Hollywood Career Research Articles

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

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.

Jester Hairston’s Film Music Career

This article aims to introduce the film music community to the life and career of Jester Hairston (1901–2000)—a multitalented Black entertainer who composed, arranged, and conducted choral ensembles for notable film composers throughout the mid-twentieth century. Hairston’s seven-decade Hollywood career began in 1936 as the assistant conductor of the Hall Johnson Choir. Following his tenure with the ensemble, Hairston worked extensively with composer Dimitri Tiomkin for over twenty years. Hairston’s most significant contribution to film music occurred in 1944 when he established the first integrated choir in Hollywood. Later in life, Hairston found success as an actor, appearing in film and television shows such as The Alamo (1960) and Amen (1986–1991), earning him a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. As an entertainer Hairston garnered 114 film and television credits (68 as a musician) and published 56 choral works.

‘Budapest’s Gift to the Movies’: Franziska Gaal’s Film Career in 1930s Europe and Hollywood

Abstract Hungarian-born actress Franziska (or Franciska) Gaal was an interwar star whose film career spanned different countries and continents. Contemporary trade press and newspaper articles reveal her international fame during the 1930s, and trace her attempts to conquer Hollywood, where the studio system dictated that she lose weight and dye her hair. As she was unable to continue her career in Europe due to her Jewish heritage, this article examines her trajectory in Europe and the United States in the context of exile. It also interrogates how one of Europe’s top stars for an entire decade could fade from public memory and drift into oblivion, especially in the German-speaking countries where she was once so successful.

Frances Kavanaugh and B Westerns’ Women Writers

Frances Kavanaugh’s story paints a different picture of 1940s Hollywood screenwriting than most academic histories. Fondly remembered as the ‘Cowgirl of the Typewriter’ by fans and aficionados of the American West, Kavanaugh wrote around thirty B Westerns for companies like Monogram and Producers Releasing Corporation. While more traditional scholarly studies will glance over her contributions, evidence of Kavanaugh’s Hollywood career can be found in the Writers Guild of America (WGA)’s records, multiple museums’ collections, periodicals and trades, as well as the recollections of her family and those who knew her. Through these sources popular histories provide us with a version of the American film past that helps us more productively imagine women’s work therein.

Keanu’s late style: the ubiquitous art of short-form celebrity

ABSTRACT Over the course of his Hollywood career, Keanu Reeves’ stardom has elicited contradictory appraisals. A well-documented history of personal struggle has facilitated a collective engagement with the lived reality of the star, fostering the public construction of an emotional interiority. Yet, these efforts at authentication seem to be obstructed by the enigmatic star’s commitment to a form of privacy that eschews the conventions of celebrity access . Following a discussion of the longstanding contradictions around his celebrity subjectivity, this article focuses on transformations in Reeves’ persona over the past decade. Since 2010ʹs ‘Sad Keanu’ meme, the star’s popularity has exploded into ubiquity, creating new fantasies of communicative disclosure. I unpack this late career ubiquity by focusing on the figurations of his celebrity identity across the ‘short form ephemera’ of memes, selfies, and film cameos. This article shows how these ephemera create new mediations of celebrity proximity, including his cameo in the romantic comedy Always Be My Maybe, where the articulation of Keanu’s Asian heritage marked an important intervention into the public life of the star. Working across celebrity studies paradigms including reluctance and confession, this article traces an emerging short-form media ecology unfolding serially across new arrangements of celebrity interaction.

Empire's Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper by Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez

