Studio History Revisited: The Case of the Universal Women

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Studio History Revisited: The Case of theUniversal WomenMark Garrett Cooper aa Florida State UniversityPublished online: 14 Dec 2007.

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Studio History Revisited: The Caseof the Universal Women

MARK GARRETT COOPER

A decade ago, Janet Staiger edited a collection of mostly earlier work on the studio systemthat called for an overhaul of this critical genre. In her introduction, Staiger observes that “asociology of the work process has not yet been attempted,” and suggests a need for a morethoroughgoing investigation of the relationship between “production conventions” (theformal and informal rules governing the work of filmmakers) and “product conventions”(film form, genre, style). She particularly urges explanation of how changes to one setof conventions affect the other (7). Since the studio provides the site where product andproduction have their most concrete encounter, it would seem necessary to understand itsrole in establishing, reproducing, and relating them. Nonetheless, the most innovative recentstudies of filmmaking institutions look elsewhere. Regulatory agencies have proved anespecially fruitful area of research, and a number of accounts reveal previously unimaginedcomplicities among the projects of censorship, public relations, and stylistic innovation.1

In contrast, the studio history remains more or less what it has always been, a chronicleinterweaving business history with the biographies of key personnel and the legacies ofnotable films.2 Perhaps scholars have simply found other topics more gripping. Comparedwith censorship, modernity, and globalization the “sociology of the work process” doeshave a rather leaden ring. I suspect, however, that academic fashion is not entirely to blame.The studio history has foundered on the question of how production and product informone another because, when posed at the scale of the studio, that question challenges one ofthe most enduring habits of film criticism, namely, the proposition that filmmakers addressviewers through their films.

A moment of serious reflection suffices to cast suspicion on this familiar formulation,for filmmakers too are viewers. If producers, directors, editors, screenwriters, actors,cinematographers, and all the others responsible for motion picture production share somesense of what the reproducible conventions are (as well as what should be avoided), thatcommon understanding must be indebted, in large part, to the viewing experiences thatconstitute a common frame of reference. Nonetheless, descriptive habit gives films sourcesin individual filmmakers and modes of production and, just as routinely, distinguishes thosemakers and modes from the viewers who receive and interpret movies. Productive though

Mark Garrett Cooper is an associate professor of English at Florida State University and theauthor of Love Rules: Silent Hollywood and the Rise of the Managerial Class (University of MinnesotaPress, 2003). His current book project considers the development of a gendered division of laborat the Universal Film Manufacturing Company (1912–1919) as an exemplary case of institutionaldecision-making.

1For example: Ruth Vasey; Steven J. Ross; Lee Grieveson.2Despite, not because of, the contributions in Staiger’s volume, including key essays by Edward

Buscombe and Thomas Schatz.

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Studio History Revisited: The Case of the Universal Women 17

it may be for certain arguments, the analytical separation of production from consumptionconditions us to speak and write as if the studio were only cinema’s source rather than,also, its addressee.

To overcome the mostly unconscious reflex that sets producers and consumers inopposite camps, a reinvigorated studio history would do well to begin with the one areaof scholarship in which it does not seem counterintuitive to suggest that films inform theindustrial process that makes them. In recent books by Rick Altman and Steve Neale, genrecriticism emerges as a key to deciphering institutional logic. Although their emphasesdiffer, Altman and Neale each revise the critical truism that a genre links an industrial planwith an audience wish. They allow us to see genre formation as an ongoing interpretiveprocess through which studios group and regroup filmmakers and films in efforts to arriveat profitably reproducible conventions. While neither account provides a sociology ofthe work process as such, Altman’s approach dovetails particularly well with work insociology that describes the division of labor within culture industries. In combination,then, genre criticism and organizational sociology suggest a model capable of discerninghow movie studios generate work rules through interpretations of their products. I propose todemonstrate the utility of such a model by applying it to one of the more intriguing mysteriesof film history: why women directors flourished at Universal during the mid-1910s, onlyto be banished from the studio by 1920.

Historians of early cinema know well that the emerging film industry of the 1910s andearly 1920s offered women substantially more opportunities to direct than did the matureindustry of the 1930s through 1970s. Universal is the bell-weather for this phenomenon.3

Between 1912 and 1919, the Universal Film Manufacturing Co. credited eleven womenwith directing at least 170 titles.4 Before 1916, superstar Lois Weber accounted for nearlyall of this output, but during the next three years, Ruth Ann Baldwin, Cleo Madison, RuthStonehouse, Elise Jane Wilson, and Ida May Park supervised at least nine titles each. Itis true that these numbers might seem less impressive when considered in the context ofUniversal’s total production. In no single year did women directors’ credits account foreven 10% of all titles. In 1917, the year more individual women were credited than anyother, they amounted to a scant 8 out of 115 named directors (or about 7%). Within thebroader history of women’s direction, however, the phenomenon still stands out. DirectorsGuild of America statistics reveal that during the 1990s women directors never accountedfor more than 9% of the days worked in film production, and they show no upward trend.5

The timing of Universal’s elevation and subsequent abandonment of women directors isalso intriguing. In 1920, ex-Universalite Park wrote the entry on “moving-picture director”for the advice volume Careers for Women. She confidently described directing as “openfield” for those women who were “hardy and determined” (337). Yet that same year, for thefirst time since its inception, Universal credited not one title to a woman director. The entirecohort left the company, and Universal promoted no new women to fill their places. Many

3Since the publication in 1977 of Anthony Slide’s Early Women Directors the “UniversalWomen” have appeared to need an historical explanation. As Slide presents it, Universal stands outfor the shear numbers of women who directed there and for the enthusiasm with which it promotedtheir efforts. Slide forms this impression by reading the trade press and talking with industry insiders.

4These figures are based on Gerald Braff’s Universal filmography and my own research. Threequalifications are necessary: in each of these years Universal released a large number of titles forwhich no director credit is known; in cases where a woman is one of two directors credited, I’vecounted the title as woman-directed; many titles credited to men were products of teams in whicha woman credited as the scenario writer probably did some of the work of directing, but I have notincluded these in the “women directed” column.

5The number is significantly higher for tape production—up to 28% in 1995.

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18 Mark Garrett Cooper

left the industry entirely; some tried to make a go of independent production; few directedagain. This employment pattern calls for an explanation. The mystery is not Universal’swomen-friendliness per se, but, more precisely, why it systematically increased its ranks ofwomen directors in late 1915 only to eliminate them in 1919.

Such an explanation eludes recent work on early women directors primarily becausecurrent methodologies discourage analysis at the institutional scale. In her Engenderingthe Studio, for example, business historian Karen Mahar deftly shows how Hollywood’sgendered division of labor evolves, in part, due to business factors such as post-war boxoffice decline, the increasing importance of investment capital, the emergence of the centralproducer system, and the decline of independent production companies abetted by verticalintegration. She also limns the culture-wide contradictions that led to the reconfigurationof patriarchy in a new consumerist guise at the end of the Progressive era. Universal figureslargely in this invaluable study as an exemplar of broader industrial and cultural trends, buthow and why it makes choices is not a central concern. Industrial development and shiftinggender roles also figure as causal factors in generous biographies by Allison McMahon(on Alice Guy Blache), Cari Beauchamp (on Francis Marion), and Kay Armatage (on NellShipman). True to form, these works place individual lives in historical context; they relatecareer and family, reveal individual gifts and failings, and show artistic development andcontinuity of vision. Armatage also turns a critical eye toward the habits of explanationthat link and distinguish biography and cultural history. Her volume resists biography’simperative to cast Shipman as an exceptional or pioneering figure, emphasizing instead herordinariness as a filmmaker and typicality as a woman in a predominately male profession.Universal enters this narrative as a place where women including Shipman worked, buthere again, how and why it specifically encouraged then limited women’s participationis not a central question. While no history of women’s participation in the early US filmindustry could responsibly ignore Universal, the institution itself falls into an analytic blindspot.

