Women’s Media History Now!

Filmmaking and Institutional Change in Early Hollywood

Mark Garrett Cooper

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780252090875
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2011.

Between 1912 and 1919, the Universal Film Manufacturing Company credited eleven women with directing at least 170 films, but by the mid-1920s all of these directors had left Universal and only one still worked in the film industry at all. Two generations of cinema historians have either overlooked or been stymied by the mystery of why Universal first systematically supported and promoted women directors and then abruptly reversed that policy.

In this trailblazing study, Mark Garrett Cooper approaches the phenomenon as a case study in how corporate movie studios interpret and act on institutional culture in deciding what it means to work as a man or woman. In focusing on issues of institutional change, Cooper challenges interpretations that explain women's exile from the film industry as the inevitable result of a transhistorical sexism or as an effect of a broadly cultural revision of gendered work roles. Drawing on a range of historical and sociological approaches to studying corporate institutions, Cooper examines the relationship between institutional organization and aesthetic conventions during the formative years when women filmmakers such as Ruth Ann Baldwin, Cleo Madison, Ruth Stonehouse, Elise Jane Wilson, and Ida May Park directed films for Universal.

PART ONE

Possibility

To understand how and why Universal made it possible for women to direct in significant numbers, we might start by considering what, exactly, the Universal Film Manufacturing Company is. What does “Universal” name? To understand this corporate entity is a goal as well as a requirement of this book. Accordingly, the chapters comprised in part 1 develop a method of institutional analysis along with a consideration of how changes at Universal through 1917 affected its gendered division of labor. In that analysis, first, Universal’s brand names indicate a sequence of provisional but relatively stable institutional arrangements. Second, an investigation of formal and informal decision-making hierarchies illuminates how Universal moves from one arrangement to the next. And, third, a look at the imaginative and lived geography of the corporate movie studio reveals how filmmaking entailed gender play, which in turn informed the organization of work.

The name “Universal Film Manufacturing Company” indicates a certain ambition. In truth, it declares one so boldly that it is difficult not to infer a self-conscious boast—as if, with a wink, the company acknowledged the practical impossibility of omnipresence but expected us to admire its pluck in staking the claim. Contemporaries to Universal’s 1912 founding may well have favored this playful interpretation. It was an age of showmanship, and there is no mistaking the ring of hucksterism in the company slogan: “The Largest Film Manufacturing Concern in the Universe.” Meanwhile, the corporation’s trademark claimed planet Earth as its territory by running a ring around it, suggesting velocity as well as an ability to fix or bind.

Nonetheless, the U.S. film industry did grow remarkably at this time, establishing by 1920 planetary, if not yet cosmic, dominance. For a brief time in the 1910s, Universal led the pack. The “U” moved quickly into Europe and pioneered exploitation of the East Asian market. By the end of 1916, it boasted offices in London (through which it distributed to Africa and Australia), Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen, Vienna, Budapest, Barcelona, Vilna, Petrograd, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Havana, Manila, Calcutta, Singapore, Japan, and China. A Java branch opened in February 1917.¹ Braggadocio notwithstanding, one must conclude that Universal’s name sincerely indicated a business aim to cover the largest territory possible.

Universal Film Manufacturing Company trademark, ca. 1912. Courtesy Richard Koszarski Collection.

What would it mean for a company to be disarmingly self-conscious of over-reaching? What, in any case, does it mean for a corporation to want? More specifically, what might it mean to say that this corporation wanted women to direct? Whether we imagine the film-manufacturing concern pursuing universality with the monomania of Gordon Gekko or puffing its chest with the bravado of P. T. Barnum, Universal’s name attributes desire to an entity whose desires we do not really know how to describe. For one thing, it has nonhuman aspects we would do well to consider. “Universal” names an entity that includes such properties as land, buildings, machines, and, not least, films. Similarly, to say that Universal “wants,” “decides,” or “hires” can occult the participation of the many minds at work within it. To posit Universal as an agent unavoidably raises the question of what kind of agent it is.

