So often we read about the movie moguls who created and ran the Hollywood movie industry. Louis B. Mayer, Jesse Lasky, Carl Laemmle, Sam Goldwyn, and David O. Selznick to name a few early moguls. And formidable directors who used their authority to make auteur films—D.W. Griffith, John Ford, Cecil B. DeMille, and modern auteurs such as Martin Scorsese.
But occasionally, right from the beginning of moving pictures, a woman was able to prove herself and obtain power in the predominantly male business. French sister filmmakers Clara and Julia Kuperberg have scoured archives and personal collections of historic and recent materials to create four hour-long documentaries on the rise of a few incredibly talented women who overcame the gender odds to become forces in Hollywood.
Kino Lorber has issued four of their documentaries on DVD. They are available in a two-disc set under the title Women Who Run Hollywood. They were completed between 2015 and 2023.
The docs are well-researched and beautifully put together. Whether the viewer already knows the subjects in depth, or is a newcomer, watching these films is quite enjoyable. The stories of the pioneering female giants in the film industry are told by well-respected film historians such as Ally Acker and Tony Maietta. The Dorothy Arzner interview, key to that doc, was created, recorded by Kevin Brownlow.
The first doc gives a general look, from earliest powerful studio owner Alice Guy who also is one of the first ever filmmakers, to silent film director Lois Weber, to Lillian Gish, Frances Marion, and then into the late Twentieth Century with Paula Wagner and Kathryn Bigelow.
Each of the remaining three documentaries focuses on one woman each. Mary Pickford, Dorothy Arzner, and Ida Lupino. These three women are standout personalities, talented powerhouses in the film industry.
Pickford’s story begins in the earliest years of the Twentieth Century, takes her from child actress to support her fatherless family, to becoming the foremost movie star of the first half of the silent era. In 1919 she became a founding partner in the legendary United Artists. The onscreen persona of Pickford, America’s sweetheart with bouncing blonde curls, someone so sweet and vulnerable that she often played a child, actually was an intelligent filmmaker and knowing businesswoman.
Ida Lupino started making movies in Hollywood in her early teens, was partner in a mid-Century indie film company, and became a fine judge of script writing, camera work, and all aspects of the industry. She was a beauty, a terrific actress who often played women of ill repute for the major studios, but she also produced and directed films that spoke to America’s domestic issues, particularly women’s issues. These independent film productions showed sex discrimination, rape and its post-traumatic distress, unwanted pregnancy, and failed marriages. If you only see one film that she supervised and directed, see Outrage from 1950. It’s daring, ahead of its time, from a Hollywood whose censorship would not allow the word “rape” to be uttered.
I wish the Kuperberg sisters had paid attention to the difficulties many of Hollywood’s strongest women had in their personal lives. It’s an aspect that in some ways is inseparable from their work.
Women Who Run Hollywood has plenty to offer. The films are informative and a pleasure to watch.
Audrey Kupferberg is a film and video archivist and retired appraiser. She is lecturer emeritus and the former director of Film Studies at the University at Albany and co-authored several entertainment biographies with her late husband and creative partner, Rob Edelman.
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