Repositioning Lorelei's Education: Mind, Body, and Sex(uality) in Anita Loos' Gentleman Prefer Blondes

2017 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 644-674
Author(s):  
Johanna M. Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Anita Loos

Working in Hollywood

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronny Regev
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
New Class ◽  
Modern System ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Form ◽  
Anita Loos

A history of the Hollywood film industry as a modern system of labor, this book reveals an important untold story of an influential twentieth-century workplace. Ronny Regev argues that the Hollywood studio system institutionalized creative labor by systemizing and standardizing the work of actors, directors, writers, and cinematographers, meshing artistic sensibilities with the efficiency-minded rationale of industrial capitalism. The employees of the studios emerged as a new class: they were wage laborers with enormous salaries, artists subjected to budgets and supervision, stars bound by contracts. As such, these workers—people like Clark Gable, Katharine Hepburn, and Anita Loos—were the outliers in the American workforce, an extraordinary working class. Through extensive use of oral histories, personal correspondence, studio archives, and the papers of leading Hollywood luminaries as well as their less-known contemporaries, Regev demonstrates that, as part of their contribution to popular culture, Hollywood studios such as Paramount, Warner Bros., and MGM cultivated a new form of labor, one that made work seem like fantasy.

Anita Loos Rediscovered: Film Treatments and Fiction, Cari Beauchamp and Mary Anita Loos (eds) (2003)

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-381
Author(s):  
Cierra Winkler
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
University Of California ◽  
Anita Loos

Review of: Anita Loos Rediscovered: Film Treatments and Fiction, Cari Beauchamp and Mary Anita Loos (eds) (2003) Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 322 pp., ISBN 978-05-20228-94-8, h/bk, $32.65

Modern Sentimentalism

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Mendelman
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Quantitative Methods ◽  
Willa Cather ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Negro Woman ◽  
Jessie Fauset ◽  
Double Binds ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Anita Loos ◽  
Literary Innovation

Modern Sentimentalism examines how American female novelists reinvented sentimentalism in the modernist period. Just as the birth of the modern woman has long been imagined as the death of sentimental feeling, modernist literary innovation has been understood to reject sentimental aesthetics. Modern Sentimentalism reframes these perceptions of cultural evolution. Taking up icons such as the New Woman, the flapper, the free lover, the New Negro woman, and the divorcée, this book argues that these figures embody aspects of a traditional sentimentality while also recognizing sentiment as incompatible with ideals of modern selfhood. These double binds equally beleaguer the protagonists and shape the styles of writers like Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Anita Loos, and Jessie Fauset. ‘Modern sentimentalism’ thus translates nineteenth-century conventions of sincerity and emotional fulfillment into the skeptical, self-conscious modes of interwar cultural production. Reading canonical and underexamined novels in concert with legal briefs, scientific treatises, and other transatlantic period discourse, and combining traditional and quantitative methods of archival research, Modern Sentimentalism demonstrates that feminine feeling, far from being peripheral to twentieth-century modernism, animates its central principles and preoccupations.

Love Stories and General Principles: The Development of the Production Code

2020 ◽  
pp. 94-117
Author(s):  
Ana Salzberg
Keyword(s):  
Motion Picture ◽  
Code Of Ethics ◽  
Love Stories ◽  
Production Code ◽  
Entertainment Value ◽  
Anita Loos

This chapter examines Thalberg’s role in crafting the Motion Picture Production Code and its influence on cinematic sensuality in a post-talkie context. In 1929, Thalberg would write “General Principles to Cover the Preparation of a Revised Code of Ethics for Talking Pictures” on behalf of a three-person subcommittee, thus informing the industry’s adoption of a formal Production Code in 1930. These Principles outline Thalberg’s theorization of how studios could engage with the issue of regulation while still maintaining their commitment to “entertainment value.” The chapter takes these General Principles – and Thalberg’s extemporaneous defence of them at a 1930 meeting of the Association of Motion Picture Producers – as a lens through which to consider early-Code films such as Norma Shearer vehicle The Divorcée (Leonard, 1930) and Anita Loos-penned Red-Headed Woman (Conway, 1932), starring Jean Harlow.

Anita Loos: The Soubrette of Satire

2014 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 87-109
Author(s):  
Kristine Somerville ◽  
Speer Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Anita Loos

scholarly journals Honey, You Know I Can’t Hear You When You Aren’t in the Room

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 69-78
Author(s):  
Rosanne Welch
Keyword(s):  
Women Characters ◽  
First Century ◽  
Female Voice ◽  
Qualitative Case Studies ◽  
Joan Didion ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
Dorothy Parker ◽  
History Of ◽  
Female Writers ◽  
Anita Loos