Usage complicates this question by implicitly anthropomorphizing the corporation. Because it avows a wish to be universal, Universal’s name invites us to interpret it as an entity that also interprets itself. If the company could intelligibly use the first person, it would say, “I want it all, and I know it.” But this is a misleading analogy. Universal does not say “I”; its wishes are equally forthright but less self-conscious. Not only do its human constituents have minds of their own, but its unity exists moment to moment absent the existential difficulties of the self. It will not die, though it might lose identity through merger or dissolution, and its others do not complete it. Unbidden, language endows Universal a monstrous desire in the form of an individual wish come to life in an inhuman body.² While such a frightening and paradoxical characterization does indeed encompass the legal fiction that establishes corporations as artificial persons, that fiction will make it difficult to grasp institutions themselves, insofar as they are not only social actors but also scenes of social action, sites of struggle for the people who build them and work within them.

In simultaneously indicating a unity to which desire may be attributed and a heterogeneous assemblage of individuals supposed to work toward a common purpose, “Universal” poses a difficulty—and an advantage—as old as the word “institution” itself. The term unites the abstract and the concrete. Since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the English word “institution” has meant “the action of instituting or establishing; setting on foot or in operation; foundation; ordainment,” and has referred to “an established law, custom, usage, practice, organization, or other element in the political or social life of a people.” Since the eighteenth century, “institution” has also signified “an establishment, organization, or association, instituted for the promotion of some object . . . e.g. a church, school, college, hospital, asylum, reformatory, mission, or the like.” Thus, “institution” and its variants now name both social conventions and particular enterprises, durable feats of establishment and open-ended processes, widely shared habits, norms, or rules and specific locations where one might live or work. Every particular entity worthy of the name takes up a function within the abstract field of relations we call “society.” At the same time, such entities distinguish themselves as concrete assemblages of persons, places, and practices.

English-speakers continue to use the term in the older sense alone. When we call the family, the law, religion, the economy, or gender “institutions,” it is typically their durable role in the “political or social life of a people” that we name. One of the earliest such usages had to do with “the establishment or ordination of a sacrament of the Christian Church, esp. of the Eucharist, by Christ.” Even at a far bureaucratic remove, the word retains a whiff of sacred mystery, and it certainly has not ceased to connote legitimacy.

The later development of the term tells us more about the world we have come to inhabit, however. “Institution” participated in the eighteenth-century semantic shift identified by Raymond Williams in which nouns “of action or process” such as “culture,” “society,” and “education” came to serve as “general and abstract noun[s] describing something apparently objective and systematic.”³ “Society,” for example, was synonymous with “association” when Shakespeare wrote of “my Riots past, my wilde Societies,” in The Merry Wives of Windsor, but the term served his seventeenth-century successors to distinguish “civil society” as “an association of free men” from “the state” as “an organization of power, drawing on all the senses of hierarchy and majesty.” The earlier, “active and immediate” sense of “society” as “association” persisted well into the eighteenth century. By 1770, however, Adam Smith could confidently use the word as we do to declare, “Every society has more to apprehend from its needy members than from the rich.”⁴

Williams proposes that this shift in usage abetted a sweeping historical transformation. Inapprehensible as the rise of another dynasty, the long Industrial Revolution depersonalized power. Once retooled, the old nouns of process could objectify new forms of authority. Like “culture,” “society,” and “education,” “institution” describes power that cannot be embodied in a sovereign. Unlike those more abstract terms, however, it also identifies the concrete machinery through which impersonal authority has historically worked: “education” needs the school; “society” entails not only “the law” but the various institutions of the state that make and enforce it; and “culture” requires publishing houses, museums, libraries, movie studios, and the like. In vernacular usage, “institution” unites an abstract sense having to do with social function and a concrete sense designating specific places, persons, and the enterprises in which they are engaged.

The relation between individuals and such abstractions as society, culture, education, economy, ideology, and discourse has been described in ways too various to catalog here. It is worth recalling, however, that a customary dividing line separates two general orientations. One approach, clustered in economics and political science, presupposes individuals equipped with universal powers of reason and describes social forces as the aggregation of their decisions. To pick the paradigmatic example, the market sets prices through the accretion of more or less rational choices by the buyers and sellers who compose it. More than the sum of these choices, the market can be called an agent. Nonetheless, the force of its invisible hand ultimately derives from individual calculations. The other approach, clustered in sociology, anthropology, and the humanities, insists on the already social character of individuals. Accounts of this ilk emphasize that shared categories of thought, norms, or values precede human individuals, point out that material distributions of power and resources precondition collective action, and chart the force of habitual practice. For example, the conviction, secured by law, that “the market” equals a domain apart from the state limits the range of choice and sets distinct rules of rationality within each domain: market choices take “profit” as an aim; choices of state emphasize, at least nominally, “the good of the people.” On this view, decisions we might experience as personal have been directed in advance by the social context in which they occur. Opposed in their premises, individualist and collectivist approaches share an analogy; neither camp believes social thought and action to be identical with individual thought and action. Nonetheless, through the connoting power of language if nothing else, each characterizes them as similar.

