Dorothy Emma Arzner was born in San Francisco, California, on January 3, 1897 – October 1, 1979. She was an American film director whose career in Hollywood spanned from the silent era of the 1920s into the early 1940s. From 1927 until her retirement from feature directing in 1943, Arzner was the only female director working in Hollywood. Additionally, she was one of a very few number of women able to establish a successful and long career in Hollywood as a film director until the 1970s. Arzner parents Jenetter and Louis Arzner restaurant was the first place Arzner came into contact with Hollywood elite; it was frequented by many silent film stars and directors, including Mary Pickford, Mack Sennett, and Douglas Fairbanks. After finishing high school at the Westlake School for Girls in Los Angeles, she enrolled at the University of Southern California, where she spent two years studying medicine with hopes of becoming a doctor. During World War I she joined a local Southern California ambulance unit. After spending a summer working in the office of a respected surgeon however, Arzner decided that she did not want a career in medicine. "I wanted to be like Jesus," she said. "'Heal the sick and raise the dead,' instantly, without surgery, pills, et cetera." Dorothy Arzner directed around 20 films over the course of her 24 years in show business. She taught Francis Ford Coppola, directed Katharine Hepburn and Joan Crawford and became the first female member of the Director’s Guide Association (DGA). But somehow, for all her pioneering work, Arzner has been largely forgotten. As Morton laments, “type the name "Dorothy Arzner" into Netflix's search bar and you'll get zero results.” Arzner got her start in the film business in 1919 typing scripts as a stenographer at the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, which later became Paramount Pictures. Soon she made the jump to film editor. In 1927, Arzner helmed her first feature, a silent movie called Fashions for Women that followed the antics of a Parisian cigarette girl named Lulu. At the time, the industry was in the midst of a transition from silent films to “talkies,” which Arzner seems to have navigated quite seamlessly. On the set of one of Paramount’s first talking films, The Wild Party, she tied a microphone to a fishing pole to put nervous silent film star Clara Bow at ease and get better audio in effect inventing the first boom microphone. Leaving Paramount to work as a freelancer after five films, Arzner went on to direct a slew of films that featured high profile stars, including Hepburn, Crawford, and Lucille Ball. Arzner, a shorthaired, boyish director, preferred to wear pants, which led some to speculate about her relationships with female stars. Arzner never spoke about her sexual orientation, but she lived openly with a female companion, choreographer Marion Morgan, for most of her life. “Arzner was often depicted in the popular press as a woman for whom her career came first,”. As a woman in a male dominated industry, Arzner challenged conventions and still succeeded in Hollywood's studio system. In 1943, an unspecified illness forced her to abandon her last work and leave Hollywood. Later on, Arzner directed a few short films and taught at UCLA, but today her notoriety is restricted to film nerds. Nevertheless, she remains among the most prolific American female film directors ever.

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