Dorothy Arzner (January 3, 1897 - October 1, 1979) was a pioneering American film director. Her directorial career in feature films spanned from the late 1920s into the early 1940s, a time period in which there were very few—if any—other women working in the field.

Dorothy Arzner, the only women director during the "Golden Age" of Hollywood's studio system during the 1920s, 30s and early 40s and the woman director with the largest oeuvre in Hollywood to this day, was born on January 3, 1897 (some sources put the year as 1900) in San Francisco, California to a German-American father and a Scots mother. Raised in Los Angeles, her parents ran a café in L.A. featuring German cuisine that was frequented by silent film stars including the superstars 'Charlie Chaplin' and William S. Hart and direct Erich von Stroheim. Working as a waitress at her parents' restaurant, no one could have foreseen at the time that Arzner would be one of the few woman to break the glass-ceiling of directing, and the only to work during the early Sound era. In her 15-year career as a director, Dorothy Arzner made three silent movies and 14 pictures in the Sound Era from 1928 to 1943. Arzner's path to the director's chair was different that that of women directors in the future (indeed, different than that of most men, too). Directors know typically are graduates of film schools or are actors prior to directing. Like most of the directors of her generation, Arzner gained wide training in most aspects of filmmaking by working her way up from the bottom. It was the best way to become a filmmaker, she later believed. After graduating from high school in 1915, she entered the University of Southern California, where she was in the pre-med program for two years. When the United States entered World War One in 1917, Arzner was unable to realize her ambition of serving her country in a military capacity as there were no women's units in the armed forces at the time, so she served as an ambulance driver during the war. After the cessation of hostilities, Azner got a job on a newspaper. The director of her ambulance introduced her to film director 'William C. DeMille' (the brother of Cecil B. DeMille, one of the co-founders of Famous-Players-Lasky that eventually became known by the title of its distribution unit, Paramount Pictures). She decided to pursue a film career after visiting a movie set and being intrigued by the editing facilities. Azner decided that she would like to become a director (there was not the strict delineation between directing and editing in the immediate post war period that came to pass as the movie studios matured into a "factory" industrial production paradigm). Though she was the sole member of her gender to direct Hollywood pictures during the first generation of sound film, in the silent era, a woman aspiring to a career behind the camera was not a pipe-dream. The first movie in history was directed by a Frenchwoman, and many women were employed in Hollywood during the silent era, most frequently as scenario writers. (Some research indicates that as many as three-quarters of the scenario writers during the silent era, when there was no requirement for a screenplay as such as there was no dialogue, were women.) Indeed, there were women directors in the silent era, such as Frances Marion (more famous as a screenwriter) and Lois Weber, but Arzner was fated to be the only female director to have make a successful transition to the Sound Era. It wasn't until the 1930s and the verticalization of the industry, as it matured and consolidated, that women were squeezed out of production jobs in Hollywood. The introduction to William DeMille paid off when he hired her for the sum of $20 a week to be a stenographer. Arzner's first job for DeMille was typing up scripts at Famous Players-Lasky. She was reportedly a poor typist. Ambitious and possessed of a strong will, Arzner's offer to write synopses of various literary properties was taken up. Impressing DeMille and other Paramount powers-that-be, Arzner was assigned to Paramount's subsidiary Realart Films, where she worked cutting film. She was promoted to script-girl after one-year, which required her presence on the set to ensure the continuity of the script as shot by the director. She then was given a job cutting films. She excelled at cutting: As an editor (and she was the first Hollywood professionally credited as such on-screen), she worked on 52 films, working her way up from cutting the Bebe Daniels comedies to A-pictures within a couple of years. She came into her own as a filmmaker editing the Rudolph Valentino headliner "Blood and Sand" (1922), about a toreador. Her editing of the bullfighting scenes was highly praised, and she later said that she actually helmed the second-unit crew shooting some of the bullfight sequences. Director `James Cruze' was so impressed by her work on the Valentino picture, he brought her on to his team to edit "The Covered Wagon" (1923). Arzner eventually edited three other Cruze films, "Ruggles of Red Gap" (l923), "Merton of the Movies" (l924), and "Old Ironsides" (l926). Her work was of such quality that she received official screen credit as an editor, a first for any cutter or any gender. While collaborating with Cruze, she also wrote scenarios, scripting her ideas both solo and in collaboration. She was credited as a screenwriter (as well as an editor) on Cruze's "Old Ironsides", one of the more spectacular films of the late silent era, being partially shot in Magnascope, one of the earliest widescreen processes. Arzner would always credit Cruze as her mentor and role model. "Old Ironsides" proved to be the last film on which she was credited as an