Universal women : filmmaking and institutional change in early Hollywood / Mark Garrett Cooper.

ISBN:

9780252090875

Title:

Author:

Cooper, Mark Garrett.

Personal Author:

Cooper, Mark Garrett.

Publication Information:

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xxix, 230 pages) : illustrations, map.

Series:

Women and film history international

Contents:

Preface : a puzzle, some premises, and a hypothesis -- Possibility. Universal's names -- Universal's organization -- Universal City -- Impossibility. Genre : a category of institutional analysis -- Serials : the foreclosure of collaboration -- Gender and the dramatic feature -- Postscript : Eleanor's catch.

Corporate Subject:

Universal Film Manufacturing Company -- History.

Subject Term:

Women motion picture producers and directors -- United States.

Women motion picture producers and directors -- History -- 20th century.

Format:

Electronic Resources

Electronic Access:

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Publication Date:

2010

Publication Information:

Available:*

Shelf Number	Material Type	Copy	Shelf Location	Status
791.4302330922 22	1:E-BOOK	1	1:ONLINE	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

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.

Author Notes

Mark Garrett Cooper is an associate professor of English and film and media studies and the director of the Moving Image Research Collections at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of Love Rules: Silent Hollywood and the Rise of the Managerial Class.

Reviews (1)

Choice Review

When the movies were young, Universal Studios, owned by Carl Laemmle, was one of the first major studio complexes in the business, and it survives today. What made Universal unique among the early studios was that it employed a large number of women, not only as secretaries, negative cutters, continuity persons, script clerks, editors, actors, and the like but also as directors--e.g., Lois Weber, who, as Cooper (Univ. of South Carolina) points out, was, by 1917, the most prolific and profitable filmmaker on the lot, male or female. When Universal City opened in 1915, Weber was named honorary mayor. Cooper discusses other women filmmakers who found a home at Universal, such as Ruth Ann Baldwin, Ida May Park, Lule Warrenton, Ruth Stonehouse, Cleo Madison, and Grace Cunard. Meticulously researched and graced with numerous rare stills and frame enlargements, this is a superb, impassioned, detailed examination of how women flourished at Universal during the silent era and how it all came crashing down when the talkies began. Summing Up: Essential. All readers. G. A. Foster University of Nebraska--Lincoln