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ABSTRACT
In the 1920s screenwriting duo Anita Loos and John Emerson wrote two how-to guides that offered advice for launching a Hollywood career, How to Write Photoplays (1921) and Breaking into the Movies (1922). Rather than emphasizing genius, the guides focus on Hollywood as an egalitarian workplace where writers become professionals through training and experience. This article argues that the guides thus functioned to distinguish Loos as a professional writer, a strategic identity opposed to both the male modernist genius and the female typist. Contra readings of Loos as ambivalent to professionalism that have been based on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925), by focusing on her screenwriting career, this article argues that Loos deployed an identity as a professional writer to avoid being pigeonholed by gendered ideas about writing.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Emerson and Loos, Breaking in to the Movies, 14.
2 “A New Art,” 97.
3 Foltz, The Novel After Film, 20.
4 Important recent and forthcoming work in this vein includes but is not limited to Eric Hoyt's Ink-Stained Hollywood, Sarah Gleeson-White's work on “Motion Picture Print Culture” in a forthcoming essay by this title and her upcoming Literature in Motion, Jordan Brower's articles cited here and upcoming book Hollywood Signs, Pardis Dabashi's Losing the Plot, and Marsha Gordon's Becoming the Ex-Wife. In the case of Loos, Laura Frost and Brooks Hefner have each discussed the productive relationship between film image and text in Blondes.
5 “Good-Bye Bill.”
6 Emerson and Loos, How to Write Photoplays, 23.
7 Loos, Kiss Hollywood Good-by, 117.
8 For example, Kristine Somerville and Morgan Speer refer to Mencken's warning admonition: “‘A husband may survive the fact that a wife has more money than he, but if she earns more, it can destroy his very essence.’ This became prophetic in Anita's case” (109).
9 Hegeman, “Taking Blondes Seriously,” 538. See also Churchwell, “‘Lost Among the Ads’,” Lutes.
10 Churchwell, “‘Lost Among the Ads’,” 139.
11 For example, like many of the earlier commentors on Blondes, Daniel Tracy focuses solely on Loos's novelistic interlocutors, positioning the tale of Lorelei and Dorothy in terms of the “battle of the brows” as represented between the initial publisher Harper's Bazar and authors such as Faulkner, Joyce, and Wharton, who later praised it. He argues, “What I want to emphasize is that middlebrow cultural institutions are key to any investigation that seeks to broaden our understanding of the authority and valuation of modernism, realism, or other varieties of writing” (Tracy 117). Other critics working in this vein include Mark McGurl, Susan Hegeman, Sarah Churchill, and Faye Hammill. In addition to Laura Frost's work on the way Loos's intertitles offered a model for text-as-image seen on display in the novella, Brooks Hefner's is the only article I know to read Blondes against the screenwriting guides, arguing that the books provide “an important background for her sophisticated narration in her fiction of the mid to late 1920s, itself a kind of title-card inspired modernism in the vernacular” (111).
12 Frost, The Problem with Pleasure, 151.
13 Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism.” Modernism/Modernity. 6.2 (April 1999): 59–77.
14 Emerson and Loos, How to Write Photoplays, 5.
15 Beauchamp, Without Lying Down, 11.
16 Hill, Never Done, 5.
17 6 May 1937. Loos's daybooks, which she kept throughout her life, are held at the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles. Many thanks to the archivists at the library and also to the American Philosophical Society which funded a research trip to view these books.
18 Gaines, Pink-Slipped, 141.
19 Elkins and Adamson. https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/elkins-adamson-typestruck
20 Frost, The Problem with Pleasure, 147.
21 For accounts of Loos and the censors, see Leslie Kreiner Wilson and Faye Hammill. Writing of Lorelei's eventual husband, the foolish censor Henry Spoffard, Hammill describes Loos's particular disdain for censorship, “In the climate of censorship which was developing during the interwar years in response to the film industry, many films now considered classics were severely cut, or had new endings appended, particularly if they depicted transgressive women who did not pay for their sins. This replacement of aesthetic values with rather regressive moral considerations is one of Loos's primary satiric targets” (Hammill 38).
22 Emerson and Loos, Breaking into the Movies, 9.
23 Ibid., 14.
24 Ibid., 65.
25 Brower and Glick, 539.
26 Emerson and Loos, Breaking into the Movies, 17.
27 Ibid., 18.
28 Ibid., 20.
29 Emerson and Loos, Breaking into the Movies, frontispiece.
30 Emerson and Loos, How to Write Photoplays, 72.
31 Foltz, The Novel After Film, 196.
32 Loos, Kiss Hollywood Good-by, 119.
33 Ibid., 155.
34 Ibid., 119.
35 Blondes, 78; Brunettes, 156.
36 Emerson and Loos, Breaking into the Movies, 61, 27.
37 Ibid., 42.
38 For example, Leslie Wilson explains that “by 1922 studio chiefs had capitulated to censorship demands, forming the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), directed by former US Postmaster General Will Hays” and that Loos and others were already adapting to coming censorship pre-1930s (108). Brower makes a similar point about the censuring of novels in the 1920s. Because every novel was a potential film adaptation, “the film-readiness of a book required its adherence to the recently constituted ‘formula’” (Brower, “Written,” 254).
39 Loos, The Talmadge Girls, 89.
40 For more on Loos's response to feminists and workplace sexual harassment, see Fusco's “Feminist (dis)pleasure and Anita Loos's Whisper Networks,” 340–347.
41 Emerson and Loos, Breaking into the Movies, 61–62.
42 Ibid., 63.
43 Emerson and Loos, How to Write Photoplays, 2.
44 Beeston, “Photography,” 161.
45 Emerson and Loos, How to Write Photoplays, 3.
46 Ibid., 13.
47 Ibid., 7, 6.
48 Frost, The Problem with Pleasure, 292.
49 Brower, “Written,” 257. Susan Hegeman's “Taking Blondes Seriously” remains one of the strongest readings of the games Lorelei plays with her many male suitors, clarifying the many exchanges of interests and favors in the novel, “this is also an economy in which Lorelei the laborer accrues a profit: her attractiveness (her "brains") has inspired men to give her presents (to ‘educate’ her), which, like the tiara, then enter into circulation as coded signs of attractiveness” (543).
50 Cella, “Narrative ‘Confidence Games’,” 511–52.
51 Dolan, “Loos Lips,” 87.
52 Loos, Blondes, 114.
53 Ibid., 123.
54 Ibid., 111, 120.
55 11, 12 January 1940.
56 5 January 1937.
57 25 October 1953.
58 21 July 1953. The Jule in question is most likely Jules Eckert Goodman.
59 For Loos's entries on the Victory Garden, see her 1943 daybook; Loos's 1939 and 1940 daybooks contain the majority of the entries about her war fears.
60 Loos, Brunettes, 129.
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Katherine Fusco
Katherine Fusco is an associate professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. She authored two books, Silent Film and U.S. Naturalist Literature and coauthored (with Nicole Seymour) Kelly Reichardt: Emergency and the Everyday. She recently completed a book about celebrities in the 1920s and 1930s titled Hollywood's Others and published articles on film and American literature in venues such as PMLA, Cinema Journal, Modernism/Modernity and MELUS. Her articles have been the recipients of the William Riley Parker Prize and the American Literature Association's 1921 Prize in American Literature. She is starting work on a new project, tentatively titled Anita Loos: A Life in Work.