The Universal women pose less an historical mystery than a methodological one. Weknow who did what, where, and when but have yet to develop a model that can explain howand why. When historians seek to explain why women were expelled from the director’schair, their attention moves centrifugally from the studio to the industry to the culture andcentripetally from the studio to its personnel. They find plenty of causes at every level, andably demonstrate that no single factor determined the rise and fall of early women directors.Universal is never lost amidst this surfeit. Historians agree that it played a central role, butthey have difficulty specifying what that part was. To clarify matters, we require neither anaccount that depicts Universal as the hero or villain (it was both), nor one that gives thephenomenon an origin in forces that traverse Universal’s borders (there are several). Rather,one wants a method capable of examining events at the institutional scale and thus of tracingthe process through which Universal and entities like it end up making the decisions theydo.

As an analytical category, genre helps to explain both how filmmaking institutionsdecide and what it means for them to have done so. To use genre in this way, however,requires some attention to premises. Written independently from one another and appearingat more or less the same time, Altman’s Film/Genre (1999) and Neale’s Genre andHollywood (2000) consolidate a change in film studies’ understanding of genre. Bothprovide a history of this intellectual turn, underway since the 1980s, and place it in the longcareer of genre theory. Briefly, each argues that genre is not a fixed structure comprisinga set of elements that delimits a corpus of works. Rather, genre represents a classificationprocess conducted by differently interested parties, in which any given work is available for

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multiple categorizations. This reorientation challenges the proposition that mass culturalgenres constitute a ritual or ideological contract between the industry and its audience. AsAltman notes, that proposition sustains a kind of magical thinking in which critics needonly identify a generic pattern in order to conjure twin sources in industrial design andaudience desire and to further imply that these two agents have somehow compromisedor agreed with each other (16). Grasped as moments of relative stability in an ongoingprocess, genre’s feats of audience mediation look both more concrete and more complex,although no less ideological.

Most importantly for my purposes here, Altman and Neale insist on the significanceof production-side mediation.6 For Neale, industrial discourses establish “inter-textualrelays” by labeling and grouping films, and for Altman, processes of classification andreclassification presuppose that producers adopt “reading positions” based in part on suchdiscourses.7 The producer and the genre critic thus come to look like comparable sortsof interpreters, albeit with different aims and methods. Each strives to group films byidentifying and comparing their significant traits. Producers concentrate on specifyingand reproducing those traits felt to be successful. Because they select new projects inaccordance with their interpretations, Altman points out, they effectively make and unmakegenres through a continuous process of experimental sorting.

For example, Altman shows how Warner Bros.’ initial efforts to reprise the unexpectedsuccess of its 1929 George Arliss vehicle Disraeli did not immediately generate the categoryof “biopic” into which critics would later place the film. By paying careful attentionto the films Warners’ produced in the wake of Disraeli and how it advertised them, hedemonstrates that the studio attributed the film’s success to “its primary emphasis on Britishhistory, political intrigue and international strife, with a secondary attention to financialconcerns, Jewishness and expansive speech-making, plus perhaps a nod to director AlfredE. Green and the film’s stage-play source” (40). Two relatively successful Green-directedfilms confirmed this interpretation in 1930: The Green Goddess, in which Alriss starsas a Rajah who imprisons a group of Brits, and The Man from Blankley’s, in whichWarner’s other British star, John Barrymore, portrays a Scottish peer. A third British-themedfilm that year, Sweet Kitty Bellais, did not do as well, and the musical elements thatdistinguished it were dropped from subsequent films. Financial dealings became the focusin the final Green-Arliss collaboration, Old English (1930), and in Arliss’s The Millionaire(1931). With 1931’s Alexander Hamilton (again staring Arliss), one might think that thebiopic had finally arrived. Yet, Altman points out, Warners’ advertising militated againstunderstanding Alexander Hamilton and Disraeli as similar. It emphasized the Americanquality of Alexander Hamilton and implied comparison with a spate of contemporary filmsfeaturing the scandalous love affairs of statesmen. Only after Darryl Zanuck recruitedAlriss to star in a series of pictures featuring famous, independently minded, foreigners for20th Century Fox in 1934 did a configuration resembling the biopic emerge. It seems thatWarners’ reinterpreted Disraeli accordingly when it produced its cycle of biopics directedby William Dieterle in the late 1930s.

As a descriptive example, this brief history reveals that commercial filmmakingclassifies and reclassifies individual films in efforts to apprehend a shifting market;definitions of genre develop and mutate accordingly. As support for a theoretical position,

6“Mediation” is my term; Altman writes of “indirect communication.” I believe we have similarprocesses in mind, but I prefer the language of “mediation” because it more strongly connotes thatshared signs partly constitute the group that shares them (which Altman terms the “constellatedcommunity”). See chapters 9 and 10 of Film/Genre for Altman’s discussion.

7Neale borrows the term “inter-textual relay” from Gregory Lukow and Steven Ricci.

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the Disraeli case indicates that genres come from the future. The interpretative feats throughwhich filmmakers recognize them are always post-hoc and oriented toward making the nextfilm. Genres, Altman proposes, “begin as reading positions established by studio personnelacting as critics.” In this formulation, “reading positions” indicates structures of meaningwithin which films can be intelligibly analyzed, interpreted, and “expressed as filmmakingconceived as an act of applied criticism” (44). A genre proper stabilizes when institutionsacross the industry adopt the reading position and begin to make films accordingly, but thatprocess proceeds concretely through a series of production cycles assembled at the studio(cf. Neale).

The mediating role of studio-level interpretations merits further consideration. WhenAltman describes the process of genre formation as a “producer’s game,” and particularlywhen he mentions the contributions of such powerful figures as Zanuck, he might be read asattributing its results to individual players. The insistence on “reading positions” adopted byplural “studio personnel,” however, reminds us first of the thicket of technical, aesthetic, andcommercial discourses that filmmaking practice entails, and second that “producer” alsoserves as a synecdoche for a hierarchy. In the producer-unit organization that characterizesthe mature studio system, a producer typically has the authority to select projects andpeople, and the film’s cast and crew have varying degrees of say in determining what showsup on screen. Creative prerogative is unevenly distributed and famously varies from filmto film across different institutions at different times. Taking this collective, hierarchicalcharacter of mainstream filmmaking into account, it becomes clear that no one person canpossibly decide what the reading position will be. Not only does the decision appear assuch only after it is made, but it is also distributed over discussions about myriad choicescongealed in the multiple films and accounts of films that constitute an ever-shifting basisof analysis.

No studio is an island. Filmmakers choose with reference to the work of theircompetitors and colleagues in the industry at large. Still, for most of Hollywood’s history“the studio” has provided the setting that most concretely encourages filmmakers to identifywhat is reproducible in their practice. To repeat box office success may be a producer’s wish,but it is an institutional compulsion. The studio also assembles filmmakers themselves.8

A key indicator of the institutional character of genre formation lies in the relationshipbetween genre and staffing indicated by Altman’s Disraeli example, which makes Alrissand Green key attributes of the genre-in-formation.9 Even if we grant Altman’s point thatthe industry as a whole must recognize a genre in order for it to thrive, and even if weacknowledge that some individuals have more authority to shape a genre’s parameters thanothers, it still makes sense to examine the interpretive framework that drives the genreprocess at the institutional scale.

Given the importance of generic interpretation to institutional decision-making, itshould come as no surprise to find genre emerging as a key term in the sociology concernedwith sexual discrimination in culture industries. Denise and William Bielby, for example,

8I am well aware that “studio” does not name the same kind of entity throughout Hollywoodhistory, but I think it can still provide a serviceable label for the institutional site that encompasses thework of film production and interpretation—regardless of whether one is dealing with Warner Bros.in the 1930s or Joel Silver’s Silver Pictures in the 1980s (see Altman 46–47). I do not argue that thestudio is the only industrial site where the work of genre formation takes place. Films schools, forinstance, contribute significantly to filmmakers’ sense of genre. The studio, however, is the centrallyimportant site where filmmakers’ interpretations meet the machinery of mass reproduction.

9Neale is careful (and right) to point out, contra Schatz, that “stars” and “genres” are overlapping,rather than entirely coincident, ways of classifying films (239–40).

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examine why women writers who work in film and television continue to be paid lessand have fewer opportunities for employment over the course of their careers than mendo. Through multivariate analysis, they seek to determine whether discrimination tends toincrease, decrease, or remain relatively constant over the course of woman writers’ careers.They find continuous disadvantage in the case of television writers and cumulative (thatis, increasing) disadvantage in the case of women writers for film. Among the principlereasons they give for why discrimination should be so prevalent and intractable in thesefields, the Bielbys identify the tendency to type writers as being more or less adept atparticular styles or genres. Genre can be such an important factor because it works intandem with the others that distinguish culture industries: short-term contracts; post-hocinterpretive evaluation; the importance of brokers who match talent with projects; and thefact that men are overrepresented in decision-making positions, combined with the highdegree of ambiguity and risk entailed in mass cultural production (“Women” 249).

