Douglas' 'Jungle Red' Uncovers the Lost Artists of 'The Women' — SkimNews
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- Illeana Douglas drew on her acting background ('Cape Fear,' 'Grace of My Heart') and her work as a film historian for Turner Classic Movies to write 'Jungle Red: The Making of MGM's The Women,' publishing September 15 with Lyons Books.
- George Cukor was fired from 'Gone With the Wind' after Clark Gable blamed his own difficulty remembering lines on being directed by a 'fairy,' only to channel those same qualities — his homosexuality and rapport with actresses — into directing 1939's all-female-cast comedy 'The Women.'
- 'The Women' featured Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Joan Fontaine, Paulette Goddard, Norma Shearer and others, with not a single line of male dialogue, and Douglas describes it as an expression of studio-system 'Genius of the System' collaboration rather than a one-director achievement.
- Douglas spotlights overlooked female artists like co-screenwriter Jane Murfin, who she says essentially invented the dog-film genre with the 'Strongheart' series but lost credit to Rin Tin Tin, while men around her 'make sure they're writing everything down and getting the credit.'
- The book also surfaces how MGM's key creative personnel — production designer Cedric Gibbons, costume designer Adrian, hair stylist Sydney Guilaroff — were all gay men at a time when being out in Hollywood was a fireable offense.
- Douglas frames the project as a contemporary parallel, noting that 'being a bitch in 1939 was a good thing' but took on a negative connotation when she worked with female directors in the 1990s.
- Douglas reveals that Cukor himself later downplayed 'The Women' because its success 'pigeonholed him as a gay director and a women's director,' even though it contains the full range of his visual and thematic signatures up through his 1981 final film 'Rich and Famous.'
Why it matters: Douglas reframes a 1939 film widely dismissed as a woman's picture as a collaborative masterpiece whose unsung women writers and gay male artisans were systematically written out of film history — a corrective that gains urgency as Hollywood again wrestles with how women's careers get credited.
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