ABSTRACT

The fourth chapter centers on the Hollywood studio system in the 1930s, following Anita Loos’s screenwriting work for MGM over the course of that decade. As many male East Coast authors learned upon migrating to Hollywood, the screenwriter was not an autonomous professional but a low-ranking employee, subject to the whims of executives and producers. It seems that this very structure, which paralleled secretarial work, facilitated the success of women screenwriters. While Loos was a talented filmmaker in her own right, the ability to mask her creative labor and adapt to managerial ideology allowed her to maintain her position as a top writer throughout the turbulent decade. Yet Loos’s conformity also led her to compromise the critical perspective that informs her best satirical work. At the beginning of the 1930s, Irving Thalberg allowed Loos to include a critique of the era’s sexual and class politics in the Red-Headed Woman (1932) as she had done in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925). A few years later, when Louis B. Mayer began to impose his conservative ideology, films like The Women (1938) for the most part affirmed conventional gender roles.