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This chapter offers a reading of Anita Loos's 1925 novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, with particular emphasis on its creation of a distinct style that incorporates the kinds of linguistic projects modernism cast as unpleasure into a more buoyant form of vernacular textuality. Like modernist writers such as James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, Loos changed reading practices, but she did so without resorting to strategies of unpleasure. Her narrative innovation in both film and literature pivots around the profusion, rather than the curtailment, of pleasure. The language of Blondes and its visual qualities are drawn from the distinctive voice Loos developed ten years earlier within silent film. This chapter explores the way Loos demonstrates how acts of cultural classification (and their undoing) are themselves pleasurable. It also considers the influence of the 1916 film Intolerance on Loos and Blondes. For Loos, the modernist debate about pleasure is a source of amusement, creativity, and aesthetic play rather than a vexing problem; in this respect, she anticipates the movement beyond modernism, postmodernism.

Chapter 2 examines the politics of emotion and corporeality in Anita Loos’s 1925 satire of Jazz Age femininity, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Blondes is both a satire of a nineteenth-century sentimental novel and a sentimental novel in its own right. The chapter argues that such indeterminacy undergirds Loos’s send-up of the flapper as a figure whose interiority and exteriority are vitally opaque. Loos’s “more old fashioned girl” performs the flapper’s conflicted sexuality and exposes the gendered contradictions of Freudian psychoanalysis and the modernist language experiments exemplified by Gertrude Stein. The chapter connects the novel to contemporary legal debates about minimum wage and prostitution. It therefore argues that Blondes can also be seen as a mock manifesto, a companion piece to other period texts that tread an unclear line between irony and sincerity as they engage politicized discourse about women’s bodies.

Douglas Fairbanks was known for his physicality onstage as well as his all-American golden boy reputation. Fleming credited Fairbanks as showing him the “motion” in “motion pictures,” given that Fairbanks’s successes were mostly early action comedies or adventures. Fleming met Fairbanks while working under famed director D. W. Griffith, screenwriter Anita Loos, and actor/director John Emerson, the team who helped turn the stage actor into a screen celebrity. Fleming later became romantically involved with one of Fairbanks’s co-stars, actress Bessie Love. When Fairbanks and Griffiths parted ways, Fairbanks created the Douglas Fairbanks Pictures Corporation; Dwan and Emerson were production heads while Fleming was supervising cameraman.

Despite the excitement of a new love affair and the professional heights he achieved, Mencken remained depressed over the loss of his mother and was unable to work. To revive his optimism, Mencken headed off on a trip south, and ended up in Hollywood where he was reunited with actress Aileen Pringle. His subsequent disenchantment with the movie industry and the suicide of his friend, poet George Sterling, pushed him back home to Baltimore.

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.

Wordsmiths were torn between their desire for the creative control traditionally enjoyed by authors and the available economic security offered by working for the movies and writing scripts. Their story is a story of assimilation. When Hollywood entered the sound era a flock of writers, including Charles Brackett and Samson Raphaelson, emigrated to the city and to the world of motion pictures from other fields of writing such as theater and magazines. They oscillated between creative worlds, between East Coast and West Coast, and their previous experience shaped their response and interaction within the studios. The chapter demonstrates that while contending with an ignoble division of labor, which all but shattered the once respected authorial voice, screenwriters also carried with them some of the cultural capital and legitimacy of the more established worlds they came from.

This chapter takes a deep dive into the making of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, directed by Howard Hawks and co-starring Marilyn Monroe. Discussed are the differences in Russell and Monroe’s personalities, their rapport both onscreen and off, and the enduring appeal of the film. Issues relating to the PCA, Travilla’s costumes, and Monroe’s personality quirks are also discussed.

Between 1924 and 1954, Hollywood was, more than any other American business enterprise, enriched by women: women’s pictures, women audiences and fans, and women filmmakers. McLean, Head, McCall, Davis, Harrison, Hopper, and many other Hollywood women offered collaborative models of the studio system. These are difficult concepts for film historians to face. Recognizing that the Hollywood studio system enabled women’s careers between 1924 and 1954 forces a reconsideration of two ideologies that have held sway over American film and cultural history: the “great man” theory of film authorship, and the assumption that things for Hollywood’s women have improved over time, due to our faith in “progressive” history. Today, women trying to break into the industry are told that although things are difficult and women are not represented equally in the creative professions, the situation has improved since the bad old studio days. “Bunk!” as Bette Davis would have said.

This chapter explores the arduous task that writer Jane Ardmore went through when penning Mae Murray’s life story, The Self-Enchanted, in the late 1950s. Murray, living in a dream world, refused to acknowledge close family, dates, her first husband, and her early career. The chapter also explores what contemporaries Anita Loos and Dagmar Godowsky thought of the book and how Murray went around to Hollywood bookstores, even the Motion Picture Academy Library, and marked through phrases in copies of her book that offended her.

This chapter takes a deeper look at the comic symbolism behind the dame's hair color. Anita Loos's famous formulation of hair color to sexual destiny follows the notion that gentlemen may prefer blondes, but marry brunettes. The brunette is taken as the dame who not only enters into marriage, but seems to redefine it. The chapter thus looks at and compares the characters of blondes and brunettes, and gleams on each one's takes on marriage. In the case of the blondes: marriage for Harlow is desirable due to its association with respectability and economic security—it is exploited for her needs. For Lombard, marriage is a field of play. For Rogers, her portrayal as a bachelor mother was her most radical challenge to America's social imagination. In response, it looks at Myrna Loy, Jean Arthur, and Claudette Colbert and sees how their brunette characters played into the notion of the fast-talking dame.