Reviewed by: Empire's Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper by Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez Gina Benavidez Gonzalez, Vernadette Vicuña. Empire's Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. In Empire's Mistress, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez weaves together the beautiful narrative of a mixed-race woman's struggle to define herself against the waves of empire in the early twentieth century. From her early vaudeville stage days in the Philippines to a fleeting romance with General Douglas MacArthur, the life of Isabel Rosario Cooper has typically been identified as one of tragic heartbreak and defined only by her relationship with MacArthur. However, in her later life she also remarried, pursued acting in the United States, and tried to forge her own path. Born to an American father and a Filipina mother, Cooper was not only a product of empire but also a participant in its currents as she performed onstage for the cosmopolitan audience of twentieth-century Manila before trying to launch a Hollywood career in Los Angeles. Facing failure after failure, from romances to job prospects, Cooper's name faded away from the spotlight until she killed herself, with speculation that she died of a broken heart. Gonzalez successfully brings Cooper's life back to the foreground, relying on trace archival documents to tell her story independently of MacArthur, with very little mention of their story aside from the relevant historical details. The book includes many of these documents, including birth certificates, death certificates, and newspaper articles along with images and film stills of Cooper herself. The fragments of the archival puzzle that Gonzalez uses to piece together Cooper's life brings a microhistorical approach to the work, adding to the [End Page 239] engagement of the reader and depth of the piece. Gonzalez, who researches transnational cultural studies, feminist theory, and postcolonial studies, among other specialties at the University of Hawai'i, demonstrates her expertise in the intersections of gender, tourism, and militarism between Asia and the Pacific. She follows a mostly chronological order, organizing the chapters by different stages of Cooper's life. Gonzalez situates her story within the imperial twentieth century, after Spain's loss of the Philippines in 1898 and during the US occupation through World War II. She begins with the story of Cooper and MacArthur "in order to move him out of the way," while tracing their five-year relationship from Manila to Washington, DC, in the 1930s (15). She then takes the narrative back to the early twentieth century, as American Isaac Cooper meets and marries Cooper's mother. Already a product of empire, their daughter Isabel is born in Maricopa, Arizona, but moves back to colonial Manila, "a city being made comfortable for family-friendly imperialism," as her mother remarries (55). In Manila, young Cooper begins a stage career, eventually headlining as "Dimples" in her teen years at a vaudeville club. She makes a name for herself as the first Filipina to kiss onscreen, acting in three small movies by the time she meets MacArthur. After their romance ends, Cooper remains in Washington and remarries, but does not disappear into obscurity as she eventually moves to Los Angeles to pursue acting once again. The book's strength lies in the final chapters, when Gonzalez analyzes the minuscule roles Cooper is hired to play in postwar Hollywood. Cast most typically as an extra and a woman of Asian descent, Cooper plays a Siamese wife, a Chinese secretary, a Native American woman, and a variety of war nurses—all roles haunted by the real-life echoes of empire and, in some cases, MacArthur himself. Cooper even plays roles in movies that take place in the Pacific Theater during World War II, following MacArthur's historical moves. As Gonzalez notes, for Cooper "the constant and swift transformation of real-time events into cinematic material blurs the line between fact and fiction and illuminates the strange intimacies at the heart of imperial war" (121). A potential drawback for some readers lies in the writing structure of the book, as it departs from a traditional historical monologue and includes a higher degree of first-person narrative along with a variety of...

Composing Himself

The beginning of Steiner’s Hollywood career is typically overlooked in studies of the composer, in part because scrutiny of his work hinges on film scores attached to celebrated films. This article argues that Steiner’s initial years are vital in understanding how a former Broadway music director exploited musical opportunities in Hollywood to develop a new career profile grounded in composition. Through his eclectic labors at RKO Radio Pictures and his connections with commentators in the trade press, Steiner formed a new and necessary position that extended beyond the arranging of numbers for musicals to the composition of incidental music for films of various genres.

Conchita Montenegro and the Spanish press: from national pride to nationalist melodrama

ABSTRACT The Spanish press reported on Conchita Montenegro, a Spanish actress who moved to Hollywood in the early 1930s, with ambiguous and contradictory messages. On the one hand, her stint in Tinseltown was celebrated as a national triumph: a young Spanish woman had managed to seduce and conquer the Hollywood film industry. On the other hand, the fact that in Hollywood she played female archetypes at odds with the conservative morality of Catholic Spain was silenced. Decades later, after her death, the Spanish press has restored Conchita Montenegro’s fame, this time through a sensationalist, melodramatic story similar to the way Hollywood stars are promoted. Based on a comparative study between journalistic sources from both periods, this article demonstrates that the way Montenegro was treated as a film star in the press reflects the same nationalist fervour, even though the focus of her patriotic exemplariness in the 1930s gave way to a melodramatic vision of her Hollywood career more recently.

