos of Dimitri, my orange guy who recently got some teeth pulled but hasn't seemed to notice Sharktopus, the queen tortie of the house, as well as a photo of my grandmother and an uncle circa 1973-74. 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 would volunteer with some of the programs that my mom worked with when I was a teenager and worked with some kids who had this condition. It would not have occurred to me to think about that with the folate and disparities and where folate is 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 of those B vitamins that are in there that are really important to fetal development from like 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 blep looking on the floor like a silly orange kitty cat face. 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 of these two 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. If you'd like to send us a note about this or any other podcast, we are at historypodcastheartradio.com you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you like to get your podcasts. Stuff youf Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite show.

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[Selena Gomez]

Okay, so we all need to get away from the world sometimes. Well, in the all new 2025 Nissan Murano, you don't even have to go anywhere. The Murano is the getaway. Just picture it. The Bose Premium sound system plays your favorite music as the Murano's massaging leather appointed seats melt away your stress. Yeah, that's a real getaway. Drive the all new 2025 Nissan Murano today. Bose and massaging leather appointed seats are optional features.