Inspirational Women In Hollywood: How Professor Marsha Gordon Of North Carolina State University Is Helping To Shake Up The Entertainment Industry

An Interview With Elana Cohen

I’m going to stick to just one, because I think it’s such a useful lesson: don’t be afraid to ask people for help, no matter who they are. The worst thing that can happen is that they say no, or ignore you. Advice and guidance helps us navigate the world, and sometimes — not always, but sometimes — people will take the time to help you out as you figure out your path in life. I’ve had a hand up from many people who, for one reason or another, at first seemed out of reach. I won’t name names here, but this includes well-known authors as well as people from the film industry who have helped me, in large and small ways, over the years with my research, writing, short filmmaking, and network-building. If you have something you need help with and can ask someone for guidance, go for it!

As a part of our series about Inspirational Women In Hollywood, I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Professor Marsha Gordon.

Marsha Gordon is Professor of Film Studies at North Carolina State University, a recent Fellow at the National Humanities Center, and an NEH Public Scholar. She is the author of numerous books and articles, and co-director of several short documentaries. Her latest book, Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life and Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott, will be published with the trade division of University of California Press in April 2023. For seven years Marsha contributed to a monthly show, “Movies on the Radio,” with NC Museum of Art film curator Laura Boyes and Frank Stasio, on 91.5/WUNC’s “The State of Things.” She regularly introduces films, gives lectures, and participates in panels all over the United States and Europe.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Our readers would love to get to know you a bit better. Can you tell us the story of how you grew up?

I grew up in the San Fernando Valley, just outside of Los Angeles — a Valley girl! I have to believe that all those years I spent hanging out at the mall as a kid and teenager, getting free passes to movie test screenings conducted prior to a film’s release, had something to do with my interest in film. I saw a lot of movies this way. My mom and maternal grandmother also really loved movies, so I had plenty of movie-time growing up — in theaters, on television, and eventually on VHS. Their love for all kinds of movies — old Hollywood, 1970s blockbusters, art films, documentaries — no doubt helped shape my interests as a future film hitorian.

Can you share a story with us about what brought you to this specific career path?

When I was a graduate student, I took a class on 1950s American film with Professor Robert Kolker in which he screened The Hitch-Hiker (1953), directed by Ida Lupino. She was one of two women — only two! — who directed feature films in Hollywood in the middle of the last century (the other was Dorothy Arzner).

I loved The Hitch-Hiker, which is an original, tense, entertaining, and smart film. It totally baffled me that I had never heard of Ida Lupino before that class. Why was that? She was also an actress, producer, and writer. This encounter with her inspired a research project and also my interest in writing about filmmakers and authors, especially women, who are not as well-known as they should be. This is precisely what inspired my new biography of Ursula Parrott, who was once a famous, best-selling author and a sought after Hollywood screenwriter, and a significant cultural figure who spoke about such things as being a career woman and raising a child without a father in the age of divorce, but who nobody seems to have remembered.

Can you tell us the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

This is less about a particular story than it is just one example of the kind of meaningful experiences I’ve had in the course of doing my work: when I was writing my last book, about the 1950s-1960s Hollywood director Sam Fuller, I spent a lot of time at his home in the Hollywood Hills. Sam’s wife, Christa, and daughter, Samantha, allowed me to study his World War II-era journals and letters, his personal photographs and diaries, his screenplays, and even his home movies. I spent hours at the house with Christa and Samantha as well as in “the shack,” the room in which Sam used to work, surrounded by his books and unproduced screenplays, his Bell & Howell 16mm camera, his typewriter, and even his WWII rifle. I never had a chance to meet Fuller before he died, but it always felt like I was communing with him while I was there. Christa and Samantha were so generous with their time, their storytelling, and their food and wine. Spending time in a filmmaker’s personal workspace and with the things they left behind feels almost like a religious experience.

It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

This isn’t at all funny, but it is instructive: when I first started teaching at the college level as I was working on my PhD at the University of Maryland, College Park, a student, who would have been only 5 or 6 years younger than me, asked me a question. I no longer remember what the question was, but I remember that I was so determined to come off as experienced and smart that I totally made the answer up. I was in panic mode, so it was a preposterous answer, too — really far off the mark, and I knew it but I just pretended that I knew what I was talking about.

