Dorothy Emma Arzner was born on January 3, 1897 in San Francisco, California, United States to Ludwig Adolph and Jeanette Young (Leydier) Arzner.
Dorothy's mother presumably died before she was eight, and in 1905 her father married Mabel Gorsuch and moved the family to Los Angeles, where he became proprietor of a café popular with actors and filmmakers. Mabel Arzner, wished to refine Dorothy's tomboy ways and sent her to the School for Girls.
Arzner graduated from the Westlake School for Girls in 1915.
From 1915 to 1917 she studied at the University of Southern California and contemplated medical school.
When the United States entered World War I, Arzner enlisted in the Los Angeles Emergency Ambulance Corps.
In 1919 her corps commander suggested a career in film and arranged an interview with William deMille at Famous Players-Lasky Studio (later Paramount Pictures). DeMille told her to look around the studio for a week. She told deMille that she would start at the bottom and began work in the script department as a typist.
After three months she did her first work on a set as the script girl for actress Alla Nazimova, and within a few months she rose to script supervisor. Instructed by film cutter Nan Heron, Arzner learned to edit. She left the studio to obtain a promotion at Universal, but in 1921 Paramount made her sole editor at their Realart Studios, giving her thirty-five pictures to cut in one year.
In 1922 she gained her first screen credit, as editor of Blood and Sand, intercutting stock footage with shots of Rudolph Valentino to create the film's bullfight sequences. Her success led director James Cruze to bring her on location to edit The Covered Wagon (1923). Now well established--according to British film historian Kevin Brownlow, "the only editor from the entire silent era to be officially remembered"--Arzner turned to writing scenarios. She sold a few Westerns to Film Booking Office but returned to Paramount as editor and scenarist on Cruze's Old Ironsides (1926). In 1927, while negotiating with Harry Cohn to direct at fledgling Columbia Pictures, producer Walter Wanger intervened and persuaded Paramount to give Arzner a film to get into production in two weeks.
Daunted but determined, she directed the silent Fashions for Women (1927), starring Esther Ralston. The two were also paired for Ten Modern Commandments (1927). The pairing, however, proved uncongenial, and Paramount found the director a new star in Clara Bow. With Bow and Charles Rogers, Arzner made another comedy, Get Your Man (1927), and, with Nancy Carroll and Richard Arlen, Manhattan Cocktail (1928).
By now Arzner's reputation was so considerable that Paramount chose her to make Bow's first sound picture, The Wild Party (1929). Arzner picked Fredric March, who had made only one other film, to play the male lead--the first of many apt castings of newcomers who would later become stars. In collaboration with a sound technician she developed the first boom microphone (on a "fish pole"), an innovation typical of the collaborative spirit on her pictures. In 1930 she made the first of four films with writer Zoë Akins.
Sarah and Son, about the trials of a German immigrant (played by Ruth Chatterton), proved so successful that the studio thereafter let Arzner choose her own stories. She picked another Akins screenplay, Anybody's Woman (1930), again with Chatterton. In the same year she directed an episode in Paramount on Parade and worked on Behind the Makeup and Charming Sinners, films assigned to other directors. In 1931 she directed Honor Among Lovers with Claudette Colbert, Fredric March, and Ginger Rogers.
Arzner's string of successes ended with Working Girls (1931), an Akins script with two heroines, one who is victimized by sex and another who exploits it. Now praised for its frankness and innovation, it found no favor with the studio. The total ambiguity of Arzner's work continued with Merrily We Go to Hell (1932), a dark Prohibition comedy about alcoholism and marriage starring Sylvia Sidney and March. It is the ambiguity itself--a disturbing, socially subversive presence in much of Arzner's work--that is emphasized by modern critics.
In 1933, Arzner left Paramount to become an independent director, working first for David O. Selznick at RKO on Christopher Strong, again picking an "unlikely" star--Katharine Hepburn, whom she found making a jungle movie "up a tree with a leopard skin on. " In Christopher Strong, Hepburn played a champion aviator.
After making Nana (1934) for Samuel Goldwyn, Arzner became an associate producer for Cohn at Columbia. She made Craig's Wife (1936) but almost lost control of the picture when Cohn objected to her expensive sets and her choice of another newcomer, Rosalind Russell, to star. The film was admired by Joan Crawford and Louis B. Mayer, who brought Arzner to MGM for The Bride Wore Red with Crawford in 1937.
She also contributed to The Last of Mrs. Cheney, without credit. Arzner then refused three scripts suggested by Mayer, calling them "frivolous, " and was put on suspension. Two years later, she stepped in after a week's shooting to take over the RKO film Dance, Girl, Dance (1940).
Arzner rewrote the script and made what has become her most widely discussed picture. Especially notable is the scene in which Maureen O'Hara, playing an idealistic ballet dancer, has a fistfight with stripper Lucille Ball and berates the male audience of a burlesque house. Arzner made training films for the Women's Army Corps early in World War II but returned to Columbia to make her last film, First Comes Courage (1943), a drama with Merle Oberon about Norwegian resistance to the Nazis.
Near completion of the film, Arzner fell ill with pneumonia, and at her recovery a year later she unexpectedly retired as a film director. She was forty-six.
In later years, she spoke of hating the tension of working for tyrants like Mayer and Cohn. Arzner said that she had no defenses and she would rather walk away. " After leaving the studios, she directed plays and from 1952 to 1954 was the first head of cinema and television at the Pasadena Playhouse.
In 1959 she began directing Pepsi-Cola television commercials for her friend Joan Crawford and in 1965 joined the Film Department at the University of California at Los Angeles for four years, where she championed the work of her student Francis Ford Coppola.
The tonal uneasiness and questioning of social values in her films have come to be identified with the "woman's viewpoint" of which she spoke, an element that deliberately disturbed the "male gaze" of traditional studio films.
For the last fourteen years of her life Arzner retired to a desert home near Palm Springs, California, where she undertook a historical novel on the settling of Los Angeles.
Arzner died in La Quinta, California. She was cremated and her ashes were scattered over her house.
Arzner became one of the very few women who established a name for herself as a director in the American film industry. Her sympathetic but unsentimental portrayals of independent women stand alone among Hollywood films of the 1930's and 1940's, and Arzner has become an icon to students of feminist film theory. Arzner was also the first woman to gain membership in the Directors Guild.
Quotations:
"I remember making the observation. If one was going to be in this movie business, one should be a director because he was the one who told everyone what to do. "
"Try as man may, he will never get the woman's viewpoint in telling certain stories. "
"We enjoy ourselves only in our work, our doing; and our best doing is our best enjoyment. "
Member of the Directors Guild.
From childhood Arzner had tomboy-like character; she always was active and competitive.
She never married, but had three female partners.
She was a Russian actress who immigrated to the United States.
She was an American actress who was famous on Broadway, on radio, early silent film, and subsequently in sound film.
She was an American choreographer and motion picture screenwriter and the longtime companion of motion picture director Dorothy Arzner. Arzner lived with her for the last 40 years of her life.
