feminism has made a particular mission
of doing so, starting with poets and nov-
elists, who were in some ways the eas-
iest to find again. There were so many
of them, their work had (mostly) sur-
vived in libraries, and feminist scholars
soon began pumping out theories on
how to rethink the canon based on such
rediscoveries. Sometimes the work was
itself a revelation. Zora Neale Hurston
had been well and truly forgotten until
Alice Walker published her article “In
Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” in Ms.,
in 1975. And sometimes the fascination
lay in the sheer unlikelihood of such an
author existing at all, amid the most in-
auspicious circumstances: a houseful of
children, a ne’er-do-well husband, a spin-
dly desk in a drafty hallway.
The challenges of tracking down lost
female moviemakers, on the other hand,
have been both material and theoreti-
cal. Only a small portion of the movies
made in the silent era, when women
were particularly active behind the cam-
era, still exist. Many silent films were
allowed to disintegrate or were purpose-
fully discarded or destroyed, sometimes
by the very studios that had produced
them. Fires took others—silver nitrate,
the compound in early film stock which
makes the images shimmer, is so flam-
mable that a tightly wound roll of such
film can burn even submerged in water.
As the film historian David Pierce writes,
the industry considered “new pictures
always better than the old ones,” which
had very little commercial value, and so
many films “simply did not last long
enough for anyone to be interested in
preserving them.”
Trying to figure out who actually
worked on films is not as easy as you
might think. Credits were assigned
haphazardly in the early days of film-
making. Then, too, the first generation
of feminist film scholars, in the nineteen-
seventies, didn’t tend to look for evi-
dence of women exercising creative or
administrative authority in Hollywood,
because they wouldn’t have expected to
find it: they were preoccupied with theo-
rizing the male gaze. And auteur theory
had little time for creative figures other
than the director.
In the tendentious but mostly per-
suasive book “Nobody’s Girl Friday:
The Women Who Ran Hollywood”
(Oxford), J. E. Smyth, a film historian
at the University of Warwick, docu-
ments the movie-production jobs that
women succeeded in, even after the si-
lent era. In fact, she argues, they held
such jobs in greater numbers between
1930 and 1950 than they would for de-
cades after. Although there were few
women directors left at the height of
the studio system (you can basically
count them on two fingers: Dorothy
Arzner and Ida Lupino), Smyth tots up
an impressive array of women film ed-
itors, costume designers, talent agents,
screenwriters, producers, Hollywood
union heads, and behind-the-scenes
machers whose titles—executive secre-
tary to a studio head, for instance—be-lied their influence. It’s little wonder
that studios of the era catered to female
audiences, with scripts built around the
commanding presence of such actresses
as Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, and
with stories thought to reflect women’s
prevailing concerns. Smyth quotes Davis,
who pulled enough weight in Holly-
wood to have been dubbed the Fourth
Warner: “Women owned Hollywood
for twenty years,” she said in a 1977 inter-
view, so “we must not be bitter.” Smyth
may have a point when she says that
academics and media critics, intently
depicting “the industry as monolithi-
cally male and hell-bent on disem-
powering women,” sometimes over -
looked the women who thrived there.
Smyth burrows enthusiastically into
humble sources that, she suggests, other
scholars have looked down on: studio
phone directories, in-house newsletters.
Researchers on similar quests have come
upon evidence in still more unlikely
forms and places. Reels of film forgot-
ten or lost sometimes turn up ran-
domly—interred in an archive in New
Zealand, or sealed into a swimming pool
in a remote town in the Yukon. Esther
Eng was a Cantonese-American direc-
tor who lived openly as a lesbian and,
in the nineteen-thirties and forties, made
Chinese-language films with titles like
“Golden Gate Girl” and “It’s a Wom-
en’s World” (the latter of which had an
all-female cast of thirty-six). Sadly, very
little of Eng’s cinematic work still ex-
ists, but her photo albums, discovered
in a San Francisco dumpster in 2006,
became the basis of a documentary by
the filmmaker S. Louisa Wei. Pamela B.
Green, the director of the 2018 docu-
mentary “Be Natural: The Untold Story
of Alice Guy-Blaché,” tracked down
photos and letters of the director’s that
distant relatives had stashed in card-
board boxes in garages and basements,
on the hunch that Tante Alice had been
an extraordinary person.M
allory O’Meara, a young horror-
movie writer and producer, is the
author of “ The Lady from the Black
Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the
Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick” (Ha-
nover Square), an intermittently enter-
taining and exhausting work about
rediscovering the stylish life and scary
“Fine, I’ll get up and feed you! No need to get the lawyers involved.” art of its heroine. Patrick designed the