When I got home from class that day, I looked up the real answer and learned something I didn’t know before. And, of course, I swallowed my pride and came into the next class and said that I had been wrong and shared the correct information with my students. The takeaways are that it’s ok not to know everything, and it’s better not to pretend to know things. It’s one of the ways we learn.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

There are so many people who have helped me over the years: teachers, librarians, archivists, magazine editors, and so on. Nobody gets anywhere without help! My most recent burst of gratitude goes to Raina Polivka, my acquisitions editor in the trade division at University of California Press, which just published my new biography of Ursula Parrott. When my agent was pitching my book, we kept getting rejections that were some version of: “Parrott sounds like a totally fascinating woman who I’m so glad to know about. However, since none of her books are on print and nobody has ever heard of her, there is no market for this book so we will have to pass.”

Those rejections were devastating, of course, since I had spent years researching and writing this book precisely because I thought Parrott’s story was important to tell. When Raina read my proposal, she instantly got the book’s importance and responded with both enthusiasm and absolute faith that I could reach an audience despite the name-recognition challenges inherent to a recovery project like this.

Well, we could not have predicted that McNally editions would reprint Parrott’s 1929 best-seller, Ex-Wife, the week after my book came out, which I had absolutely nothing to do with. So I’ll always be grateful for Raina’s instant excitement about the project — it’s how you know you’ve found the right home for your book.

You have been blessed with great success in a career path that can be challenging. Do you have any words of advice for others who may want to embark on this career path, but seem daunted by the prospect of failure?

Stick to it, and don’t be afraid to try new things! Failure and rejection are part of any career path, so prepare yourself for the bumps along the way. If you want to teach, write, or make creative work (I also make short, art-focused documentary films) — you will fail, at times, and not just in the beginning, as my recent book publication story perfectly demonstrates.

This reminds me of a useful story: many years ago, I was doing research in the Jack London papers at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California, and came across Jack London’s log of all of his manuscript rejections. He would get a rejection from a publisher, and he would simply put the rejected manuscript in a new envelope and send it to another publisher — always on the same day. Sometimes his stories would be rejected dozens of times before being accepted! But London didn’t linger on his failures. He just kept at it. Any time I get some form of rejection, I think of this story and remind myself that it’s just part of the process.

Every industry iterates and seeks improvement. What changes would you like to see in the industry going forward?

There has been a lot of attention paid in the past few years to the hurdles that women and people of color have had to push past in order to participate in the making of movies. But I wish more people working in the film and television industry today knew about the significant contributions made especially by women filmmakers in the past. For example, women like Alice Guy-Blaché, Lois Weber, Cleo Madison, Angela Murray Gibson, and Ida May Park, just to name a few — directed films in the very first decades of film history. In 1914, Alice Guy-Blaché even published an article in Moving Picture World called “Woman’s Place in Photoplay Production,” about how women were better suited to directing than men, and urging women to pursue careers as film directors. These women’s pioneering work in the industry, which took place a hundred years or more in the past, are both inspiring and affirming.

You have such impressive work. What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now? Where do you see yourself heading from here?

I’m currently trying to get more of Ursula Parrott’s work republished, including a collection of her short stories. There’s one especially wonderful novella that she wrote, Breadwinner, about a woman screenwriter, which is set in the late 1920s and early 1930s in New York, that I’d love people to be able to read. It’s about work-life balance and the challenges faced by a very successful woman who is also a single mother.

I have several articles I’m working on, too — one about a pioneering New York woman politician whom everyone seems to have forgotten, and another, more personal one about reconnecting with my best friend from elementary school during COVID. I’m also in pre-production on a new short documentary, co-directed with my husband Louis Cherry, “This Beautiful Vision,” about the visionary artist Alexander Bogardy. I have lots of other projects in the works, but it’s a matter of finding the time to get to them.

We are very interested in looking at diversity in the entertainment industry. Can you share three reasons with our readers why you think it’s important to have diversity represented in film and television? How can that potentially affect our culture and our youth growing up today?

I have a couple of anecdotes that speak to this indirectly:

First I was once on an all-female panel at a science museum about dinosaurs in the movies. The two women I shared the stage with were paleontologists. Before our discussion started, I overheard a young boy — maybe six or seven years old — ask his mother where the scientists were. I saw her point to the two women beside me and say, “they’re right there.” The kid looked puzzled for a few seconds, and then said, “oh, ok,” and moved on. It was such a clarifying moment because it made it so clear that preconceptions and biases form early, and that diversity matters because what people see makes them think about what is possible.