editor, as Arzner's ambitions to be become a director had reached full flood. To indulge her, Paramount gave her a job as an assistant director, for which she was happy: Happy, until she realized it was not a stepping stone to the director's chair. Azner was determined to sit in that chair. Arzner pressured Paramount to let her direct, threatening to leave the studio to work for Columbia Pictures on Poverty Row, which had offered her a job as a director. Unwilling to lose such a talented filmmaker, the Paramount brass relented, and she made her debut with "Fashions for Women" (1927). It was a hit. In the process of directing Paramount's first talkie, "Manhattan Cocktail" (1928), she made history by becoming the first woman to direct a sound picture. The success of her next sound picture, "The Wild Party" (1929), starring Paramount's top star, 'Clara Bow', helped establish 'Frederic March' as a movie star. Arzner proved adept at handling actresses. As Budd Schulberg related in his autobiography "Moving Pictures", Clara Bow -- a favorite of his father, studio boss B.P. Schulberg, had a thick Brooklyn accent that the silence of the pre-talkie era hid nicely from the audience. She was terrified of the transition to sound, and developed a fear of the microphone. Working with her sound crew, Arzner devised and used the first boom mike, attaching the microphone to a fish pole to follow Bow as she moved around the set. Arzner even used Bow's less-than-dulcet speaking tones to underscore the vivaciousness of her character. Though Arzner made several successful films for Paramount, the studio teetered on bankruptcy due to the Depression, eventually going into receivership (before being saved by the advent of another iconic woman, Mae West). When Paramount mandated a pay-cut for all studio employees, Arzner decided to go free-lance. R.K.O.-Radio Pictures hired her to direct its new star, headstrong young Katharine Hepburn, in her second starring film, "Christopher Strong" (1933). It was not a happy collaboration, as both women were strong and unyielding, but Arzner eventually prevailed. She was, after all, the boss on the set: The director. The fiercely independent Hepburn complained to R.K.O., but they backed the director against their star. Eventually, they settled into a working relationship, mutually respecting each other but remaining cold and distant from one another. Ironically, Arzner would display her directorial flair in elucidating the kind of competitive rivalries between women she experienced with Hepburn. The Directors Guild of America was established in 1933, and Arzner became the first woman. Indeed, she was the only female member of the DGA for many years. Arzner's films featured well-developed women characters, and she was known at the time of her work, quite naturally, as a director of "women's pictures". Not only did Arzner's movies portray the lives of strong, interesting women,her pictures are noted for elucidating the ambiguities of life. Since the rise of feminist scholarship in the 1960s, Arzner's movies are seen as challenging the dominant, phallocentric mores of the times. Arzner was a lesbian, who cultivated a masculine look in her clothes and appearance (some feel as camouflage to hide the boy's club that was Hollywood). Many gay critics discern a hidden gay subtext in her films, such as "Christopher Strong". Whereas feminist critics see a critique of gender inequality in "Christopher Strong", lesbian critics see a critique of heterosexuality itself as the source of a woman's troubles. The very private Azner, the woman who broke the glass ceiling and had to survive and indeed thrived in the all-male world of studio filmmaking, refused to be categorized as a woman or gay director, insisting she was simply a "director." She was right. Aside from Hepburn, Arzner did have less troubled and more productive collaborations with other actresses. She developed a close friendship with one of her female stars, Joan Crawford, whom she directed in two 1937 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer vehicles, "The Last of Mrs. Cheyney" and "The Bride Wore Red". Arzner later directed Pepsi commercials as a favor to Crawford's husband, Pepsi Cola Company's Chairman of the Board Alfred Steele. In 1943, Arzner joined other top Hollywood directors such as 'John Ford', 'George Stevens', and 'John Ford' in going to work for the U.S. war effort during World War Two Arzner made training films for the U.S. Army's Women's Army Corps (WACs). That same year, her health was compromised after she contracted pneumonia. After the War, she did not to return to feature film directing, but made documentaries and commercials for the new television industry. She also became a filmmaking teacher, first at the Pasadena Playhouse during the 1950s and 60s, and then at the University of California, Los Angeles during the 1960s and 70s. At UCLA, she taught directing and screenwriting, where one of her students was Francis Ford Coppola, the first film school grad to achieve major success as as a director. She taught at UCLA until her death in 1979. She was honored in her own lifetime. She became a symbol and role model for women filmmakers who desired entry into mainstream cinema. The feminist movement in the 1960s championed her. In 1972, the First International Festival of Women's Films honored her by screening "The Wild Party", and her oeuvre was given a full retrospective at the Second Festival in 1976. In 1975, the DGA honored her with "A Tribute to Dorothy Arzner." During the tribute, a telegram from Katharine Hepburn was read: "Isn't it wonderful that you've had such a great career, when you had no right to have a career at all."