Dorothy Arzner, Pioneer, Queer, Feminist
Director, Clara and Julia Kuperberg
Dorothy Arzner was Hollywood’s most powerful director, though History has forgotten her.
She began working in the film industry at 19 as a “cutter” before the advent of editors, and gradually worked her way up through the studio system. Determined and ambitious, she was accepted as a director at Paramount, as the first woman to direct a talking picture for the star Clara Bow. A true pioneer of the cinema, she was the only woman director at a major Hollywood studio in the 1930s and 1940s, openly lesbian, dressed like a man, making movies “avant-gardiste” about women condition. She was a mentor for Francis Ford Coppola, who considers her as one of the most important woman directors of Hollywood.