ReFocus: The Films of Elaine May ed. by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Dean Brandum

Reviewed by: ReFocus: The Films of Elaine May ed. by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Dean Brandum Martha Shearer (bio) ReFocus: The Films of Elaine May. Edited by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Dean Brandum. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. 264 pp., ISBN 9781474440189 (pb), US $24.95. Elaine May is a notoriously elusive figure. She has had a lengthy and rich career, first in improv with her comedy partner Mike Nichols in the late 1950s and early 1960s, then later as an actor, film director, and screenwriter, with her most recent stage work winning her a Tony in 2019. Yet she has also been marginalized and demonized, especially in the wake of the spectacular commercial and critical failure of Ishtar (1986), and she is herself reclusive and oblique in her public statements. As Alexandra Heller-Nicholas notes in her introduction to this new collection of essays on May, she has been at best overlooked and at worst actively derided in scholarship on both New Hollywood and women’s filmmaking. This book, however, comes at a time of increasing public and academic attention to women filmmakers in Hollywood cinema’s auteurist 1970s, when May made three of the four feature films she directed, including film seasons at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2017 and The Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in 2018, the 2020 season of Karina Longworth’s You Must Remember This podcast on the producer, screenwriter, and production designer Polly Platt, and recent academic publications, most notably Maya Montañez Smukler’s Liberating Hollywood.1 That has also included a resurgence of interest [End Page 236] in May specifically, from “written and directed by Elaine May” t-shirts to film seasons such as Painfully Funny: The Complete Directorial Works of Elaine May, programmed by the Badlands Collective at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts in 2018. She has become, in short, something of a cinephile cult figure. Refocus: The Films of Elaine May has two broad projects: first, to understand the reasons behind and resonances of May’s prickly reputation and negative press; and second, to resituate her as, for Heller-Nicholas, “one of the twentieth century’s greatest comic writers, performers, and screenwriters” (1). The broader May revival has largely focused on the four feature films she directed: A New Leaf (1971), The Heartbreak Kid (1972), Mikey and Nicky (1976), and Ishtar (1986). This collection grants them prominence, with a chapter devoted to each individual film as well as their discussion throughout. But it also draws valuable attention to the breadth of May’s career as a performer and writer, from her early success in sketch improv with Nichols to her work as a screenwriter and script doctor and her recent return to filmmaking with her 2016 PBS documentary American Masters: Mike Nichols. The collection is structured in four sections: the first on her early career, the second on broader critical contexts (Smukler’s chapter on her career in 1970s Hollywood, Jake Wilson’s on the centrality of improvisation to her practice), the third on each of the films she directed, and the final on “Collaborations/Revelations,” with chapters addressing her performance style, her screenwriting work on Otto Preminger’s Such Good Friends (1971), and her late-career collaborations with Nichols, including her screenplays for The Birdcage (1996) and Primary Colors (1998). The chapters on her early work usefully situate Nichols and May’s improvisational work in a broader cultural context. Mark Freeman’s chapter, for example, foregrounds the relationship between their Method training (Nichols having studied with Lee Strasberg and May with Stanislavsky acolyte Maria Ouspenskaya) and improv practice. In one of the collection’s highlights, Wilson argues that Nichols and May turned the Method against itself, using satire to forestall self-reflection and keeping the audience at arm’s length, and teases out the significance of improvisation for May’s craft as both a performer and a director. May’s combination of an interest in improvisation with critical distance extends to her public persona. May rarely grants interviews, and Wilson suggests that she has treated the ones she has given as yet another improvisational game. Yet it is not just her own personal style...