Where Altman’s account gives a clear sense of why post-hoc evaluation and perceptionsof generic fashion would be linked, sociologist Paul DiMaggio’s 1977 explanation of“brokerage-administration,” on which the Bielbys draw, shows why these processes are soimportant to staffing decisions. DiMaggio points out that the relation between professionalskill and administrative hierarchy in cultural industries resembles craft production moreclosely than it does traditional industrial organization. As in craft administration, the cultureindustry’s decision-makers “lack professional competence to build a finished product andmust defer to specialists beneath them on the organizational chart.” Nonetheless, brokers—e.g., producers—face very different challenges than their craft administrator counterparts:“they can never be certain exactly what professional competence is or who may be expectedto possess it.” It is not a matter of finding artisans capable of, for example, reliably crankingout so many hand-blown goblets of a certain quality, but of deciding who seems likely toproduce next month’s hit. The only way to do this is “post hoc on the basis of success, oron the basis of reputation or track record” (DiMaggio 442). This brokerage-administrativemodel tends to reify such untested assumptions as “women can’t write action pictures,”thereby decreasing the employment opportunities available to women and making themespecially vulnerable to shifts in generic fashion (D. D. Bielby and W. T. Bielby 266).

Read alongside this sociology, Altman’s discussion of genre identifies a reciprocal pro-cess through which institutions develop staffing and filmmaking conventions. Consideredfrom this point of view, moreover, films and credits look like a distinct kind of evidenceabout institutional function. Each title amounts to an interpretation of past practice and aguess about future success. In the aggregate, a set of titles and the industrial discourse thataccompanies them can reveal interpretive patterns that at the time may have been invisibleto individual brokers or filmmakers or that may have constituted common sense for them.When definite habits emerge—as when biopics are understood as such or when womendisappear from the director’s chair—the genealogy of that decision might best be found byinvestigation at the institutional scale.

Connecting the Bielbys’ analysis to new genre theory brings out two aspects of genericinterpretation that want underscoring. First, it reminds us that nearly all commercial filmgenres make sexual difference an organizing principle—so much so that genres themselvesare frequently understood as gendered. Secondly, it clarifies the link between genre anda gendered division of labor. By analogy, an understanding of gender invoked on screenis applied to the filmmaker. Although action films are not solely responsible for makingspeed, violence, decisiveness, and heroism appear to be manly virtues, for instance, thefact that these generic attributes have become associated with masculinity must accountfor why producers would assume that a woman would be less likely than a man to become

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the next Jerry Bruckheimer.10 The assumptions about personhood that genres reproduceaffect staffing choices. How exactly they do so wants concrete explanation. In concludingtheir essay, the Bielbys call on sociologists to attend to just this problem when theywrite, “Mass culture industries are sites where symbolic representations of gender areliterally produced, and they provide new challenges to the way we understand genderinequality in organizations” (“Women and Men” 267). The challenge resides, precisely, inunderstanding the producers of symbolic structures as also the addressees and interpretersof those structures. This will seem a blandly circular exchange, however, until we accountfor the setting that demands and delimits it, endowing it with regularity and the force ofhabit. Conceived as a way to perform a genealogy of the interpretive process that occurs atthe institutional scale, genre allows us to do just that.

Karen Mahar’s survey provides a convenient starting point for the type of investigationI am proposing. Her volume identifies three genres of the 1910s as especially welcomingto women filmmakers: the serial-queen melodrama, the slapstick comedy, and the socialproblem film. It follows critical consensus in associating the serial-queen and the slapstickcomedienne with the figure of the New Woman. Indebted to nineteenth-century theatricaltraditions, these genres configure “the new” in their emphasis on the heroine’s mobility,athleticism, independence of action, and defiance of domestic propriety. New Womanhoodis not without its contradictions, however. As Shelly Stamp and Ben Singer have shown,even the most adventurous of serial-queens typically finds herself married and restored toa domestic setting in the final reel. “Social problem film” provides a baggier category thanthe serial-queen melodrama. Key treatments by Kay Sloan and Kevin Brownlow pull indifferent directions and leave us with a genre that includes films ranging from Griffith’sadaptation of Norris’s A Corner in Wheat (Biograph 1909) to the cycle of “white slavery”films prompted by Traffic in Souls (Universal 1913), to Cecil B. DeMille’s 1919 remarriagecomedy Why Change Your Wife? Mahar’s use of the category points to a configurationthat parallels the contradictions of New Womanhood. The social problem film recalls therhetoric of nineteenth-century, middle-class, feminine moral authority and also reproducesProgressive era discourses of reform and uplift.

Engendering the Studio proposes slightly different reasons why each genre wouldauthorize women to direct or produce it. In the case of serial-queens and comediennes,Mahar points to a flexibility of work roles habitual in kindred theatrical productionsand carried over into the cinema, combined with an emphasis on star players as abasis of value. This sanctioned the movement of prominent stars such as Ruth Roland,Grace Cunard, and Mabel Normand into decision-making positions. In the case of socialproblem pictures, Mahar shows, the industry hoped to enhance its claims to producemorally and aesthetically virtuous entertainments, and thus thwart censorship arguments,by attributing films to middle-class women. On this account, genre provides two partialexplanations for women’s brief prominence in the industry during the 1910s. It also helps toexplanation their decline. By 1922, Mahar argues, the censorship movement succeeded indefining serial-queen melodramas and slapstick comedies as inappropriately vulgar while,at the same time, the industry’s increasing emphases on consumerist entertainments recastthe social problem film’s “sermonizing” as a negative value. Thus, the development ofmass entertainment genres antipathetic to women directors proceeds along with verticalintegration, the increasing importance of finance capital, industrial self-censorship, and theevolution of the central-producer system.

10Action-adventure films have not always worked or been interpreted in this way, see Neale52–60.

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A reconsideration of genre as a process occurring at the institutional scale qualifies andamends Mahar’s interpretation even as it ultimately ratifies her approach. Serials and socialproblem films emerge as more nearly opposite instances. It appears that the developmentof the serial at Universal actually militated against the flexible division of labor inheritedfrom theater that Mahar sees authorizing women. In contrast, Universal seems to haveunderstood women’s authorship as an important selling point when marketing a particularpermutation of social problem film, but not necessarily when marketing the range of filmsthat scholars classify in this genre. In truth, credits and advertising reveal a wide rangeof experimentation. A substantial number of Universal’s women-directed films do notfall neatly into any of the three genres referenced by Mahar. Some provide evidence ofattempts to market highly specific types of films as woman directed. Others seem obliviousto or uninterested in the project of correlating gender with genre. Even given this rangeof marketing approaches, and given further the messiness of genre during this period,it remains true that a closer look at genre formation supports the proposition that theinstitution developed its gendered division of labor by interpreting its films. The “Big U”seems impelled to arrive at a configuration of gender roles behind the camera that confirmedand supported the arrangements that prevailed in front of it. I do not mean to suggest thatit was somehow inevitable or logically necessary for Universal define directing as men’swork. To the contrary, even a partial genealogy of that decision brings paths-not-taken intoview. Nonetheless, one discerns an institutional compulsion to make gender make sense,to secure its position as an organizing principle of social and symbolic life, and sustain itsstatus as a schema with which to understand any number of disparate phenomena.

