Neither typist nor genius: Hollywood as workplace in the John Emerson and Anita Loos how-to guides

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the 1920s screenwriting duo Anita Loos and John Emerson wrote two how-to guides that offered advice for launching a Hollywood career, How to Write Photoplays (1921) and Breaking into the Movies (1922). Rather than emphasizing genius, the guides focus on Hollywood as an egalitarian workplace where writers become professionals through training and experience. This article argues that the guides thus functioned to distinguish Loos as a professional writer, a strategic identity opposed to both the male modernist genius and the female typist. Contra readings of Loos as ambivalent to professionalism that have been based on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925), by focusing on her screenwriting career, this article argues that Loos deployed an identity as a professional writer to avoid being pigeonholed by gendered ideas about writing.