Probably it is impossible to describe “decisions” without implying something like a human mind at work. Because it points in two directions at once, the category of “institution” resists analogical description of the relationship between the individual and the collective. Although scholarship provides ample examples, everyday life reveals this readily enough. What functionary has not had occasion to marvel at the difference between what one says and what the institution does as a consequence, between personal contribution and institutional decision? The bigger the organization, the greater the difference is likely to be, as level upon level of committees, supervisors, reports, and memoranda pile up between idea and implementation. Nonetheless, even very large organizations seem not to generate universal cynicism. As if by some miracle, institutional constituents remain convinced of their ability to “move” the organization, to affect outcomes, and even the most hardened may point to instances of having done just that. Such accomplishments might appear as strictly personal in an annual review or resumé, but they invariably entail a back story involving the diverse precedents, procedures, and people that hindered and aided every achievement. Our quotidian experience of institutions militates against an analogical understanding of the relationship between individual and collective agency because institutions engage us concretely in practices that simultaneously distinguish and link individual acts and collective outcomes.

“Institution” therefore frames the problem of impersonal power in a fundamentally different way than terms such as “society” and “culture” typically do. It neither calls for ontological disputes over whether collectives are prior to individuals nor presents the epistemological dilemma of what finally constitutes reason. “Institution” designates the pragmatic face of impersonal power and invites us to appraise the mediations uniting and distinguishing various sorts of doers and deeds, thinkers and thoughts.

It is in this light that Universal’s name helps us to understand its division of labor. The name interprets the assemblage of people, places, and things comprised in it; it also offers the whole thus composed as an object of interpretation. As is often the case in human affairs, no ontological distinction can be made between “the institution itself” and the symbols through which it acquires identity. The institution could not exist absent its name, which legally and publicly composes diverse elements into a unity. But if describing an institution and bringing it to life are, pragmatically, the same thing, this does not mean that the institution may be reduced to the sum of its interpretations or that one interpretation is just as good as another. Characterizations vie for authority. The virtue of any interpretation, including historical descriptions of interpretations themselves, can only be judged within a context that defines some propositions as habitual, others as polemical, and still others as outré.⁵ If, for a time, Universal wanted to employ women directors and then changed its mind, the explanation lies not in a psychology it does not possess but in interpretations that acquired the force of habit—interpretations like, for example, its name.

Or rather many names, since the company had several arrayed in what would now be described as a “brand or ‘naming architecture.’”⁶ Alterations to this arrangement as well as extensions and contractions of the domain of persons, places, and products comprised in particular names amounted to de facto changes in how the institution understood its component parts. In turn, arrangements institutionalized in the brand architecture conditioned how individuals could interpret and reinterpret the institution.

Thus it is significant that the dramatic increase in the number of women credited as director in 1916 and 1917 accompanied the creation of the brand name Bluebird, under which Universal distributed a weekly schedule of five-reel feature films separately from its shorts program and its prestigious road shows. The name was at the center of arguments within the company over the type of films Universal should be making, how much it should spend to make them, where it should make them, and how they should be brought to market. Women did not direct Bluebirds exclusively, but they did direct them more frequently than they did many other brands, and no new women were hired to direct after the brand was phased out in 1919.⁷ The creation of Bluebirds does not suffice to explain the rise of the Universal women, but it begins to explain what made it possible by revealing that phenomenon’s relation to shifts in how the organization understood its product and the elements necessary to assemble and sell it.

If name changes indicate struggles shaping the young institution and affecting the fate of its women directors, they tell us little about the distribution of power that informs and results from those struggles. By power, I mean the ability to command (mobilize and dispose of) resources (human and material) within the institution as a hierarchical organization.⁸ Such power is remarkably difficult to understand. The evolving corpus of sociological work devoted to institutionalized organizations does not agr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface: A Puzzle, Some Premises, and a Hypothesis
• Part One Possibility
• Part Two Impossibility
• Postscript: Eleanor’s Catch
• Notes
• Index