It may be objected that the methods of analysis Altman et al. develop throughconsideration of the mature studio system have dubious applicability in this case. After all,Universal still used “producer” and “director” as synonyms in 1914. There were no reliablemechanisms for reporting national box-office figures. Universal sold most of its outputto exhibitors as part of a program of short films that changed daily. Marketing thereforetargeted theater owners as much as audiences and emphasized brand identity, often linkedto particular performers, as much as the virtues of particular film titles. The next fouryears witnessed substantial changes, however. Historians often cast Universal as laggingbehind those companies, e.g., Paramount, that would in the 1920s establish themselves as“the majors” (Koszarski 80–94; Schatz 15–28). Still, no one disputes that the giant of the1910s played an important role in developing the studio system. While it did not abandon itsdaily program of one- and two-reel films until 1917, production and advertising increasinglyfocused on individual five- and six-reel features. National advertising campaigns developed,particularly around long-running serials, and these campaigns participated in the decade’sarguments over whether brand names, stars, writers, directors, or stories constituted themost reliable basis for marketing—arguments productive of the later consensus that theyall could be counted on, but differently. Finally, Janet Staiger finds the merger of independentcompanies that created Universal in 1912 to have been a key step along the path toward thecentral producer system that characterized the industry though 1931 (Bordwell, Thompsonand Staiger 136). The tendency toward professional specialization, central coordination,and an increasingly stable hierarchical division of labor is unmistakable. It is not a questionthen, of applying Altman’s and Neale’s insights anachronistically, but rather of tracing thegenealogy of the very practices they specify and explain.

Nowhere is the institutional imperative to think generically clearer than in the case ofserials. Universal launched episode one of Lucille Love, The Girl of Mystery in late April of1914. The studio doubtlessly hoped that this, its first serial would allow it to catch up withSelig, which had hit with The Adventures of Kathlyn early in the year, and Pathe-Eclectic,

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which had launched the legendary Perils of Pauline in late March (see Bowser 209). Itturned to director-actor Francis Ford and writer-director-actor Grace Cunard, a team thathad reliably produced two, and sometimes three, shorts a month since joining Universal asa package in 1913. Even as they continued to crank out short films, Cunard and Ford madea total of four serials between 1914 and 1917, establishing themselves as Universal’s mostpopular and reliable producers of the genre.

In their shorts, Cunard and Ford played a wide variety of roles, but their on-screenrelationship in the serials was fairly consistent. This relationship probably owes its mostdirect debt to their popular My Lady Raffles series, which began to appear in March 1914and continued at odd intervals over the next two years. (A “series” featured recurringcharacters but unlike a serial completed a narrative in each installment.) In this series,Cunard plays a crook, and Ford, the detective who seeks to apprehend her. They areoften united, however, in confronting a more profound villainy.11 Lucille Love likewisetransforms the stock characters of hero and heroine into adversaries who must occasionallycollaborate. He is a master spy, she, an amateur investigator; they are thrown togetherin a perilous globetrotting pursuit of secret government documents. In The Broken Coin(June–November 1915) Cunard portrays a newspaper reporter who seeks the hidden treasureof a Balkan fantasy kingdom and must overcome the machinations of the king’s consul andrival (played by Ford). Eventually, they each hold halves of a coin revealing the treasure’slocation. The halves are united when Ford’s character turns out to be the true king, and hepromptly weds the American reporter. Adventures of Peg o’ the Ring (May–August 1916)accents their shared danger while inverting the plot in which competition leads to romance.Cunard is Peg, a rider in the circus and unacknowledged daughter of its owner. Ford playsher half-brother who, ignorant of their shared paternity, proposes to her in the first episode.This set-up gives each star numerous occasions to rescue the other as various interestedparties vie to separate or kill them in attempts to prevent the revelation of Peg’s secret.The last of their serials, The Purple Mask (January–April 1917) explicitly reprised the MyLady Raffles template, borrowing Ford’s Detective Kennedy from that series and recreatingCunard’s Lady Raffles as the Purple Mask, who robs from the greedy to give to the needy.

By casting themselves in these alternately competitive and collaborative roles, Ford andCunard produce an on-screen world that echoes and confirms their off-screen partnership.In the fragments of Lucille Love and Purple Mask that survive, each possesses equallyremarkable capabilities when it comes to mastery of disguise, the ability to move throughspace, and the power to command the allegiance of others. Universal’s publicity departmentreinforced the sense that their method of working entailed interchangeable roles. In 1915,the Universal Weekly (an in-house paper addressed to Universal’s exhibitors) describedCunard as “one of the most capable directors in ‘the business,’” noting that “When Mr.Ford is in a scene Miss Cunard directs, and when she appears without her virile co-star, Mr.Ford takes charge” (Weir 27). Ford himself seems less defensive about his virility whendescribing their collaboration in a later interview: “Miss Cunard and I are an ideal team. Weeven work out the story together. Sometimes one of us, sometimes the other, has the originalidea, and then she usually puts it into scenario form. She can dream scenarios. We play into

11A capsule review of the second Lady Raffles film gives a sense of the formula: “THEMYSTERIOUS LEOPARD LADY (Gold Seal), March 24,—This is a two-reel offering, writtenby Grace Cunard. The author and Francis Ford play the principal parts. The plot is of the thrilling,melodramatic sort. It is full of mystery and action, but the story is not very clear in parts. The yarn isso ridiculous in places that it almost becomes burlesque. There is a Lady Raffles, a deep-dyed villain,a fearless hero, and plenty of wild animals. The conglomeration is not to be taken seriously and is byno means without interest.”

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each others hands. She is a very capable director herself, you know” (“Talking to FrancisFord”). In sum, the Cunard-Ford films supply an on-screen configuration that tends to makethe man and woman appear equally capable, combined with a work model that emphasesfungible roles, reinforced by publicity that attributes success to this collaboration. In allareas they “play into each other’s hands.”

If the Cunard-Ford serials support Mahar’s industry-level argument that the adventur-ous leading lady’s stardom plus a flexible division of labor equaled opportunities for womento direct and produce, the same cannot be said for Universal’s other early serials. Amongthe Universal women directors, Cleo Madison achieved fame in the serial Trey o’ Hearts,Ruth Stonehouse performed in Adventures of Peg o’ the Ring, and Ruth Ann Baldwin wrotethe scenarios for The Black Box.12 But none of these women directed a serial. Arguably,Madison’s prominence in Trey o’ Hearts gave her the leverage necessary to secure adirecting position. Even so, she began with an apprenticeship in shorts before taking chargeof her own company of actors. Moreover, since Cunard and Ford were a team before theirserials, their particular way of working cannot be credited to the genre. Indeed, Universalencouraged male-female producing partnerships in its early years. In addition to Cunard andFord, who were not married, durable collaborations included actor-director Lois Weber andher husband Phillips Smalley, and director Joseph de Grasse and his wife, scenario-writerIda May Park. Despite the popularity of Lucille Love, however, credits show no evidencethat Universal imagined serials production as an extension of this pattern. When it came toserials, the Cunard-Ford partnership was clearly an exception. To begin to understand whyUniversal did not reproduce this successful configuration, we need look no further than itsmarketing.

The national advertising campaigns Universal that first began to organize around LucilleLove focused a good deal of attention on the writer. Before 1918, serials inevitably entaileda newspaper tie-in; one read in print the weekly installment that appeared on the screen(see Singer 276–79). Universal promoted the Lucille Love series to exhibitors by pointingto the size of the readership guaranteed by the circulation of the papers that had agreed toprint the stories. By the end of May 1914, it claimed 70 million readers (Lucille Love). Thismarketing plan encouraged an emphasis on the newspaper story as a text both captivatingin its own right and preliminary to the film version. Significantly, Universal dissociatedLucille Love’s writer from its performer-producers by attributing Cunard’s stories not toCunard, the “Girl of Mystery,” but to the equally enigmatic “Master Pen,” “the greatestwriter of modern times” (“Universal Releases”).13 Universal stuck to this strategy in thethree major serials that followed. Advertising for Trey o’ Hearts explained that the serieswould “rewrite” literary as well as moving-picture history in adapting the prose of popularauthor Louis Joseph Vance (“The Trey O’ Hearts”). Universal similarly proclaimed the“writing fame” of John Fleming Wilson in marketing The Master Key, co-staring Ella Halland director Robert Z. Leonard (“The Master Key”). It turned to English mystery writer E.Phillips Oppenheim for The Black Box, produced by “dean of directors” Otis Turner andstaring Anna Little.

12Nell Shipman wrote the scenario for Universal’s Under the Crescent (June–July 1916), andher memoir suggests that she had her first directing experience at Universal when working on a JohnKerrigan two-reeler for which she had written the scenario. Kerrigan insisted she stand in for thedirector who had run off with the leading lady (see Armatage 57–58). Shipman is not credited withany Universal titles.

13Universal finally revealed to its exhibitors that the Master Pen was Cunard mid-way throughthe series, see “Lucille Love Founded on Fact,” Universal Weekly 16 May 1914.

