Dorothy Emma Arzner (January 3, 1897 – October 1, 1979) was an American film director whose career in Hollywood spanned from the silent era of the 1920s into the early 1940s.

[6][7] Arzner made a total of twenty films between 1927 and 1943 and launched the careers of a number of Hollywood actresses, including Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell, and Lucille Ball.

[16] Her parents' 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.

[16] A girl friend from college suggested Arzner meet with William DeMille, a major director for Famous Players–Lasky Corporation, the parent company of Paramount.

[16] After asking her a question about the furniture in his office that she did not know the answer to, DeMille suggested Arzner explore the different departments for a week and talk to his secretary.

[16] Arzner spent the week watching the sets at work, including that of Cecil DeMille, after which she made the observation "If one was going to be in this movie business, one should be a director because he was the one who told everyone else what to do.

[11] Arzner's work on Blood and Sand caught the attention of director James Cruze who would later employ her as a writer and editor for a number of his films.

"[16] Wanger then offered her a chance to direct a comedy based on the play The Best Dressed Woman in Paris, which would later be retitled Fashions for Women (1927).

[21] Many of Dorothy Arzner's films had a similar theme of unconventional romance; The Wild Party is about a college student who is attracted to one of her teachers.

Honor Among Lovers is about a businessman who is attracted to his secretary, who ends up marrying another, shadier man, which leads to a love triangle.

[11] According to William S. Kenly,The Wild Party was such a success that it kicked off a series of films "set on college campuses where the fun-loving, hard-drinking students include coeds who fall in love with their professors.

[24] In an article for Jumpcut, Jane Gaines argues it's possible to read Christopher Strong as reflecting Arzner's belief that "heterosexual monogamy cripples the imagination and curbs the appetite for living.

Arzner's version turned the story into what So Mayer calls "a plea for women to become their own people rather than beautiful possessions.

[6] Mayer writes that Arzner's films "show again and again that when a man believes he can own a woman and women have to compete for men, then romance, loyalty and friendship go out the window.

"[6] In Craig's Wife, Arzner offers the possibility of women's community after the instability of heterosexual romance with a final scene between Harriet and her widowed next door neighbor.

The film is Arzner's best-known and most studied work and thematizes the issues of female performance, female-female relationships, and social mobility.

"[11] In a scene in the latter half of the film, O'Hara's character, Judy, stops her stage performance to directly address the male audience watching her act.

In the late fifties, she became the entertainment and publicity consultant at the Pepsi-Cola Company, with the influence of her friend Joan Crawford, who was married to Pepsi president Alfred Steele.

In 1961, Arzner joined the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, in the Motion Picture division as a staff member, where she spent four years supervising advanced cinema classes before retiring in June 1965.

Arzner spent her childhood surrounded by celebrities who came to the restaurant, including Maude Adams, Sarah Bernhardt, and David Warfield, among others, but she was so used to them that she was never attracted to the cinema world.

Arzner began studying for a medical degree at the University of Southern California, but in a 1974 interview with Karin Kay and Gerald Peary published in Cinema, she said "With a few summer months in the office of a fine surgeon and meeting with the sick, I decided that was not what I wanted.

[6] She never hid her sexual orientation, nor her identity; her clothing was unconventional for a woman of that time, as she wore suits or straight dresses.

In addition to this, many of her films, such as Working Girls (1931), analyze the role of traditional femininity in women's lives, often criticizing the importance society places on it.

[33] S. Louisa Wei's 2014 feature documentary, Golden Gate Girls, compares the news media representation of Arzner with that of Esther Eng, Hong Kong's first female director who was a Chinese American.

Judith Mayne, the author of Directed by Dorothy Arzner, is interviewed in the documentary, saying, "I love the fact that history of woman filmmakers now would include Dorothy Arzner and Esther Eng as the two of the real exceptions, who proved it was entirely possible to build a successful film career without necessarily being a part of mainstream identity.

"[citation needed] In the 2022 film Babylon, which portrays a fictionalized, exaggerated version of 1920s Hollywood, the character of director Ruth Adler is mainly inspired by Arzner and her collaborations with Clara Bow.