Latitude in Mass-Produced Culture's Capital: New Women and Other Players in Hollywood, 1920-1941

Frontiers, 2004 by Abrams, Brett L

Scholars have noted that the images of women in the media changed significantly during the 1920s and 1930s. The dominant image of the "New Woman" during the 1920s was the flapper. While flappers enjoyed greater freedom in consumption and sexual awareness, much of their consumption and sexual gratification focused on pleasing males, not on engaging in same-sex sexuality. The flapper embraced a career for herself until she got married and rarely acted in other ways that defied the newly established gender norms of the era.6 Images of women who defied the culture's dominant images, such as matrons, faced ridicule for representing Victorian rather than "modern" gender and sexual attitudes.7 Figures who challenged sexual norms in literature of the era sparked censorship efforts, despite appearing as miserable characters who experienced emotional turmoil and became outcasts or suicide victims or who engaged in self-loathing and despair.8 Despite the occasional movie that showed a successful independent woman, during the period before the establishment of the Production Code Administration in the mid-1930s, most of the adulterers, gold diggers, and other "fallen women" met unfortunate ends or were forced to redeem themselves at the end of the movie.9

Scholars writing in the 19805 and 19905, including Vito Russo and Andrea Weiss, have observed that in most Hollywood productions from the early 1910s to the mid-1970s, homosexuals led lonely lives, experienced derision, and sometimes became victims of murder or suicide. Lesbians appeared as vampires who preyed upon innocent younger women.10 Historians of the movie industry noted few instances of nonconformist imagery in news about the movie industry. Generally, they determined that the industry viewed these images as detrimental to the business and observed that the industry covered up gender and sexual nonconformity by mainstreaming the images.11

The depictions of Hollywood players created by the movie studio publicity departments, their movie-making personnel, newspaper and magazine reporters, and other observers of the movie industry belied the findings regarding the types of urban spaces available to nonconformists and their presentation within the media. The Hollywood players of the 1920s and 1930s illustrated that within the Los Angeles environs people engaged in alternative gender and sexual behaviors and used nightclubs, homes, parties, and studio lots as locations where they could act upon their interests. The media images depicted these figures throughout the period. The players appeared successful in their personal and professional careers, indicating that the capital of the world's mass-produced culture had a unique relationship to the "New Woman" and other gender and sexual nonconformists of the era.

NIGHTSPOTS

The Café International nightclub appeared on one of Hollywood's most magical streets, Sunset Boulevard. During the 1920s Hollywood's population quadrupled as the area expanded west through Beverly Hills and north into the San Fernando Valley. Los Angeles developed a manufacturing base in automobiles and aircraft, expanded its oil refinery industry, and emerged as one of the top tourist locations in the country. Los Angeles also developed the Mediterranean and Spanish Revival architectural styles and Southland literature. Movie-making became the eleventh largest industry in the nation. The large studios transformed the "barn" structures of the early 1910s into the series of buildings and sets behind tall gates, giving the studios the look of fiefdoms. The production wings of the big eight studios functioned like factories. Each studio employed nearly three thousand people, and a single department, such as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's makeup department, could handle twelve hundred actors in an hour.