The need for more diversity in Hollywood films and television is currently being debated by scholars and content makers alike, but where is the proof that more diverse writers will create more diverse material? Since all forms of art are subjective, there is no perfect way to prove the importance of having female writers in the room except through samples of qualitative case studies of various female writers across the history of film. By studying the writing of several female screenwriters – personal correspondence, interviews and their writing for the screen – this paper will begin to prove that having a female voice in the room has made a difference in several prominent films. It will further hypothesise that greater representation can only create greater opportunity for more female stories and voices to be heard.  Research for my PhD dissertation ‘Married:  With Screenplay’ involved the work of several prominent female screenwriters across the first century of filmmaking, including Anita Loos, Dorothy Parker, Frances Goodrich and Joan Didion. In all of their memoirs and other writings about working on screenplays, each mentioned the importance of (often) being the lone woman in the room during pitches and during the development of a screenplay. Goodrich summarised all their experiences concisely when she wrote, ‘I’m always the only woman working on the picture and I hold the fate of the women [characters] in my hand… I’ll fight for what the gal will or will not do, and I can be completely unfeminine about it.’ Also, the rise of female directors, such as Barbra Streisand or female production executives, such as Kathleen Kennedy, prove that one of the greatest assets to having a female voice in the room is the ability to invite other women inside. Therefore, this paper contributes to the scholarship on women in film and to authorship studies. 

In Behalf of the Feminine Side of the Commercial Stage: The Institute of the Woman's Theatre and Stagestruck Girls

2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Folino White
Keyword(s):  
Vice President ◽  
Safety Net ◽  
Public Accounting ◽  
Office Staff ◽  
Box Office ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Commercial Theatre ◽  
Rachel Crothers ◽  
Anita Loos ◽  
Mary Pickford

By Mabel Rowland's public accounting, the Institute of the Woman's Theatre helped hundreds of so-called stagestruck girls realize their ambitions by providing a safety net for the pitfalls of the commercial theatre. The organization, officially established in 1926 and in operation until roughly 1930, was said to have begun years earlier, “the outgrowth of a group which was formed in 1910 and used to meet in the Fitzgerald Building.” As president, Rowland—a press agent, well-known comedic monologist, and all-around theatre factotum—was supported by society women and a cadre of famous female writers and performers, including Florence Reed, who served as Vice President, and charter members Julia Arthur, Irene Castle, Rachel Crothers, Helen Hayes, Violet Heming, Elsie Janis, Anita Loos, Mary Pickford, and Mary Shaw, plus about a dozen more. At the time of its official founding, the institute announced that it would undertake three activities. First, it sought to establish aprofessionalBroadway theatre as exclusively a women's operation, employing female playwrights, designers, directors, managers, producers, box-office staff, and so forth: “The only men who will be connected with the enterprise … are the actors and stagehands.” Second and third, the institute would give “aid and advice to girls from out of town who think they have something to offer the theater, read scripts and give opinions thereon, and in other ways labor in behalf of the feminine side of the stage.” The institute's goal of a theatre in tandem with discovering talented women looked to create a meaningful shift in women's inclusion and power within commercial theatre.

Authoring Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: Mass-Market Beauty Culture and the Makeup of Writers

Prospects ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 431-460 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean Marie Lutes
Keyword(s):  
Young Woman ◽  
Mass Market ◽  
Beauty Culture ◽  
A Priority ◽  
Anita Loos ◽  
Alter Ego ◽  
As If

Lorelei Lee, the “professional lady” who narrates her own adventures in the 1925 international bestseller Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, is not a likely alter ego for an aspiring writer. Indifferent to most books and unlikely to indulge in introspection, Lorelei makes writing far less a priority than managing social invitations and sexual conquests. Accordingly, Anita Loos, the author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, went to considerable lengths to distance herself from her blonde-bombshell narrator. As if to acknowledge and enforce such distance, Loos has Lorelei remark offhandedly in the opening pages of the book, “It would be strange if I turn out to be an authoress.” The novel's first edition highlights the incongruity of Lorelei's status as author, illustrating this remark with a drawing of a wide-eyed young woman clutching a pen and bending over a ruffle-skirted vanity table. She is dressed for writing in a pair of highheeled slippers, a sheer, rose-trimmed negligee, and a frilly bed cap tied under her chin. Years later, a publicity still for the musical version of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes continued to emphasize the distinction by juxtaposing a seated, conservatively clad Loos with the standing figure of Carol Channing as Lorelei Lee, elaborately gowned and dripping with diamonds. As the photograph suggests, Loos carefully positioned herself in opposition to the glamour girl whose appearance has since been labeled “the most significant event in the evolution of the dumb blonde” (Everett, 254).

Lorelei's Doomed Performance: Anita Loos and the American Dream

Prospects ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 547-568 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Silverman
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
American Dream ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
The Public ◽  
Nineteenth Amendment ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Horatio Alger ◽  
Anita Loos

When Anita Loos wrote her best-selling novels, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) and But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (1928), American women were in a state of flux. Buoyed by the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, many middle-class and upper-class women expected to play a larger role in public life. Nonetheless, men expected women to undertake the same roles of wife and mother as women of previous generations — a demand that put many women and men in conflict. While suffrage had not eliminated the myths and beliefs that bound women earlier in the century, women believed they had tools similar to those implicitly endorsed by Horatio Alger, such as education and determination, to enable them to move into the public sphere.

Anita Loos Rediscovered:Full Treatments and Fiction

2007 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 67-69
Author(s):  
Loos Anita ◽  
Dickison Stephanie
Keyword(s):  
Anita Loos
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