Dorothy Arzner

Born in San Francisco (California), on January 3, 1895, Dorothy Arzner grew up in Hollywood, where she came into contact with the world of cinema while working as a waitress, helping her father at Hoffman’s Cafe, the small family business he ran there. . She dealt daily with actors and technicians – Charles Chaplin passed by regularly, for example – who encouraged her to try her luck in the film industry.

After leaving her medical studies and working as a nurse during World War I, Dorothy Arzner managed to get hired as a secretary, in the script department of Famous Players-Lasky, the embryo of Paramount, plugged in by her friend, the filmmaker William C. DeMille. , Cecil ‘s brother .

But Arzner was an intelligent and valuable woman who did not spend long typing scripts. Before long she was promoted to synopsis writer, script writer and she eventually ended up in the editing department, where she built a solid reputation, especially editing the films of director James Cruze .

She made her debut as a director as head of the second unit of Blood and Sand (1922) , an adaptation of the novel by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez , one of Rodolfo Valentino ‘s great successes . She was in charge above all of the bullfighting sequences, shot with enormous brilliance. The truth is that the directors were reluctant to assign him the direction of a film. She but she finally got it, threatening to accept an offer from the competition.

Thus, they gave her the green light to take to the screen based on her own script La reina de la moda , during which she realized that in the industry she was going to need enormous authority for the team members to take her seriously. . For this reason, Arzner distinguished herself as a controlling and angry woman.

With Manhattan Cocktail , she became the first lady to sign up for a talkie. While the great pioneer of American filmmakers, Lois Webber, began to fail at the box office, and Frances Marion stopped directing in the 1920s to focus on her prolific career as a screenwriter, Arzner survived the advent of talkies. He even contributed decisively to the new work methods, since he is credited with inventing the giraffe in 1929. Fed up with the fact that the actors had to covertly go to the microphone, which was usually placed next to the camera, he decided to hang it on a pole fishing to follow whoever had to speak at any given moment.

Very active during the 1930s, she directed titles such as The Queen of the Boulevard , about an aspiring star of the Parisian show business, based on the novel by Émile Zola that had already inspired Nana , one of Jean Renoir ‘s early works . The film was so successful that Paramount cast its top star of the day, Clara Bow , whom she directed in The Mad Orgy , which she made a celebrity out of Fredric March .

Arzner stood out for his portraits of strong women, rarely seen on the screen at that time, especially with The Soulless Woman , where Rosalind Russell embodied a calculating woman, who marries a wealthy pusillanimous man out of interest. He also took advantage of Katharine Hepburn , an aviator in a man’s world in Upward , where she entered into a relationship with a married man.

In 1936, Arzner became the first woman to join the then newly created Directors Guild. For reasons that are not clear, she left Hollywood in 1943, according to all indications of her to recover from an illness, but she did not return to resume her career in the cinema. Her friend, the actress Joan Crawford , a director of a soft drink company, hired her to shoot commercials. She also served as her professor at UCLA, where she had students such as Francis Ford Coppola , until her death on October 1, 1979.