A Little Hollywood History

"I'm going to be a star!" The declaration of many a young actress (including, perhaps, Hepburn herself), was not just wishful thinking; in the Hollywood of the 1930s it was something of a battle cry. The movie industry in the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood was a tough, unrelenting business, run by a handful of powerful studio executives and producers, able to make and break careers. Though both male and female stars profited - and suffered - in the studio system, the inner circle of power in Hollywood was an all-male club.

 

It had not always been so. In the early days of cinema women founded studios and produced, wrote and directed films in addition to acting in them. As movies caught the imagination of the country - and the world - filmmaking quickly became big business and women were pushed out of the top positions. The number of female directors dropped, studios run by women went out of business, and scripts were increasingly given to men. In 1928, 22% of the screenplays were penned by women; by 1940, it was only 10%. Some women, of course, retained their prestige, and others fought to work their way through the studio hierarchies. But it was clearly a man's industry, run with assembly-line precision.

 

Photo by Frank Marchese

While women lost power behind the camera, their presence in front of it seemed even more crucial. Vamps, femmes fatale, vixens, 'working girls,' leading ladies and poor little rich girls - packaged and marketed by the studios - kept movie house cash registers ringing. Their box office appeal was vital to the growth of large studios such as Paramount, Fox Film, Warner Brothers, RKO and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Governed with a mixture of mercilessness and loyalty by men like Adolph Zukor and Louis B. Mayer, the studio system borrowed Henry Ford's techniques of mass production. Writers and directors did not develop their own films; they were assigned to projects by the studio executives. Actors and actresses were put under seven year contracts that gave the studios almost complete control over their film careers. (The system became especially advantageous to the studios as the depression wore on, with stars agreeing to longer contracts at lower salaries.)

After the creation of the "product," the studios used sophisticated mass marketing strategies to sell it to an audience. The studios needed stars, former Columbia Pictures executive David Puttnam observed, because "they were the 'brand names' who could create a distinct identity for each film, distinguishing it from the hundreds of others jostling for an audience in the marketplace." Little was left to chance; sneak previews, polls, and other methods were used to gauge stars' performances.

 

Competition for roles was fierce. The studios usually had more bankable female stars than male ones, making the women particularly dependent on producers and directors for the best parts. When it was learned that David Selznik was going to make a film of the popular Gone with the Wind, the battles began for the chance to play Scarlett O'Hara. Though Lana Turner, Bette Davis, Paulette Goddard, Jean Arthur, Katharine Hepburn and a host of other actresses were rumored to be front-runners for the role, in the end it was British actress Vivien Leigh who played the southern heroine.

 

Ambition, business savvy and assertiveness were qualities required to become successful, but they earned many of the Golden Age actresses less than flattering labels. Some female stars, such as Barbara Stanwyck, were known as generous and easy going - and thus, "professional." Many others, however, were considered hard, ruthless, or eccentric, or, like actress-turned-director Ida Lupino, "temperamental."

 

Thousands of young women flocked to Los Angeles, eager to become stars. ("Why don't you sit on my lap when we're discussing your contract," Mayer reportedly said to a young actress, "the way the others girls do?") While so many were trying to break into the studios, some of the stars were trying to break out, or at least fight for control of their careers: Bette Davis, For instance, tried to split from Warner Brothers by fleeing to England, and Olivia De Havilland sued to gain control over her choice of roles. And Katharine Hepburn, taking the reigns of her screen comeback, purchased the rights to the Broadway smash The Philadelphia Story, so Mayer would have to negotiate with her to make the film.

--Reprinted from the Hartford Stage Company program