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The Broken Coin, next on Universal’s agenda and the second Cunard-Ford serial,would seem calculated to break the association with a famous male writer since, in afabulously recursive turn, its newspaper-reporter heroine writes up her weekly adventuresfor publication within the film’s diegesis. Here again, however, publicity extolled writerEmerson Hough (although it did credit Cunard as scenario writer). A piece puffing Hough inthe Universal Weekly explained that “The Universal has been very fortunate in the selectionof all the men who have written its former serials. Such names as Louis Joseph Vance, JohnFreming Wilson and E. Phillips Oppenheim, are as mighty in the literary world as are thoseof Ford and Cunard in the motion picture world.” Hough cuts a manly and aristocratic figurein this piece as a big game hunter and collector of antiques (“Author of ‘The Broken Coin’”).So committed was Universal to the newspaper tie-in that it preserved this component ofthe formula even while sacrificing the genre’s characteristic episodic structure. Worriedthat the public might be wearying of the cliffhanger, Universal publicist Joe Brandt takescredit for a baroque variation on the great authors strategy in planning Graft during thefall of 1915. The Universal Weekly explained that this would be a “series-serial,” withnarratives complete in each chapter (but tied together by longer story arcs), and that adifferent well-known author would pen each of the sixteen installments. Universal did notrepeat the Graft experiment. It did turn again and again to Cunard and Ford. Thus, it seemsclear that it regarded their approach as the more bankable proposition. It seems equallyclear, however, that it interpreted “the great writer” as a key component of the Cunard-Fordserials’ success.

Far more is at stake in this interpretation than whether or not a serial required amasculine writer’s name as a positive selling point. Serials were expensive and risky.14

They mandated a long-term commitment and circulated in a crowded market. Successdepended on convincing exhibitors and newspaper editors in advance that the audiencewould return week after week. The name-brand writer had insurance value, guaranteeingexhibitors a known standard and doubtlessly easing negotiations with the newspapersyndicate. Considered as an element in the filmmaking process, moreover, the writer’sinvolvement—even when he was a pseudonym–delimited the authority of the director andscenario writer in favor of those managers who coordinated publicity and production.Whereas directors and scenario writers apparently had broad authority over projectsproduced for Universal’s shorts program, coverage of the Graft experiment indicatesthat serials were birds of a different color. Not only did publicist Joe Brandt, organizerof the newspaper syndicate, play a key role in serials production from the outset, butUniversal Director General Henry McRae had supervisory functions akin to those oflater “producers”: he coordinated the efforts of Graft’s director with those of UniversalCity’s business manager, technical director, and scenario editor (“Wonderful Company”).A survey of credits confirms that Universal higher-ups matched serial projects to directorswith care. No director debuted in serials production, and all serials directors had trackrecords indicating an ability to produce on a steady schedule. Aside from Cunard and Ford,only one other serial star directed himself: Robert Z. Leonard, who had at least 29 shortfilms under his belt at Universal before directing The Master Key. Given the frequency ofhospitalization among serials performers (who did their own stunts) it no doubt seemeddoubly wise to select directors who were not in the film. Interpreted according to the schemaindicated by marketing, the Cunard-Ford films promote not a partnership of equals with

14Mahar notes: “In 1916, Photop1ay estimated that while the average feature cost between$5,000 and $25,000 to produce, the cost of making a serial ran between $100,000 and $500,000.While that figure may have been closer to $45,000–$80,000, the price was still quite steep” (ch. 3).

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flexible roles but rather a well-coordinated hierarchy in which reputation functioned as aprinciple of risk management.

The Cunard-Ford films can indeed be interpreted as paeans to organizational efficacyand, moreover, as confirming a common explanation for what made professional womena poor employment risk. With some hazard of overgeneralization, one can say that serial-queen melodramas imagine a world in which, for better and worse, organizations constantlymeddle. Along with all manner of technological gadgets and transportation devices, criminalgangs, spy networks, and the police function both as tropes for the modern and pretextsfor a highly suppressive narration. The famous twists and turns of serial plots often rely onthe discovery that some complex enterprise hovering just outside the frame has arrangedcircumstances or is about to intervene. They do so both to threaten the heroine’s safety andto ensure it, as she joins the struggle to control some treasure or vital piece of information.These are worlds rife with risk, in other words, that contending organizations vie to manage.Accordingly, the criminal masterminds and genius detectives who inhabit the serials tendto be organization men: they command henchmen, report to headquarters, and so on. Theheroine tends to be an amateur, typically the daughter of a powerful man (Singer 208–10).This pattern genders organizational authority as masculine, and the two Cunard-Ford serialsthat can most easily be seen as offering a counterpoint to it can also be interpreted asconfirming it.

In The Broken Coin, Cunard’s newspaper reporter explicitly professionalizes theamateur-sleuth daughter of Lucille Love. In each episode, she reports back to her editor,played by Universal president Carl Laemmle himself. The nature of this relationship isdifficult to appraise in the absence of a surviving print, but it is clear that the serial endedwith Cunard giving up her job to become Ford’s bride. Marriage also ends The PurpleMask, in which Cunard heads a gang of ex-Apaches from the Paris sewers that repeatedlyfoils Ford’s Detective Kelley and his police. In the final episodes, the Purple Mask andDetective Kelley join forces to defeat an anarchist plot, which earns her both a pardon anda wedding ring. Marriage does not entirely vanquish the Purple Mask, however. The finalsequence rushes forward in time to give the couple a daughter—dressed in a tiny versionof her mother’s former costume. In sum, as much as these serials depict Cunard’s andFord’s characters as equally capable adversaries and partners, they also depict the woman’sadventures as a preamble to the domestic life and define them as an appropriate activity fordaughters, but not for wives.

Although recent criticism regards such a configuration as conventional across the genre,we would do well to recall that this long retrospective view would not have been availableto Universal when it began trying to reproduce the success of Lucille Love in 1914. In analternate timeline, Universal might have attributed the film’s success to the frisson generatedby a heroine who outsmarts her male rival, secures the nation, and mimes the capacities ofthe star, writer, and co-director who rendered her. Instead, Universal ignored those featuresof the Cunard-Ford serials that made the professional partnerships of men and womenseem both intelligible and fun. It fastened instead on the marketing tie-in that promoteda masculine writer. This predisposed it to understand serial success as an organizationaltriumph to which women might temporarily contribute, but could not reliably orchestratein the long term.

The label “social problem film” points to a production cycle that was, for a time, muchfriendlier to women directors, but proved equally ambivalent in its eventual effects. Inthe criticism that establishes the social problem film as an early film genre, Lois Weber’slate 1910s features are among its key examples. For most of this period, she worked atUniversal.15 There can be no doubt that the studio esteemed her. Weber had joined Universal

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in 1912 with her husband and nominal co-director Phillips Smalley, who continued to becredited along with her throughout the 1910s. After 1915, however, publicity increasinglyemphasized Weber’s contributions. Universal billed her as “the world’s greatest womandirector,” the “Belasco of the screen,” (The Price of a Good Time) and the “master geniusof the films” (Shoes). If Universal’s website is any indication, it continues to see her WhereAre My Children? as a studio landmark. This 1916 film caused an international sensationfor its defense of birth control via an indictment of abortion. Universal marketed subsequentWeber films by emphasizing their similarity to this hit and other Weber successes. Whatexactly defined a “Weber film” was a matter of interpretation. Nonetheless, the combinationof a famous woman director and an identifiable cycle of successful films certainly seemslike the sort of configuration Universal would want to reproduce, and indeed it did so.

Strong evidence that Universal sought to develop a genre based on the Weber prototypecomes from publicity figuring Ida May Park as her replacement. Along with De Grasse,Park was the scenario-writing (and probably co-producing) half of another Universal team.When Weber left Universal in 1917 to establish her own semi-independent productioncompany, Moving Picture World gave substantial attention to Park’s directorial debut.“During the eighteen months Bluebird’s program has been progressing,” it told exhibitors,“there has always been a woman director concerned in the picture making for that firm. . .

