Nobody's girl Friday : the women who ran Hollywood
J. E. Smyth (Author)
"Looking back on her career in 1977, Bette Davis remembered with pride, "Women owned Hollywood for twenty years." She had a point. Between 1930 and 1950, journalists claimed that over 40% of film industry employees were women--and they weren't merely passive, pretty faces on the screen or anonymous secretaries. A quarter of all screenwriters were female. The era's most influential and publicly recognized film editors were women and two of them were responsible for supervising their studio's feature film output. One woman ran MGM behind the scenes. Over a dozen women worked as studio producers, while others set up their own production companies. A woman headed the Screen Writers Guild three times. The press claimed Hollywood was a generation or two ahead of the rest of the country in terms of gender equality and employment. But historians, critics, and the public have largely forgotten this era and persist in seeing the studio system as a man's world. J.E. Smyth tells another story of a golden age for women's employment in the film industry and of Hollywood's ranks of powerful organization women. The first comprehensive history of the Hollywood studio system's high-flying career women, Nobody's Girl Friday covers the impact of the executives, producers, editors, writers, agents, designers, directors, and actresses who shaped Hollywood film production and style, led their unions, climbed to the top during the war, and fought the blacklist. The story of the women who called the shots in studio-era Hollywood has never fully been told--until now."--Jacket
Print Book, English, 2018
Oxford University Press, New York, NY, United States of America, 2018