‘One woman’s failure affects every woman’s chances’: stereotyping impossible women directors in 1970s Hollywood

ABSTRACT In the 1970s, after decades of exclusion from most creative and technical roles in the American film industry, women worked to break down barriers to their employment through fighting for equity and representation in industry guilds, broadening their access to education and training, and through establishing women-focused film festivals and independent production companies. Five women—Elaine May, Joan Darling, Jane Wagner, Lina Wertmüller, and Joan Micklin Silver—directed films for major Hollywood studios during the decade. Yet each woman experienced gender discrimination that circumscribed her commercial feature film output and Hollywood career. This article argues that even as women made inroads into filmmaking in the 1970s, their progress as directors in Hollywood was impeded by institutionalised and renewed beliefs that women could not manage the financial, logistical, technical, and creative complexities of filmmaking. 1970s Hollywood discourse and practice stereotyped women directors as incompetent and impossible with enduring consequences for women filmmakers.

French after all: the Hollywood career of Marion Cotillard

ABSTRACT This article attempts to shed light on the aspects of the persona which enabled Marion Cotillard to have a long-lasting career in Hollywood where so many other French stars have failed, by analysing her most important roles, as well as her image in the English-speaking press. Even if her Americanisation distinguished her from her fellow countrywomen like Audrey Tautou or Juliette Binoche, Cotillard nonetheless never lost her Frenchness, which played just as important a role in her Hollywood success. By comparing Cotillard to other female French stars such as Simone Signoret, Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche or Audrey Tautou, I show how she followed a tradition of representations of French women that enabled her to distinguish herself from other Hollywood stars who do not possess this ‘exoticness’, but also how she differentiated herself from her compatriots popular in the US. I also underline the complexity of her persona, which prevented being trapped in a monolithic and fixed national stereotype, and enabled her to embody an eminently singular variation on this stereotype, perfectly adapted to the American ideological context of the 2010s.

Ben Hecht's Hard-Boiled Decadence: The Flaneur as Reporter

This essay illustrates how Ben Hecht's short stories in The Little Review and the Chicago Daily News crucially expand the scope of burgeoning research into post-Wildean, American Decadence. These works (written between 1915 and 1921) have been over-shadowed by Hecht's later Hollywood career to the point where they have all-but eluded scholarly commentary. However, attention to these vignettes of sensual experience in downtown Chicago reveals that they develop Decadence in a unique direction, which fuses the backstreet Decadence of Arthur Machen and Arthur Symons with the pulp fiction published by Hecht's mentor, H. L. Mencken, in The Black Mask. The result, I argue, is that Hecht's short stories create a hard-boiled Decadence: a new form which uses Decadent language to explore the continuity of Decadent sensuality in the unlikely setting downtown Chicago, at the same time as it uses the emerging tropes of hard-boiled fiction to define the impediments to having a Decadent sensibility in such circumstances.

‘The almost perfect Anglo-Saxon type, more English than the English’: Vilma Bánky’s star image in 1920s America

The early 1920s witnessed a spike of interest in the import of European stars to Hollywood, as the film studios hired talent scouts to keep a constant watch on successful stage and film actors on the continent. Vilma Bánky’s Hollywood career began when she was signed to Samuel Goldwyn’s film studio in 1925. This paper analyses the characteristics of Bánky’s star image, particularly in relation to her conspicuously white features and the story of her discovery, which successfully located her within the Cinderella narrative. To the movie going public, Bánky achieved stardom through being discovered by a film producer rather than through conscious efforts, thus, her story was encoded as a patriarchal text that denied her any form of agency. Bánky’s star publicity suggested she incarnated the highest ideals of whiteness; her gentle way of being and feminine charm was a natural extension of her physical attributes. Fan magazines propagated the concept of perfect white womanhood by emphasising tranquillity, elegance and grace as characteristics inherent to her persona. ‘Miss Banky’s charm is a subtle, winsome appeal which one associates inevitably with the truly feminine’, declared one columnist writing for Picture Play. The fan discourse also showed Bánky as an eager subject of Americanisation, as an actress who owed her ‘lucky break’ not only to her producer, but an individual in debt to transformative power of America at large.

Dalton Trumbo: Blacklisted Hollywood RadicalLarryCeplair and ChristopherTrumbo. University Press of Kentucky, 2015.