Lois Weber was a great factor in promptly establishing Bluebirds [sic], and when shedecided to begin producing on her own account Ida May Park was assigned to the workof directing Dorothy Phillips, thus keeping a woman’s hand in the Bluebird game”(“IdaMay Park, Director”). Universal invented the Bluebird brand as a way to market five-reelfeatures. Marketing cemented the Weber-Park connection when Park began to direct MaryMacLaren the following year. The unknown MacLaren had become a star through Weber’sShoes in 1916, and the Moving Picture World suggested that exhibitors advertise her firstfeature with Park, The Model’s Confession, with the line: “Beautiful Heroine of “Shoes,”Returns to Screen in Another Sociological Experiment” (The Model’s Confession). Park’snext film, Bread (1918), owes an obvious debt to Shoes. In both, MacLaren portrays aheroine stoic in her impoverishment and upright in her refusal of indecent proposals fromwealthier men. In the fragment of Bread that survives, the starving heroine looks longinglythrough food shop windows, echoing her similar stare through the glass at desperatelyneeded footwear in Shoes. Accordingly, Moving Picture World gave Bread the tag-line:“The Heroine of ‘Shoes’ Now Comes To View In Another Sociological Photodrama” (Rev.of Bread). For marketing purposes, Universal associated Park with Weber as a “womandirector” via a production cycle of MacLaren features in which the heroine’s poverty andsusceptibility to unwelcome advances could be understood as matters of “sociological”interest.

Further investigation suggests that by linking Park’s first two MacLaren pictures withShoes, Universal and Moving Picture World collaborated to find a provisional, and in somerespects uncharacteristic, solution to a persistent problem of explaining what made Weber’s

15In the fall of 1914, Smalley and Weber left Universal to make films with actor-director HobartBosworth, including Hypocrites (nonetheless made on the Universal City lot), which won nationalattention for, among other features, its allegorical portrayal of “the Naked Truth.” In April of 1915,the pair rejoined Universal, bringing Bosworth with them. Those who have looked closely at Weber’slife and career consider her to have been the creatively dominant creative partner outset, and fromthis point on publicity increasingly emphasized her name over his. The Smalley’s work at UniversalCity concentrated on features released under newly created and heavily advertised “Broadway,”“Bluebird,” and “Jewel” brands, and Universal continued to distribute Weber’s films after she set upan independent company in 1917.

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films great. Although delighted to promote her unique genius, Universal clearly hoped for amore easily repeatable answer than simply “Weber.” An April 1917 Universal Weekly storyprovides insight into the studio’s thought process. In addition to praising Weber’s “soaringimagination” and “unfailing sense of the dramatic” it noted that she “can deal successfullywith subjects which other directors would not dare to touch for fear of condemnation.” Hereis a theme noted by Mahar in her contention that women’s involvement helped inoculateagainst censorship. The Weekly finds in “every one” of Weber’s films “a purpose beyondthat of mere entertainment” and goes on to name about half of the fifteen features Weberdirected between 1915 and 1917. Most articulate a moral lesson. Hop, the Devil’s Brew(1916) inveighs against “the opium evil,” for example, Scandal (1915) condemns gossip,and The People vs. John Doe (1916) rails against the death penalty. The Weekly exertsinterpretive muscle to include in this group “the ethereal” Mysterious Mrs. M. (1917), alighthearted look at a suicidal but healthy and wealthy young man whose friends conspirewith a fortune teller to give him a reason for living. Although made “with apparently nopurpose on earth but to amuse,” the Weekly writes, the film “yet bore a message morepowerful than that of many sermons on that which makes life really worth while.” Incontrast, the paper describes the ten-reel Dumb Girl of Portici as unlike Weber’s others,and defines it as distinctly a vehicle for its star, Anna Pavlova. According to this particularfeat of generic sorting, Weber makes message films comparable to sermons, which mayor may not deal with sensational subject matter, that emphasize content rather than astar performer. Such a view is consonant with Weber’s own description of her late 1910sfeatures as “missionary pictures,” “editorials,” or “heavy dinners” (Balides; Stamp; Sloan,“The Hand That Rocks”).

Interestingly, none of these descriptions emphasize the “sociological” element used tolink Shoes with Bread or repeat the label of “problem play” attached to Shoes. That this is adistinction with a difference becomes clear later in the article when the Weekly points to thestylistic variety of Weber’s oeuvre: “Sometimes she works through the extreme of realism,through a fidelity to the last sordid detail which is typical of a modern Russian, as in theBluebird ‘Shoes.’ Sometimes she joins the ‘open air’ school and gets effects with cloudstudies, flowers and natural surrounding like an impressionist painter. . .. Again she franklyemploys the resources of allegory, as she did in ‘Hypocrites’” (“‘Even as You and I’” 19).Through its coding as “Russian,” the Weekly implies that Shoes differs not only in its realiststyle, but also in its depiction of class, and particularly of “sordid” poverty. Similarly, a 1916article on MacLaren’s career distinguishes her second Weber film, Saving the Family Nameas “not a ‘problem drama,’ but a serious and purposeful handling of a certain phase of stagelife that will provide engaging entertainment without guile” (“Saving” 17). Advertisingfor the third Weber-MacLaren feature, Idle Wives (1916), avoids the language of “problemdrama” altogether in favor of a familiar Weber trope; it is “the most dignified and moralpreachment ever presented on the screen” (“Idle Wives” 21). In 1919, Moving Picture Worldintroduced a similar distinction in Ida May Park’s oeuvre when it suggested that exhibitorspromote The Amazing Wife with the phrase: “Pretty Mary MacLaren, Star of ‘Shoes’ andOther Problem Plays, Now Comes in Drama of Woman’s Psychology” (McElravy). Insum, “sociological photodrama” and “problem play” provided apt labels for associatingMacLaren’s early Park pictures with her initial success in Shoes and indicate Universal’sinterest in repeating that success. They did not provide descriptive terms for Weber’s orPark’s work in general, and Universal may have avoided them due to their association witha grim, even un-American, depiction of urban poverty.

Despite such evidence, recent criticism tends to lump Shoes with Weber’s other workand favors the language of sociology over that of the sermon or editorial in describing,

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not so much her oeuvre’s themes, but its mode of address. Although The Blot (1921) isfrequently described as less emphatically moralistic than Weber’s 1910 Universal films,Jennifer Parchesky finds a continuity of concern and particularly of directorial voice, which“exposes the contradictions of a [white] middle-class consciousness trying to critique theexcesses of consumer capitalism while maintaining its own class privileges” (Parchesky48). Constance Balides sees Weber’s Shoes as one of several mid-1910s films that “invite thespectator to take up a position of reformer in relation to the social problems represented,”and demonstrates that the film advances a specific position within contemporary socialscientific debates linking work, family, sexuality, and consumption (Balides 171). Shoesannounces its similarity to social science in its opening close-up of Jane Addams’s A NewConscience and an Ancient Evil, and presents itself visually as a case study (Balides 185).Shelly Stamp usefully distinguishes Weber’s films from other social problem films of thisera that “sought to reform working class moviegoers with solemn sermons on temperance,sexuality, and hygiene” as well as from the “‘uplifting’ bourgeois fare” advocated bythe Better Films Movement. She agrees with Balides and Parchesky that Weber’s filmsaddressed middle-class spectators and proposes they did so “not simply to recruit theminto particular progressive causes (though that was certainly one of her goals), but also tosuggest a broader congruence between film viewing and reformist sensibilities—to suggest,in other words, that cinema might aspire to much grander aims than commercial recreationfor the masses” (“Lois Weber” 145). Stamp also emphases a productive tension betweenthe stance of interested observation and the identifications Weber’s films also encourage. Ofa sequence in which the heroine of Shoes looks longingly through a shop window, Stampobserves that “viewers are asked to watch as if through two pairs of eyes, empathizing atfirst with Eva’s longing for the lovely boots, then gradually seeing what she cannot see,the web of winks and implications spun by Charlie and Lil just outside her line of vision”as they conspire to seduce her. The gradual revelation of the play of various sightlines“invites viewers to situate their understanding of Eva’s desire within a broader frameworkof sociological observation” (“Lois Weber” 155). Stamp shows this manner of addressingthe audience to be constant across Weber films with different subject matter.

