FILM journalist Helen O'Hara's new book Women vs Hollywood: The Fall and Rise of Women in Film explores how and why scores of pioneering female film-makers suddenly found themselves sidelined and literally written out of history as the movie business they helped to create became increasingly successful.
In the current era of #MeToo and #EnoughIsEnough, Hollywood has never been under greater pressure to platform a much more diverse range of film talent across the full spectrum of gender, race and sexuality.
Part of that 'healing' process will be to recognise where things went wrong in the past: for example, why are important female film-making figures of the early 20th century like director Alice Guy-Blaché and director/screenwriter Lois Weber less well known than male contemporaries like DW Griffith and Cecil B DeMille, despite being central to the 'Hollywood story'?
O'Hara's painstakingly researched book finds her delving into archives which are still being pieced together by the likes of Columbia University's Women Film Pioneers Project to uncover the stories of American film's 'forgotten' female directors, producers and actors.
It charts how these highly creative women were adversely affected by the transition from the collaborative low-budget early silent films of the 1890s/1900s to the increasingly investor-driven commercially orientated movies of the 1910s, the arrival of the 'talkies' in the 1920s/30s and on to the establishment of the contract-based and male-dominated 'studio' system of the 1940s, as well as the impact of the myth of the male director as 'auteur' and America's prevailingly patriarchal (not to mention racist and homophobic) society and culture.
"It's a bit of an introduction in some ways," explains O'Hara, who is editor at large with monthly film bible Empire.
"I'm not an historian so I was kind of relying on a lot of people who are, but I wanted to gather a lot of the information in one place, basically and hopefully give people an idea of the sweep of the problem.
"I'm not saying women were the majority of film directors and producers at that time, but they absolutely did exist in large numbers and some of them were very important. By some estimates up to 50 per cent of screenwriters [of the silent era] were women.
"Director Lois Weber was paid more than most of the men in Hollywood at the time, while Alice Guy-Blaché made around 1,000 films and was at the forefront of the art – she was head of production for [Paris-based] Gaumont studios and experimented with making colour films and sound films in the 1890s and 1900s, which is just crazy.
Indeed, many agree that Alice Guy (as she was then) directed the first ever narratively-based feature way back in 1896, when the amateur drama-lover was still a secretary for pioneering French film-maker Leon Gaumont.
"The earliest films were just 'slice of life' stuff – the Lumiere brothers pointing a camera at people getting on a train or whatever – but Alice was the first one who thought 'we can film these little plays', explains O'Hara of the world's first ever female film director who later established Solax Studios in the US, making her the first ever female studio owner.
"It's kind of miraculous that she then just went and did it, literally borrowed a camera for an afternoon and made a 40 second-long film using cardboard scenery."
The author adds: "With any luck, I hope that they will go on and read some of these women's biographies and actually learn more about them than I had space for in the book. There are some fascinating stories out there."
There certainly are: in fact, film-maker Pamela B Green directed an acclaimed documentary on Alice Guy-Blaché, Be Natural, in 2018. However, Hollywood has yet to capitalise on its own hidden history in terms of Oscar-fodder biopics.
"During my research I spoke to Mimi Leder about her experiences as a director, as she was one of the first women to do a big budget action movie with The Peacemaker," O'Hara tells me.
"She said she'd tried for years to get a biopic about [back-to-back Oscar-winning early Hollywood screenwriter] Frances Marion off the ground and absolutely no-one was interested."
This illustrates the legacy of another long-standing problem in Hollywood: male investors have been historically reluctant to fund female-fronted/centric film projects.
"As films got longer they got more expensive to make which meant you suddenly needed outside investors – and they just weren't willing to invest in women," explains O'Hara of how he rapid growth of the film business through the early 1900s created an increasingly patriarchal environment.
"Alice and Lois both worked with their husbands and, reading between the lines, they were basically their 'frontmen' that the male investors would talk to while they got on with it behind the scenes. Once their marriages fell apart, they no longer had that buffer, and so men no longer wanted to work with them."
O'Hara adds: "Most of the women [in the business] were pretty much pushed out by 1921/22. A couple held out for longer, but really were pretty much gone by the sound era. And when the industry was attempting to encourage people to convert their cinemas to play sound and put in all this expensive equipment, they sort of made fun of silent movies.
"It became a thing to re-cut them with silly voice-overs, which had the side-effect of erasing the contribution that a lot of the women film-makers of the silent era had made. It was seen as somewhat embarrassing, that if women had been involved it must be 'amateurish' almost by definition."
Happily, over the past few years, Hollywood has faced searing criticism for its myriad failings when it comes to the treatment and representation of women and minority groups both on and off camera.
O'Hara says was part of her motivation in writing her book was to try and frame the industry's ongoing 'conversations' about gender, race and sexuality in a relevant historical context.
"It was really important to have a chapter in there about censorship and the way that it has shaped what is seen as being 'okay' and 'not okay' in American film-making – in particular how it shaped the careers of women of colour who were never allowed to play a love scene with a white man.
"Inter-racial relationships were outlawed in the censorship rules of the 1930s, which was hugely damaging to the careers of people like Dorothy Dandridge and Lena Horne – and is still kind of shaping who gets cast today."
However, while she admits that it would be all too easy to become depressed by the never-ending stream of reports about how Hollywood has discriminated against and outright abused women and others over the years, O'Hara tells me that she's trying to remain optimistic that things will get better as we mover forward into a more inclusive era of film-making.
"It's a little bit relentless sometimes when you're hearing the same complaints over and over again, but at the same time that awareness and that vocalness is beginning to slowly change attitudes.
"People are at least now having the conversation in a way they wouldn't have done before, and they wouldn't have worried about before. So I do have hope.
"[Just] talking about this stuff is absolutely not enough – but it is a necessary first step towards actually doing something about it."
:: Helen O'Hara will be in conversation with Kathy Clugston on Tuesday November 9 at QFT Belfast as part of the Belfast Film Festival. Tickets and full programme information available via Belfastfilmfestival.org. Women Vs Hollywood: The Fall and Rise of Women in Film is out now, published by Robinson.