Dalton Trumbo: Blacklisted Hollywood Radical Larry Ceplair and Christopher Trumbo. University Press of Kentucky, 2015.The fate of famed screenwriter Dalton Trumbo and the other members of the Hollywood Ten has been a significant part of Hollywood lore for over a half century. It is a story that Hollywood loves to tell and has often told. Woody Allen gave us The Front in 1968, which, as its title implies, deals with how Trumbo and other writers wrote screenplays under pseudonyms. Irwin Winkler wrote and directed Guilt by Suspicion in 1991, starring Robert DeNiro. We are now in the midst of a major Trumbo and Hollywood Ten revival, which started with the 2015 filming of Trumbo, based on Bruce Cook's 1977 biography. We have also had a hilarious contrarian send-up of Hollywood Communists in the Coen Brothers' film, Hail, Caesar! (2016).The most significant work in this recent revival is the massive (676 pages) Larry Ceplair/Christopher Trumbo biography of Christopher's father, Dalton Trumbo: Blacklisted Hollywood Radical. Just as Tony Hiss spent much of his life trying to vindicate his father, Alger Hiss, Christopher Trumbo spent much of his trying to vindicate his father. Unfortunately, Christopher died before his major product could be completed. Knowing that he would not live to finish the book, Christopher asked Lawrence Ceplair to complete the project, which turned out to be a good choice. Ceplair is a good enough writer. He knows the historical material well, as we can see in his 2003 book, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the FilmCommunity, 1930-60. Ceplair's most important attribute, from Christopher's point of view, is that he is fully in tune ideologically with both Trumbos.That last point suggests also the greatest weakness of the book. The promotional materials that accompany the book give us the standard line on Trumbo, that he is remembered as one of the Hollywood Ten who opposed the House Un-American Activities Committee. Refusing to answer questions about his prior involvement with the Communist Party, Trumbo sacrificed a successful career in Hollywood to stand up for his rights and defend political freedom. The most obvious thing amiss about this statement is that Trumbo was not interested in political freedom (except for himself and his friends). As a Marxist, he saw American freedom representing no more than bourgeois capitalism stifling the poor and underprivileged. It is hard to conceal-and Ceplair does not really try- that Trumbo was a thoroughgoing Stalinist through the 1940s and early 1950s. With every twist and turn in party policy, Trumbo followed the party line, including the momentous (and gut-wrenching for many American Communists) change following the HitlerStalin Pact of 1939. It is an indicator of how delusional Trumbo could be in his political thinking that he would refer to Americans for Democratic Action (an anti-Communist organization formed by such notable liberals as Eleanor Roosevelt, Arthur M. …

‘Ah, love! It’s not for me!’ Off-screen romance and Pola Negri’s star persona

ABSTRACTThe Polish actor Pola Negri embarked on her American film career in 1922, after signing a lucrative contract with Famous-Players Lasky. She was promoted as a fiery, European woman of temperament and ‘a wild cat … who doesn’t calculate’. Hollywood star discourse paid particular attention to romantic alliances between Negri and a number of successful screen actors; in generating this type of publicity, the studio ensured its chief star was portrayed as a passionate, continental diva. Yet the strategy proved to be a double-edged sword. First of all, the highly publicised, brief relationships with non-American men suggested a strong, active sexuality and unwillingness to settle down. Secondly, Negri’s public disclosure of grief after the death of her fiancé Rudolph Valentino violated the more reserved American norms of mourning, attracting criticism. Her marriage to Prince Serge Mdivani shortly after Valentino’s death caused outrage and reinforced her position as a star placed on the margins of the main current of American society. Fan magazines such as Photoplay ascribed Negri with the fixed, static persona of an Old-World diva, resistant to all attempts at Americanisation. As a result, Negri came to symbolise the most dreaded aspects of modernity in the person of the foreign woman, which effectively impeded the advancement of her Hollywood career.

