her marriage to J.P. McGowan fell apart, Helen stayed off the screen for two years. The strain of working together in remote locations and performing intense action scenes had taken their toll on the couple. Their separation was reported in the Los Angeles Times with the headline, “Helen Holmes Principal in a Domestic Smash Up!” To make matters worse, the financial company backing Signal Film Productions went bankrupt, taking their studio down with it.
Helen returned to the screen a few years later and created Helen Holmes Pictures to produce her own work. She even reunited with her estranged husband briefly, both romantically and as collaborators, but they never quite reached the success of their earlier serials.
As the 1920s wore on, the image of women changed. The modern flapper girl and the goth-like vamp were in, while the adventurous serial star was out—well, for women anyway, there were still serials starring male actors throughout the 1920s and 1930s. (And these characters inspired another decades later, in the form of Indiana Jones.) In 1936, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times noted the change for women, writing, “There are no more serial queens … the serials now prefer to let their menfolk wear the pants.”
But in her day, Helen Holmes was a hero. Along with other serial stars, Helen showed audiences what a fearless woman looked like, right at the time when women needed to be brave and fight for their rights. Even “The Duke” had a thing for her. John Wayne admitted that as a teenager, Helen Holmes was his first crush.
It’s staggering to learn that in the first three years of the Great Depression, approximately one hundred thousand jobs were lost in America each and every week. The stock market crash of 1929 had a huge impact on industries; movies were not immune, and nearly a third of all theaters shut down by 1933.
Hollywood suffered, but managed to survive by adjusting the way it made films. Feature-length sound films were costly to produce, so studios relied on banks to finance their projects. Producers had to make sure they got their investment back, and the most powerful were ambitious young men like “Boy Wonder” Irving Thalberg, who was just twenty years old when he was put in charge of production at Universal. Professor Karen Ward Mahar explains that this was when women started to disappear from Hollywood. “Banking interests came to town, and defined women as unfit to handle large numbers of people or large amounts of capital.” They preferred to deal with male executives.
In the 1930s, eight movie studios ended up with most of the power, and they produced two-thirds of all Hollywood feature films during the decade. There was the major “Big Five”, comprised of Twentieth Century Fox, MGM, Paramount Pictures, RKO, and Warner Bros, and the minor “Little Three”: Columbia Pictures, United Artists, and Universal Studios. All of these companies were run by men except United Artists, where Mary Pickford continued to work.
With this new concentration of power, the big movie studios became an oligopoly, a word I needed to look up. According to the Oxford Dictionary, it is “a state of limited competition, in which a market is shared by a small number of producers or sellers.” To put it simply, a few movie studios controlled the majority share of film revenue in America. They had their own labs to print their films, and bought theaters to exclusively play their product. They mastered the art of Vertical Integration, where they controlled every part of their own production, distribution, and exhibition. This was otherwise known as the “Studio System.”
Each studio began to have its own identity. They placed their biggest stars under contracts so they couldn’t work for anyone else, and created movies based around them. There were also specific genres for each studio—for example, Warner Bros had gangster films, Universal was the home of horror, Paramount made comedies with the Marx Brothers, and MGM had “more stars than there are in heaven.”
A constant across all of these studios was the type of people working for them. The images on the screen may have been black and white, but the actors were overwhelmingly one color. When non-Caucasian actors appeared in movies, they were relegated to the sidelines and given roles fraught with racist stereotypes. They also had to deal with segregation on film sets and lower pay. Sometimes white actors would replace them completely, playing different races with crude “blackface” makeup.
So, why would non-white actresses even want to enter a business which actively excluded them? That’s what author Nancy Wang Yuen explored in her book Reel Inequality. These actors were as Nancy said, “very realistic about their chances of success. But many of them saw it as activism in Hollywood, and I was surprised by how much they were interested in changing the system from within. Tiny, minuscule changes like costume … to invoke authenticity. Over and over again, actors of color across different groups were able to challenge the system, and saw themselves as change agents in the system.”
The few and limited opportunities for non-white actors were further restricted with the arrival of the production code, with its ruling against interracial romance. The code was a form of censorship, brought in after protests started over the content of movies. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, studios began producing riskier films full of sex and violence, hoping to get audiences into theaters by offering more “bang” for their buck. Groups like the Catholic Legion of Decency complained, and a list of rules were enforced. The subjects outlawed included many that were particular to women, such as abortion, birth control, and pretty much everything other than fashion and love.
The 1930s represents a sharp decline for women holding power in Hollywood, as they were restricted by the studio system, star contracts, and the production code. But despite numerous obstacles, several brave women stood out.
Dorothy Arzner: The Only Female Filmmaker
During the 1930s, Dorothy Arzner was the only female filmmaker who continued to work in Hollywood. She made commercial hits, wore suits, invented the boom microphone, and was the first woman to be invited into the Directors Guild of America, as well as a fierce feminist and a lesbian. She was definitely ahead of her time.
As a teenager, Dorothy helped her father serve customers at his restaurant in Hollywood. The clientele included several celebrities like Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and D.W. Griffith. As Dorothy wanted to study medicine, she enrolled at college. But she never finished her degree, because when America joined World War I, she dropped out to volunteer in France in the ambulance corps.
When Dorothy returned to America, a friend she had made in Europe introduced her to William C. DeMille. He was the brother of high profile Hollywood director Cecil B. DeMille, and he too worked in the movies. William gave Dorothy a job as a script typist at the Famous Players Lasky studio, which soon became Paramount.
Dorothy was a hard worker, who quickly moved up from typist to screenwriter and then to film editor. She set her sights on directing, and in the late 1920s, she told the studio if they didn’t let her in the director’s chair, she would go to Columbia Pictures.
In 1927 she directed her first feature, called Fashions for Women. This was a silent film with a mistaken identity plot, all about a cigarette girl who pretends to be a famous fashion model and falls in love with a duke. It was a huge commercial success and proved to Paramount they had made the right choice by giving in to her demands to direct the film.
As the ΄20s turned into the ΄30s, silent films were making way for sound. Before the production code governing censorship was created, there were seven glorious years we now call ‘pre-code’. More than just a time before the production code