The second is: how many times did you read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby when you were in school? I think I was taught this novel at least five times between junior high school and grad school. And then I discover, all these years later, that a novel from the same era, Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife, is totally amazing but has been out of print for decades. Where Gatsby is totally male focused, however, Parrott’s novel is focused on a woman’s experiences in this age — including divorce, rape, and abortion. This is another article I’m working on, by the way. I want teachers to teach Ex-Wife now that it is in print — it is so good, important, and in many ways timely, too. It can definitely hold its own alongside, or even up against, Fitzgerald’s novel.

The more diversity we have in not just the film industry, on camera and off, but in every area, the less we’ll have to teach young people that everyone has a right to be at the table. I don’t think we’re anywhere near that point yet.

What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started” and why? Please share a story or example for each.

I’m going to stick to just one, because I think it’s such a useful lesson: don’t be afraid to ask people for help, no matter who they are. The worst thing that can happen is that they say no, or ignore you. Advice and guidance helps us navigate the world, and sometimes — not always, but sometimes — people will take the time to help you out as you figure out your path in life. I’ve had a hand up from many people who, for one reason or another, at first seemed out of reach. I won’t name names here, but this includes well-known authors as well as people from the film industry who have helped me, in large and small ways, over the years with my research, writing, short filmmaking, and network-building. If you have something you need help with and can ask someone for guidance, go for it!

Can you share with our readers any self-care routines, practices or treatments that you do to help your body, mind or heart to thrive? Please share a story for each one if you can.

I do three things that help me immensely: cooking, gardening, and exercise. When you are researching and writing a book, or working on any creative project, it can take many years from the time you think of a project to the time it is finished. My three self-care rituals are instantly gratifying — you cook a meal for yourself or for friends and get to experience the pleasure of it right away, you spend an hour pulling weeds and your yard looks better, you go for a brisk walk and you feel energized. This is the opposite of what my writing and creating life is like, very slow with deferred rewards.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

I have a problem with taking on too much — writing projects, filmmaking projects, radio and podcast appearances, interviews, lectures, film introductions, teaching, and so on. So I actually love two lines that I came across in Ursula Parrott’s semi-autobiographical novel Ex-Wife. They describe how Patricia, who works writing advertising copy for a department store in New York city in the 1920s, is burned out: “That feeling of running, of having been running endlessly, so that I was breathless, yet must go on running forever, seemed to sum up my life. Running through days of posting as an efficient young business woman, through nights of posing as a sophisticated young woman about town.”

I often find myself thinking of this quote when I am working too much and not giving myself enough downtime. Parrott identified the problem of work-life balance for women when it first emerged in the 1920s, and I think we could all learn a thing or two from her about the need to slow down, take on less, and be intentional about relaxation.

You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?

This may sound a little naïve, but it’s a basic tenet that would change the world: always thinking about the greater good of humanity in everything we do. I struggle to understand why we fail to collectively prioritize things like protecting the environment, promoting peace and respect for one another, providing quality education for all, accepting a diversity of identities and beliefs, and doing everything we can to ensure that all people have a chance at a prosperous and healthy life. I’ve never understood the culture of people being out only for one’s self at any cost.

Is there a person in the world whom you would love to have lunch with, and why? Maybe we can tag them and see what happens!

Can I please have a table for four? Even though I’m a historian, I’m also very interested in what’s happening now in the film industry so I think my luncheon has to be with some of the women who are driving awareness and change in Hollywood. A few of the many women whose work in this area I’ve admired from a distance are Geena Davis, who, as the New York Times recently reported, has long supported research about women in Hollywood; Reese Witherspoon, whose Hello Sunshine approaches this question from the publication and production angle; and Ava DuVernay, whose creativity, generosity, and intentional inclusiveness I find really inspiring.

I believe that women can and should help each other in every profession, and I would love sit down with this group to learn more about what is happening on the ground in Hollywood around issues of equity and inclusion.

Are you on social media? How can our readers follow you online?

I am on Twitter and Instagram. I also put out a 2–3 times a month newsletter, which you can sign up for here. I started the newsletter when Becoming the Ex-Wife was published and will continue to publish it with a focus primarily on forgotten or lesser-known women in American film and literary history.

This was so informative, thank you so much! We wish you continued success!