Summerlost by A. Condie

Condie, Ally. 2016. Summerlost. New York: Dutton Children’s Books. Print.Cedar’s Mother has brought Cedar and her brother to Iron Creek, her hometown, for the summer. They have bought a house that her mother intends to rent over the rest of the year and keep it for them as a summer home. For Cedar, this is not just any ordinary summer vacation. Only a year ago, her father and brother Ben were killed in a car accident with a drunk driver. Haunted by memories of a father and brother no longer with them, the family is struggling to move forward, each of them dealing with the changes and the grief. Shortly after they arrive, Cedar finds a friend in Leo, a boy her age who is working at the local Shakespeare festival. Through Leo, she manages to get a job at the festival as well. She also learns about the legendary Lisette Chamberlain, a local girl who got her start in the festival, and later moved on to a career in Hollywood. As with many cases of stardom, Lisette had several romances and met a tragic end, when she was found dead in a local hotel. Cedar is fascinated by Chamberlain’s story, and she and Leo concoct a plan to offer private “Lisette” tours for festivalgoers, for extra money. Hiding their tours from festival officials and their parents prove difficult and then Cedar stumbles across a detail that might shed light on the mystery of Chamberlain’s death.Summerlost is a surprisingly layered story about a young girl’s formative summer. Intermixed between the sleuth work of Cedar and Leo, is the struggle of a family coming to terms with an immeasurable loss. Cedar must not only manage her own feelings of loss and confusion, but she is growing old enough to see her mother’s and brother’s struggles as well. The friendship between Leo and Cedar is quite wonderful, platonic and sincere. I will admit the Lisette Chamberlain mystery, while compelling in the beginning, became a bit tedious and felt anticlimactic in the end. Nevertheless, the story is touching mix of daydreams and hard truths. This story will appeal to both young and old. The young will see themselves in Cedar as they are now and adults will be taken back to their own childhoods, to relive their own bittersweet summers.Recommended: 3 out of 4 starsReviewer: Hanne PearceHanne Pearce has worked at the University of Alberta Libraries since 2004. Aside from being an avid reader, she has continuing interests in writing, photography, graphic design and knitting.

Book Review: <i>J. M. Coetzee: Two Screenplays</i>

J. M. Coetzee, arguably one of the finest writers working in English, has not always had encouraging things to say about the business of screenwriting. Thus, in an essay on the life of William Faulkner, Coetzee remarks on the financial burdens - chief among them the burden of having to support an extended family circle, swollen by any number of hangers-on - that led to squander his literary talents, first by writing short stories for popular magazines, and then, between 1932 and 1945, by writing screenplays for Hollywood. Some of the short stories could still be salvaged and reworked into novels, but that the years spent writing film scripts were artistically waste of time there is, for Coetzee, doubt. We learn that had no gift for putting together snappy dialogue and that nothing he wrote for the movies proved worth rescuing (William Faulkner 195). By far the most alarming aspect of Faulkner's Hollywood career, however, is the possibility that writing films could have had a bad effect on his prose (195).

