by ERIN MCGUIRL
This essay is part of a slow research series, What is Research? Learn about the series and click here to add your voice to the conversation.
Research is part of the history of Hollywood’s Golden age. Eighty years ago, in the heyday of the studio system, little libraries on studio lots employed a handful of people who collaborated with writers, directors, producers, and designers to dig up the details that made the movies look and sound authentic. Studio researchers made sure that audiences were focused on the story, not the modern look of a movie set in the nineteenth century.
Research departments were dominated by white women, and they weren’t the only places on the lot to be so. The stenographic, typing, and story departments were also staffed largely this way, and these denizens of Hollywood are the subject of my research in the Harry Ransom Center’s David O. Selznick Collection. “Selznick kept everything” is the catch phrase of the collection, and for good reason. His studio’s archive is remarkable for preserving Head of Research Lillian K. Deighton’s memos to Selznick and creative staff, secretaries’ annotated copies of draft screenplays, payroll records for stenographic staff, applications for work in the research department. Deighton was no Gloria Swanson—there isn’t much glamor in these corners of the Selznick Collection—but she and the women she worked with made their marks on the movies nevertheless.
In 1938, the Museum of Modern Art held an exhibition entitled, “The Making of a Contemporary Film,” and it prominently featured Selznick’s production of Tom Sawyer (Dir. Norman Taurog, 1938) of the same year. Materials compiled by Deighton and her staff were exhibited, and records like the document above show that she was also involved in organizing the exhibition. The historical note in the American Film Institute’s catalog entry for Tom Sawyer highlights the extensive research undertaken for its planning and production, noting that “the studio’s research department was said to have consulted over one hundred sources in order to insure [sic] the authenticity of the setting and the characters in the film,” including Twain’s Life on the Mississippi and late nineteenth-century schoolbooks. Records of work done by Deighton and her staff on Tom Sawyer (and dozens more films) survive at the Ransom Center, yet AFI cites Bernard De Voto, H. L. Mencken, and Albert Bigelow Paine as consultant experts without acknowledging Deighton.
Selznick’s secretary Barbara Keon was copied on the same memo, and evidence of her contributions also survive in the Selznick archive. Secretaries and typists are the physical creators of the lion’s share of documents in corporate archives of all kinds, yet they are almost never credited, nor have their roles been examined through the primary source materials that they left behind in archives like Selznick’s. Secretarial and stenographic labor has never moved beyond the caricature of the sexualized and subservient—and typically young and husband-hunting—woman behind a typewriter in the popular imagination, and scholarly writing in film has ignored them entirely with a few exceptions. Yet the record shows that women working in Hollywood studios were engaged in intellectually demanding work that required an expert command of the English language, editorial skills, deep knowledge of writing for the screen and of the movie making process, and technical proficiency with typewriters and duplicating machines. These skills fall into a category that I call printerly labor: work having to do with the creative generation and physical production of rigidly formatted, well edited, printed matter.
Research is part of the history of Hollywood’s Golden age. Eighty years ago, in the heyday of the studio system, little libraries on studio lots employed a handful of people who collaborated with writers, directors, producers, and designers to dig up the details that made the movies look and sound authentic. Studio researchers made sure that audiences were focused on the story, not the modern look of a movie set in the nineteenth century.
—ERIN MCGUIRL
Typists—who might also be secretaries or scenario assistants—were charged with producing screenplays out of often messy, perhaps incomplete manuscripts or from dictation. Secretaries, especially those working with producers, directors, and screenwriters, were cinematic story experts. A 1936 article in the New York Times encouraged writers to head to Hollywood even without experience writing for the screen because their secretaries were experts who knew “all about screen technique, camera angles, exits, suspense, climax, and the clinch and fade-out to full orchestra music.”[1] We see this playing out in Selznick’s archive. Lydia Schiller, an assistant in the story department, annotated this copy of Little Women (Dir. George Cukor, 1933), and her pencil traces show her at work revising dialogue and comparing different versions of the script with Louisa May Alcott’s novel.
Recognizing the labor of Hollywood’s researchers and secretaries not only refines our understanding of the history of the studio system, it also contributes to the history of American print production in the twentieth century. As a bibliographer and a librarian, the latter have been my foremost professional concerns for over a decade. Most of my peers in bibliography—defined as “the branch of historical scholarship that examines any aspect of the production, dissemination, and reception of handwritten and printed books as physical objects”[2]—study, teach, and write about Western printed matter made with moveable type on a hand-powered press. When I learned bibliographical description and analysis, I learned a lot about how old books were made. Yet, while old books open windows into the past through their materiality and the words on their pages, it wasn’t a past that I was devoted to studying. As a twentieth-century woman with a background in art history and film studies, print shops that looked like the ones in 16th century printer Josse Bade’s trademark were interesting, but they weren’t my research.
Screenplays are book-like objects produced for controlled circulation in fairly large numbers in a completely different sort of print shop. Unlike the handpress printed books on which I cut my bibliographical teeth, these were overwhelmingly produced by working class white women with typewriters, not men with founts of lead type and giant wooden presses. Better yet, screenplays (or scripts) as objects are not ends in themselves, but carefully crafted texts designed to be transformed into a creative work in another medium.
The product of research is inevitably defined by how the researcher looks at their subject. Training in bibliography—specifically analytical and feminist approaches—helps me to see all forms of textual production as rigorous and demanding, especially because not everyone does it well. (Spend time with some midcentury screenwriters’ archives and you’ll see that pretty quickly.) Recognizing the work done by secretaries in the twentieth century demands that we value their work the same way that we do similar work done by early modern men in print shops. As researchers, typists, and secretaries, women who performed printerly labor helped make the movies.
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[1] Idwal Jones, “The Muse Never Dies,” New York Times (December 27, 1936).
[2] G. Thomas Tanselle, “Bibliography Defined,” website of Bibliographical Society of America (2020). Tanselle’s Bibliographical Analysis: An Historical Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2009) offers an excellent and expansive introduction at a quick 176 pages.
