One of the Year’s Best Film Books Celebrates the Unsung Artists That Turned ‘The Women’ Into a Classic

In 1939, George Cukor suffered a professional blow when he was fired as the director of “Gone With the Wind” thanks to star Clark Gable’s opposition to working with the openly gay filmmaker. According to Cukor biographer Patrick McGilligan, Cukor was given his walking papers after Gable had trouble remembering his lines and blamed it on the fact that he was being directed by a “fairy.” ““I can’t go on with this picture,” Gable reportedly screamed. “I have to work with a real man!”

Yet not only did Cukor refuse to let his termination from “Wind” damage his career, he turned the very attributes that Gable saw as drawbacks — his homosexuality and sensitivity to female performers (among other things, Gable wasn’t happy about the attention Cukor lavished on costar Vivien Leigh) — into assets when he moved over to MGM’s “The Women.” A razor-sharp comedy filled with some of the best actresses of their era (Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Joan Fontaine, Paulette Goddard, Norma Shearer and more) and not a single line of dialogue spoken by a man, “The Women” turned out to be not only Cukor’s salvation but one of the best movies from a year (1939) considered by some to be the greatest year in Hollywood history.

It’s also one of the best examples ever of what film historian Thomas Schatz referred to as “The Genius of the System,” a collaborative effort that pooled all of MGM’s resources and many of the studio’s finest technicians to create a masterpiece that would be unthinkable with any of the key personnel removed from the equation. While auteurists can find plenty to identify “The Women” as a George Cukor picture (it has visual and thematic motifs that would carry on through his career all the way up to and including his final movie, 1981’s “Rich and Famous”), it’s just as much an expression of the personalities and preoccupations of screenwriters Anita Loos and Jane Murfin, costume designer Adrian, production designer Cedric Gibbons, and hair stylist Sydney Guilaroff — not to mention all the actors whose personal lives and competitive relationships with each other informed the shape “The Women” would ultimately take.

All of this is comprehensively explored in and brilliantly explained by Illeana Douglas‘ new book “Jungle Red: The Making of MGM’s ‘The Women,'” one of the most entertaining and enlightening books ever written on a single film. Douglas’ approach is informed equally by her background as an actor (“Cape Fear,” “Grace of My Heart”) and her work as a film historian for Turner Classic Movies; her filmmaking experience gives her the ability to clearly convey all the complex machinations at work on a film set, but what makes the book special is the way she combines this intimate firsthand knowledge with a historian’s broader perspective.

The result is not simply a rigorously researched and often hilarious account of the day-to-day process of making “The Women” (though it is that), but a vital work of film history that addresses larger issues like the nature of collaboration, the ways in which film production and film publicity are intertwined, and women’s power (or lack of it) in the studio system and how its use (and sometimes, abuse) informs the art they create. For Douglas, looking back at “The Women” was a way to wrestle with contemporary issues relating to women and their place in Hollywood.

“I was interested in the idea of writing about female empowerment circa 1939 and comparing it to today,” Douglas told IndieWire. “All of the women in the movie had a sense of their own destiny, and none of them were afraid of embracing being a bitch. And being a bitch in 1939 was a good thing. It always fascinated me that working with so many female directors in the 1990s, it took on a negative connotation and women couldn’t be bitches anymore. And now I think they’re not sure what their role is.”

Indeed, some of the most compelling aspects of “Jungle Red” are Douglas’ descriptions of each actor’s background and reason for doing — or resisting — the movie, and her explanation of how genuine antagonisms like a competition between Crawford and Shearer were exploited by both Cukor and MGM publicists to the advantage of the film. There are also hilarious passages in which we learn how the film’s iconic costumes often resulted from gown designer Adrian’s subtle manipulations of both the talent and the studio brass, and a whole crash course in MGM’s corporate history in the age of wunderkind executive Irving Thalberg and his aftermath.

Above all, however, “Jungle Red” is a celebration of women artists, many of whom never really received their due credit. “I always want to be a champion of writing about women’s history,” Douglas said. “One of the reasons I wanted to write about ‘The Women’ is that nobody thinks it’s an important film.” While Douglas scrupulously avoids conventional wisdom and provides new insights into famous figures like Crawford, Fontaine, and Shearer, she also pays tribute to significant artists whose names have been forgotten, like co-screenwriter Jane Murfin.

“Jane Murfin was a worker bee,” Douglas said. “She basically invented a whole genre of dog films with the ‘Strongheart’ series, but Rin Tin Tin, who came later, got all the credit. And her partner at the time, Lawrence Trimble, wrote a book and barely mentioned her, even though she was really his co-director on the movies. Time and time again, women don’t seem to be credited properly because men are very conscious of history right from the get-go and make sure they’re writing everything down and getting the credit for it. Women seem to be just so thrilled to have a job that they don’t take their careers that seriously.”

‘The Women’Courtesy Everett Collection

While researching “The Women,” Douglas found that it was not only a story of several formidable women coming together to make a movie, but of gay men at a time when to be out in Hollywood was a fireable offense. “One thing people don’t write about in their books on MGM is the studio’s incredibly gay sensibility,” Douglas said. “Cedric Gibbons, Adrian, Sydney Guilaroff…they were making massive creative decisions for each film, and they were all gay men, and everybody who worked for them was gay.”

Ironically, Cukor felt typecast by the success of “The Women” and didn’t talk much about the movie in later interviews. “He made such a successful film that it pigeonholed him as a gay director and a women’s director, so he downplayed it,” Douglas said. “In his canon of films people always leave off ‘The Women,’ which is so interesting since it has all of his great sensibilities in it.”

One of the many ways in which Douglas’ book offers a new perspective on “The Women” is to properly situate it in Cukor’s oeuvre as not only a film better than its reputation, but one of Cukor’s flat-out masterpieces — and certainly the film in which he had the greatest number of complex personalities to wrangle and orchestrate. Yet while Douglas doesn’t shy away from the more sensationalistic aspects of the film’s making — like an infamous catfight between Russell and Goddard that was more or less real — her greatest gift as a writer is her talent for simultaneously honoring the melodrama and the more down-to-earth nature of her subjects’ lives.

“There was a bittersweet quality to everything that I was writing about,” Douglas said, not only when it came to figures like F. Scott Fitzgerald (who wrote an early draft of “The Women” and could never work successfully in Hollywood) but the stars of “The Women,” who had more in common than they acknowledged. “Joan Crawford and Norma Shearer were both cradle robbers. Norma Shearer had an affair with Mickey Rooney when she was 38 and he was 18, and Joan Crawford had a similar affair with Jackie Cooper.”

Douglas luxuriates in the juicy gossip about these actresses without losing sight of their very relatable aspirations and neuroses, and therein lies the key to her book’s greatness. “Crawford and Shearer both hated each other, yet they were very, very similar,” Douglas said, zeroing in on her own sensibility as a film historian and the core quality that’s most intoxicating about “Jungle Red.” “As an actress myself who has been on a lot of film sets, I wanted to bring the humanity to all of these people who we see as larger than life personalities.”

“Jungle Red: The Making of MGM’s ‘The Women'” will be available on September 15 from Lyons Books.