The man that got away: the life and songs of Harold Arlen

The Man That Got Away: The Life and Songs of Harold Arlen. By Walter Rimler Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. 209pp. $29.95 How strange that, for some, Harold Arlen isn't a known name: a composer of mid-century popular music who deserved the celebrity of George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Harry Warren, Richard Rogers, Cole Porter, and so many others! For others, his music is one of the foundations of the Great American Songbook. These two opposing worlds are bridged in Walter Rimler's fascinating new biography. From the introduction, the book takes a approach to Arlen's life (Rimler calls it Arlen's personal story), especially regarding Arlen's alcoholism and his wife Anya's behavioral issues. Arlen friend and biographer Edward Jablonski's earlier opus, Harold Arlen: with the Blues (Doubleday, 1961), written during Arlen's lifetime, did not touch on such issues, although his second work, Harold Arlen: Rhythm, Rainbows & Blues (Northeastern University Press, 1996), did. This intimacy creates a rounded picture of the artist, whose work is woven into the fabric of his life. A dispassionate overview of Arlen's life and career, this primer has the necessary distance from its subject to give the twenty-first-century reader and music lover the information needed to understand this most essential composer. Shy by nature, bold by craft, Arlen had a career that began in the Cotton Club and went beyond the era of the Beatles. Such longevity belies the fact that Arlen was a musical laborer, ever searching for inspiration, which did not always come easily. Not finding any ideas for the music for Judy Garland's ballad in The Wizard of Oz, Arlen and Anya drove to the Grauman's Chinese Theatre for distraction, and along the way the melody for Over the Rainbow came to him out of the blue, at which time they pulled over and he jotted it down. For Arlen, inspiration was divine. Like Peter Shaffer's Mozart, Arlen's music pre-existed and he was the scribe. Son of a cantor, Arlen was also the blackest of the great American melodists. His first success, the 1929 Get Happy (lyrics by Ted Koehler), is a feel-good rouser that could have been invented by no one but Arlen. He next contributed the music to a good number of now-standards that were first featured at the Cotton Club, among which were Stormy Weather (1933, made famous by Ethel Waters), Long As I Live (1934, as sung by Lena Horne), and Ill Wind (1934, as sung by Adelaide Hall). His Hollywood career included many a film that is today forgotten, but those years produced a wealth of songs that are today considered standards. His Broadway notables included such musicals as You Said It (1931), Life Begins at 8:40 (1934), Hooray for What! (1937), Bloomer Girl (1944), St. Louis Woman (1946), House of Flowers (1954), Jamaica (1957), and Saratoga (1959). Like the Gershwin brothers, his list of song classics and standouts in Hollywood and New York is long and outstanding, from 1932's Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea to 1976's Looks Like the End of a Beautiful Friendship. In an October 29, 2015, posting to the Songbirds Yahoo! group (https://groups.yahoo. com/neo/groups/songbirds/info), author Walter Rimler stated: The two Jablonski biographies of Harold Arlen will always be essential reading for anyone who wants to learn about this great composer. But it seemed to me a good idea that he have more than one biographer, and that the time to write a new one was now because it's still possible to interview people who knew Arlen. I was able to speak at length to his sister-in-law, Rita Arlen, who explained internal family dynamics and showed me letters to Arlen, including revealing ones from Cantor Samuel Arluck (his father) and--surprisingly--Paul McCartney. …

Theo Bikel (1924–2015)

Theodore Meir “Theo” Bikel was a consummate performer and actor, as well as political activist. Born in Vienna, he fled with his family to Palestine in 1938, where he became an actor in Tel Aviv; he moved to London following the war, where he continued as an actor and also budding folk performer. He learned folk songs while involved with Alan Lomax and the American expatriate leftwing community; he appeared on Lomax’s BBC television series Song Hunter. One British police report noted in early 1954, while keeping watch on both Lomax and Ives: “It has recently been learnt that Burl IVES, the well-known broadcaster of hill-billy music, was first given his chance to broadcast on the American radio by LOMAX who also assisted Josh WHITE another American singer to gain public approval.” The Red Scare was alive and well in Great Britain, although much more muted that in the United States. Bikel moved that year to the United States and quickly plunged into the worlds of Broadway theater and commercial folk music. His New York apartment quickly became a gathering spot for folk musicians, including the Clancy Brothers and Cynthia Gooding. For the rest of his life Bikel juggled his acting and singing careers, with great success in both, while always continuing his progressive politics. His Hollywood career began in 1951 with John Houston’s The African Queen, with Bikel playing a World War I German naval officer, soon followed by Moulin Rouge, The Pride and the Passion, The Enemy Below, The Defiant Ones, and My Fair Lady, to name only a few. On Broadway he began with Tonight in Samarkand, then had a string of hits, including The Sound of Music, for which Rodgers and Hammerstein included “Edelweiss” just for him; he appeared as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof for at least 2,000 performances beginning in 1967. Meanwhile, he appeared in various television productions. He managed to squeeze into this busy schedule dozens of folk-music albums, beginning with An Actor’s Holiday, Folk Songs of Israel, and a Young Man and a Maid with Cynthia Gooding, all for Elektra in 1956. Two years later Songs of a Russian Gypsy appeared, then many more albums for Jac Holzman’s label during the following decade. With his facility for languages, Bikel’s albums added to the numerous international recordings of the 1950s, which deftly countered the Cold War’s suspicion of foreigners. As if his acting and performing careers were not enough, in 1956 Bikel opened two pioneering folk venues in Los Angeles with Herb Cohen. The first, the Unicorn, seating fewer than 100, launched the career of the folk duo Bud and Travis. Soon thereafter Bikel and Cohen opened Cosmo Alley, behind the Ivar Theater in Hollywood, which seated 150 and served beer and wine, and where Maya Angelou

