<i>Universal Women: Filmmaking and Institutional Change in Early Hollywood</i> (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Universal Women: Filmmaking and Institutional Change in Early Hollywood Luci Marzola (bio) Universal Women: Filmmaking and Institutional Change in Early Hollywood; BY Mark Garrett Cooper ; University of Illinois Press, 2010 Although historical works going back as far as Anthony Slide's Early Women Directors 1 have brought our attention to prominent women directors in the 1910s, few, if any, have attempted to identify the causes both of their emergence and of their sudden disappearance through an institutional analysis. Mark Garrett Cooper does just that in his new addition to the Women and Film History International Series, Universal Women. In tracing the institutional changes at Universal Studios (by far the greatest employer of women directors), both as an organization and as a film producer, Cooper highlights the great complexity of the factors that contributed to decisions about who would and would not make films. In doing so, Cooper also highlights how much more work needs to be done in this area of film history. Between 1912 and 1919, Universal credited eleven women with directing or codirecting close to two hundred films, a record unmatched by any other studio at that time or since. Unfortunately, as Cooper himself points out, he is working with a paucity of institutional records that would explain why particular decisions that would either benefit or repress women directors were made. Instead, Cooper works with the material to which he has access, using period newspapers, trade publications, and Universal's internal organs Universal Weekly and Moving Picture Weekly to read between the lines as to what was occurring at Universal in the 1910s as well as owing a debt to the previous work of scholars such as Shelley Stamp and Karen Mahar. Cooper looks at the structure of the institution and its production space, Universal City, in the first half of the book, before turning to the films produced by the Universal women. Cooper labels the first part of the book "Possibility," as he argues that it was the institutional structure at Universal that allowed so many women to rise to the position of director. During the 1910s, Universal focused on distribution of various brands that would dictate the genre, length, and style of the films produced. Cooper particularly focuses on the Bluebird brand, which made prestigious feature films and was home to the highest concentration of women directors. Though, surprisingly, women were much more highly represented in feature filmmaking, it was in the shorts brands where the vast majority of these women got their start. This distinction becomes crucial. As Cooper points out later in the book, it was the diminishing of the shorts brands after 1917 that dried up the pipeline that was allowing women to move into feature film production. Cooper shows how H. O. Davis, production chief from 1915 to 1917, focused on a streamlining of production time and cost. He speculates, using sociological research on gender equality in the work place, that this must have led Davis to focus on merit-based review of work. This quick production time and merit-based [End Page 113] promotion led to fluidity between the positions of director, actor, and writer. This idea is supported by the fact that half the Universal women were promoted to director under Davis's tenure, and nearly all came from the position of either actress or writer. Although the administrative areas of Universal, especially the New York offices, were traditionally gendered, on the lot, "authority depended on its public performance, personnel intermingled, and gender experimentation was encouraged" (64). One of the most interesting episodes to emerge from this period was Universal's attempt to become an incorporated city. The studio held elections in which prominent actresses won positions such as police chief and mayor, an office held by the most important director of any gender at Universal, Lois Weber. Cooper uses instances such as this to build an argument that "the studio was conceived and built as a sort of laboratory for gender experimentation" (79), an argument that is not entirely convincing. Although it is evident from Cooper's work that gender experimentation was present and even promoted at Universal City, it seems speculative, given the lack of archival...