“Sociological,” I agree, aptly names the technique of representation, which insistson an awareness of the group formations in which the protagonist takes up a position,as well as the particular thematic connection between family poverty, consumer desire,and casual prostitution at issue in the film. If we stipulate, therefore, that recent criticismhas a point when it describes Weber’s films as “sociological” in their narrative voice,Universal’s preference for terms invoking the editorial and the sermon points either to avariant interpretation or to a deliberate attempt to spin sociology in a different direction.“Preachment” does distinguish her films according to their mode of address, as opposed totheir star or “problem” subject matter. Like “editorial,” it suggests a “grander aim” than“commercial recreation.” Sermons and editorials also indicate more broadly popular formsof discourse than social science. Perhaps, then, such language bespeaks a compromisebetween competing aims to, on the one hand, legitimate the movies by associating themwith forms felt to have a nobler purpose than to entertain, and, on the other, maximizeaudience by downplaying aspects of Weber’s address that could define some patrons asobjects of investigation rather than its subjects.

In any event, the fact that sermonizing, editorializing, and social science jostle againstone another as labels for “the Weber film” suggests that any effort to capitalize on theirsuccess would logically have faced two major difficulties. First, there is the problem ofconnecting the association of narrative voice with auteur to genre, and thus to multipledirectors. Fiction film genres, it should be noted, are not customarily distinguished according

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to mode of address, although documentaries are (see Nichols). Second, there is the equallyvexing problem of determining whether this mode of address was necessarily a woman’s.This was, after all, a period in which a profusion of discourses linked a middle-classdomestic woman’s authority to and distinguished it from the rising professional authorityof women in such fields as social work, education, nursing, and home economics. As DeniseRiley shows us, this discussion set the terms post-suffrage feminism and was made possibleby the feminized terms in which the nineteenth-century invented “the social” as a domain(44–66).16

The marketing link between Bread and Shoes amounts to an interpretive solution tothe first problem that answers the second in the affirmative: more than one director couldconduct a “sociological experiment” and those directors would be women. Yet the filmsthemselves offer contradictory support for this answer. If, as Stamp describes it, we lookat the world of Shoes by turns through Eva’s eyes and from a vantage of sociologicalobservation, are we to understand those two viewpoints as related, and thus as equallyfeminine? Or, are we led to distinguish the embodied and limited feminine perspective fromone that is necessarily incorporeal, more authoritative, and perhaps implicitly masculine?In the abstract, these alternatives frame the dilemma confronting professional women inall lines of work. Nancy Cott finds its prototype, for example, in late nineteenth-centuryarguments among “lady lawyers” over whether they should emphasize service to womenclients and risk marginalization, or efface their difference and speak in the masculine voiceof the profession (232). Even predominately female early twentieth-century professionssuch a social work evince a tension between the implicitly masculine attitude expected ofthe disinterested investigator and the explicitly feminine qualities of nurture and empathythat sanctioned women’s participation in them (Walkowitz). Authority to represent “thesocial” and argue on its behalf could be based on feminine empathy, but to secure itselfsuch authority had to establish a paradoxical stance of objective, scientific, disinterestedadvocacy.

As part of Universal, Weber found a distinctly cinematic way to formulate thismovement from empathy to authority and the double bind for women professionals thataccompanies it. If one understands the film’s sociological viewpoint to be feminine, likeEva’s, then it makes sense for women to orchestrate it. If this is the case, women wouldbe limited to a narrowly defined genre, and could easily find themselves at odds withHollywood’s mission to entertain. If one interprets the film’s sociological viewpoint to be“gender neutral” (although perhaps implicitly masculine), then to win authority to produceit a women had to distinguish herself from “women” and claim professional expertise.It was precisely this sort of claim that an increasingly developed system of brokerageadministration would make difficult, since it could only be established on the basis of pastsuccess. 17

Weber was not alone in working out a mode of address that could be interpreted asfeminine in a very specific Progessive-era sense. Two additional examples will have to

16For a discussion of how this argument played out in relation to motion picture regulationspecifically, see Parker. The percentage of employed women in the U.S. classified as professionalsjumped from 8.2% in 1900 to 14.2% in 1930 according to Walkowitz (91).

17This double bind was not limited to production cycles focused on “sociological” experimen-tation. A parallel pitfall lurks in efforts to make women specialists in “Women’s Psychology”—thehook suggested by advertising for Park’s The Amazing Wife and supported by several articles onwomen directors in the trade press. Reminders that women possessed a superior understanding ofthe human heart amounted to a better implicit argument for women screenwriters than for womendirectors, as directing was increasingly seen as requiring not only emotional understanding but alsocommand capability.

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suffice. The scenario for Cleo Madison’s lost 1916 feature Her Bitter Cup (released thesame day as Where Are My Children?), depicts improper sexual relations as a logicalextension of labor exploitation. Its heroine, Rethna (played by Madison) has an affair withone of a factory owner’s sons (the bad seed), then marries the other (the upright brother),in order to extract money from the family and divert it to “her people” (the downtroddenworkers). To arrive at a happy ending in which true love redeems past wrongs and the factoryowner changes his ways, Madison subjects Rethna first to a factory fire, from which herestranged husband rescues her, and then to a crucifixion. In what was likely represented as adream sequence, the deranged younger brother catches her unawares and pins her to a doorwith nutpicks (“Comments” 648). While it is impossible to know exactly how Madisonrendered these developments on screen, the narrative outline seems designed to presentRethna as, by turns, a workers’ advocate from whose perspective social evils are exposedand the victim of circumstances she cannot anticipate because they lie outside her purview.A similar structure characterizes If My Country Should Call (1916), for which Park wrotethe scenario just before she began to direct. Here a pacifist mother attempts to prevent herson from enlisting in the Army by slowly poisoning him with her heart medication. Sheanticipates a medical disqualification, but ends up ruining his life and overdoses herself indespair. A print of this film survives. Relatively restricted to the mother’s vantage point, itsnarration emphasizes her anguish throughout. We see her beside the vial of medication asan iris circles in to frame a close-up of her apprehensive countenance. A title in the bottomcorner of the frame underscores the terrible calculation she contemplates: “Ten drops woulddepress the action of the heart enough to fool any physician, but an overdose—.” This shotprecedes her decision to begin poisoning her son and is repeated again before her suicide. Inthe end, the entire chain of events turns out to have been a dream, and the mother wakes upclaiming to have learned a valuable lesson about young men and patriotism. The movementfrom the mother’s nightmare to the framing story amounts to shift in narrative tone notidentical with, but certainly akin to, that accomplished by Weber when she redirects ourattention from Eva’s yearning to the Cadet’s unseen sneer.

Despite commonalities of address, Universal identified neither Her Bitter Cup nor IfMy Country Should Call as “problem plays.” Her Bitter Cup was “a thrilling and intenselygripping drama of a woman’s supreme sacrifice for her people– the poor and lowly,”and If My Country Should Call was a “remarkable preparedness drama” (Her Bitter Cup;“‘‘If My Country Should Call,’ Red Feather Masterpiece”). I have discovered no evidencethat catches Universal in the act of interpreting Madison’s film as similar to Weber’ssuccess—publicity more clearly focused on developing Madison’s own star persona. Park’spromotion to Weber’s chair at Bluebird immediately after If My Country Should Call mightsuggest that the film was seen as similar in approach, but I cannot confirm that hunch. Myevidence does suggest that “problem play” marked an apt, if lame, attempt to identify andmarket a mode of address with which a number of women filmmakers experimented. Lame,in that Universal manifestly failed to articulate a reading position that would encompassthe range of experimentation, that would identify the sorts of similarities critics now findnoteworthy when confronted with Madison’s, Park’s, and Weber’s films.

There are good reasons why Universal interpreted its products differently, groupingonly certain titles into a proto-genre that never really coalesced. Both the mode of addressI have been describing and the subject matter to which it lent itself straddled contradictoryimperatives. Entertainment value seemed opposed to artistic elevation; feminine empathygainsaid professional neutrality. Logical parsimony, one might well suggest, impelledUniversal toward a tidy theory in which the opposition of female to male made theopposition of empathy and disinterestedness correspond to the distinction between a film’s

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“heart interest” and the professional authority necessary to orchestrate its story. The mythiccharacter of such a logic should be self-evident. If this indeed became Universal’s myth,then the types of films I have been discussing here both contributed to the formation ofthat myth and indicate that it might have been otherwise. Just as Universal might havelogically interpreted its serials in ways that would have encouraged a different division oflabor, so too might it have made different sense of Weber’s mode of address by seeing itscommonality with the successful efforts of other women directors. Such an interpretationwould not have escaped the double-bind this narrative voice entails, but it might well haveinstitutionalized a more stable if marginal position for women directors.