Valentino’s Lesbianism: Stardom, Spectatorship, and Sexuality in 1920s Hollywood Cinema

Valentino’s Lesbianism: Stardom, Spectatorship, and Sexuality in 1920s Hollywood Cinema Susan Potter (bio) The demand for the recognition of queer history as a viable practice is charged with a long history of similar claims for the viability of certain “hard to believe” modes of existence and desire. —Heather Love, Feeling Backward At first sight, this essay’s title might seem to invoke a fantasy in the sense of a whimsical historical fiction or even an unconscious critical wish—possibilities that haunt much queer history and historiography—since the 1920s matinée idol Rudolph Valentino is most commonly identified not with lesbianism but with a hyperbolical heterosexuality. The most well-known Orientalist romances that book-end his brief but volatile Hollywood career—The Sheik (George Melford, US, 1921) and The Son of the Sheik (George Fitzmaurice, US, 1926)—are often considered key film texts that first establish and then systematically sustain the male actor as heterosexual erotic spectacle. This reading of Valentino’s stardom is frequently buttressed by evidence of his extraordinary capacity to mobilize an audience seemingly dominated by women, a phenomenon of central interest to feminist film scholars concerned with the historical and gendered dimensions of cinema spectatorship.1 Miriam Hansen summarizes concisely the gendered aspects of Valentino’s stardom and spectatorship and [End Page 271] its significance in the history of Hollywood cinema: “Never before was the discourse on fan behavior so strongly marked by the terms of sexual difference, and never again was spectatorship so explicitly linked to the discourse on female desire.”2 The over-determined quality of those discourses that Hansen draws attention to indicates the extent to which Valentino’s disparate star image—both dominant and submissive screen lover, hyper-masculine and androgynous erotic spectacle, alternately sadistic and masochistic romantic lead—disturbed normative, predominantly white, middle-class conceptualizations and ideals of sexual difference and desire. While as a potent fantasy figure Valentino often confounded certain structural differences organizing dominant cross-gendered sexual culture, his heterogeneous image also made other forms of desire and erotic identification visually legible. Kenneth Anger, author of the now classic camp text Hollywood Babylon, was perhaps the first to reclaim Valentino as gay icon.3 Recently, Anger’s suggestive, fan-based perspective has been more explicitly historicized by Mark Lynn Anderson, who recuperates for Valentino spectatorship the fairies and queer men of urban same-sex cultures.4 But the multifaceted nature of Valentino’s stardom is not just a matter of acknowledging the historical context of his erotic appeal for male audiences and its difference from present cultural architectures of homosexuality. As I argue in this essay, Valentino’s stardom also generated a specific queer appeal for his female audiences, one that permitted the recognition not only of desire between women but also of an interest in same-sex eroticism that could be shared by both women and men, manifested as a sexual identity held in common. One of the more productive interventions in recent film studies scholarship that has enabled thinking about the possibility of such historical spectatorships has been the recourse to fantasy.5 As Patricia White notes in her study Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability, fantasy “allows us to detach processes of identification and desire—which are both involved but which are not collapsed—from an assumed correspondence between spectator and like-gendered character, an ideology of sexual difference governed by a heterosexual teleology even more relentless than that of Hollywood.”6 By loosening the determinative hold of what have tended to be totalizing and heteronormative accounts of identification, sexual desire, and subject formation, fantasy theory is able to preserve a sense of contingency, variability, and contradiction in the formation of modern sexual subjectivities. Nevertheless, fantasy theory, both generally and in relation to what I’m calling the lesbian dimension of Valentino’s 1920s spectatorship, does not authorize an open-ended, playful field of desire and identity formation.7 As Brett Farmer points out in relation to his theorization of gay male spectatorship, any cinematic fantasmatic is “produced in and by the determinate relations of culture and history.”8 [End Page 272] The responsiveness of fantasy theory to specific cultural and historical contexts can...