Universal found one at least other way of connecting women filmmakers with particulartypes of films that Mahar does not mention. It involved, perhaps predictably, children. In1916–17, Lule Warrenton directed a series of 3 or 4 short children’s films (of which onesurvives) followed by another set, staring Zoe Rae, directed by Elsie Jane Wilson. Thereare ten or so 1917 titles that credit Ruth Stonehouse with directing herself in the role ofMary Ann, a willful and independent orphan waif. This production cycle provides furtherevidence that interpretations of what women could do behind the camera were both enabledand limited by their portrayals in front of it, in this case as mothers and, perhaps, tomboys.

In at least one case, Universal may have needed no explanation for a woman’s authorityother her professional competence. It credited Ruth Ann Baldwin with directing ten films,mostly shorts, released from early March to mid-October, 1917. The films received positivereviews but not the attention accorded Park’s or Weber’s. They were not marketed as“Baldwin” films, and with one or two exceptions, publicity did not emphasize the director’sfemininity. The reviews do emphasize the competent handling of familiar scenarios and theintroduction of unusual plot twists.18 It only makes sense that Baldwin would be skilled inarea of plot construction: she had been a San Diego newspaper writer and then a scenariowriter at Universal since late 1913. If Ruth Ann Baldwin wound up in the director’s chairsimply by doing a great job of telling a story, however, Universal proved unable to accountthat a success and repeat it. In the decade that followed, scenario writing remained a jobfor women but became increasingly distinct from the work of directing.

In sum, Universal faced the problem of finding analogies suitable for explaining awoman’s authority as director (with all this meant for the management of time, money,property, and people) and doing so in terms of the social authority of women—whetheras empathetic moral paragons, mothers, or as men’s partners in detection or crime. Wheresuch an analogy could be found and marketed, it seems that Universal was willing toexperiment. Crucially, Universal needed no explanation for why individual men shouldhave authority as men. In the movies, after all, the problems of masculine authority areframed quite differently—the issue is rarely what makes this man as good as a woman, andalmost always what makes him more competent than the next guy.

Insofar as some version of the opposition male-female tends to organize the syntaxof most Hollywood films, it is not surprising that producers would try to map the traitsassociated with that opposition onto their personnel. This is not to suggest that a gendereddivision of labor developed via a simplistic correspondence of on- and off-screen roles.Universal well knew that Grace Cunard was not a female Robin Hood. But surely it is notfarfetched to suggest that an uncertainty about what “man” and “woman” would be and

18For instance, a capsule review of Baldwin’s penultimate film, The Storm Woman reads: “Athree-reel subject of a tragical [sic] life, featuring Clair McDowell. This is unusual in theme, andpresented artistically. The Italian scenes are picturesque and attractive, and the manner of unfoldingthe story is novel and pleasing. The tragedy is mitigated by an unexpected humorous ending.” MovingPicture World 6 Oct. 1917.

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mean on screen went hand in hand with an uncertainly about what work they would dooff screen. Such uncertainty is probably constitutive of modern personhood; it’s certainlyconstitutive of genre. The case of the Universal women shows with particular clarity that theneed for a cogent institutional theory of gender difference confirmed and empowered genericinterpretation as an administrative mechanism. Universal tried different ways of associatingwoman directors with particular types of films, and it also gave them opportunities to directwithout particularly marketing their films as womanly products. In the limited success ofthe first strategy and the failure of the second, we may discover Universal’s contribution tothe product and production conventions that made directing men’s work.

Rather than considering the studio to be an economic container in which filmmakerslabor to make films for viewers, the approach I have sketched and applied here would thinkof films as the material means through which the institution works out its basic assumptionsand turns them into habitual practices. Genre analysis helps to explain this process, providedwe understand that, in their efforts to read and reproduce successes, filmmakers addressfilms to themselves as much as to their paying customers. Conducted accordingly, thestudio history describes the multifarious experiments and contingent interpretations thatdefine relationships between product and production as habitual, desirable, or in need ofrevision.

Works Cited

Altman, Rick, and British Film Institute. Film/Genre. London: BFI Publishing, 1999.Armatage, Kay. The Girl from God’s Country: Nell Shipman and the Silent Cinema. Toronto:

University of Toronto Press, 2003.“Author of ‘The Broken Coin.’” Moving Picture Word 12 Jun. 1915: 1753.Balides, Constance. “Making Ends Meet: ‘Welfare Films’ and the Politics of Consumption During

the Progressive Era.“ A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema. Eds. Jennifer M. Bean and DianeNegra. Durham: Duke UP, 2002: 166–94.

Beauchamp, Cari. Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of EarlyHollywood. New York: Scribner, 1997.

Bielby, William T, and Denise, D Bielby. “Cumulative Versus Continuous Disadvantage in anUnstructured Labor Market: Gender Differences in the Careers of Television Writers.” Workand Occupations 19.4 (1992): 366–86.

——. “Women and Men in Film: Gender Inequality among Writers in a Culture Industry.” Genderand Society 10.3 (1996): 248–71.

Bordwell, David, Kristin, Thompson, and Janet, Staiger. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: FilmStyle and Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

Bowser, Eileen. The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915. Berkeley: University of California Press,1990.

Braff, Richard E. The Universal Silents: A Filmography of the Universal Motion PictureManufacturing Company, 1912–1929. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1999.

Brownlow, Kevin. Behind the Mask of Innocence. New York: Knopf/Random House, 1990.Cott, Nancy. The Grounding of Modern Feminism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.DiMaggio, Paul. “Market Structure, the Creative Process, and Popular Culture: Toward an

Organizational Reinterpretation of Mass Culture Theory.” Journal of Popular Culture 11 (1977):433–51.

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——. DGA Annual Report on Women and Minority Hiring Reveals Bleak Industry Record for 1999.Jan. 2001. Available: http://www.dga.org/index2.php3.

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Grieveson, Lee. Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early-Twentieth-Century America.Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

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10–11.Koszarski, Richard. The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915–1928. Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1990.Lucille Love. Advertisement. Moving Picture World 30 May 1914: 1201.“Lucille Love Founded on Fact.” Universal Weekly 16 May 1914: 4–5.Mahar, Karen. Engendering the Studio: Women Filmmakers and the Rise of Hollywood. Forthcoming:

Johns Hopkins University Press.The Master Key. Advertisement. Moving Picture World 14 Nov. 1914: 870–71.McElravy, Robert C. Rev. of The Amazing Wife. Review. Moving Picture World 15 Mar. 1919: 1528.McMahan, Alison. Alice Guy Blache: Lost Visionary of the Cinema. Women Make Cinema. New

York: Continuum, 2002.The Model’s Confession. Synopsis. Moving Picture World 8 Jun. 1918: 1483.Rev. of The Mysterious Leopard Lady. Moving Picture World 28 Mar. 1914: 1682.Neale, Stephen. Genre and Hollywood. New York: Routledge, 2000.Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.Parchesky, Jennifer. Lois Weber’s the Blot: Rewriting Melodrama, Reproducing the Middle Class

Cinema Journal 39.1 (1999): 23–53.Park, Ida May. “The Motion-Picture Director.”. Careers for Women. Ed. Catherine, Filene. Boston:

Houghton Mifflin Company, 1920: 335–37.Parker, Alison M. “Mothering the Movies: Women Reformers and Popular Culture.”. Movie

Censorship and American Culture. Ed. Francis G., Couvares. Washington, D.C.: SmithsonianInstitution Press, 1996: 73–96.

The Price of a Good Time. Advertisement. Universal Weekly 8 Dec. 1917: 47.Riley, Denise. “Am I That Name?”: Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History. Language,

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Princeton University Press, 1998.“Saving the Family Name–Bluebird.” Universal Weekly 3.8 (1916): 16–17, 31.Schatz, Thomas. The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era. New York:

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University Press, 2001.Slide, Anthony. Early Women Directors. South Brunswick, N.J.: A. S. Barnes, 1977.Sloan, Kay. “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle: An Introduction.” Film History 1.4 (1987): 341–66.——. The Loud Silents: Origins of the Social Problem Film. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,

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Studio History Revisited: The Case of the Universal Women

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Transcript of Studio History Revisited: The Case of the Universal Women