Luxurious cinemites and the great depression: labour, stardom and Stand-In (1937)

Unlike more celebrated Hollywood-on-Hollywood films, Walter Wanger’s neglected screwball comedy Stand-In (1937) emphasizes the centrality of labour to studio-era production. Besides climaxing with a highly unusual, if carefully negotiated spectacle of industrial action by Hollywood’s rank and file workers, the film departs further from other self-reflexive movies by defining stardom in relation to labour and gender and by focusing on the topical and contentious issues of star salaries and child stardom (via a highly topical parody of Shirley Temple). With the aid of a wide array of primary and secondary materials – including newspapers and magazines, the entertainment trade press, and documents of the Production Code Administration – as well as detailed textual scrutiny, this essay examines Stand-In’s depiction of Hollywood and labour in relation to the economic, industrial and social challenges the Great Depression posed to studio production. The article proposes that the film’s comic framework allows it to deliver an uncommonly upfront, if conflicted critique of the contemporary motion picture business.

As veteran film journalist Edwin Schallert observed in a 1933 article for Picture Play magazine, the Great Depression inspired many Americans to question whether Hollywood stars merited their fabulous lifestylesand, as a consequence, whether the motion picture industry was sufficiently in tune with the audience it served. Stars had been integral to the Hollywood film's production and marketing since the 1910s, as well as being responsible for many of its pleasures. As Schallert suggests, however, the gulf between the silver screen's luxurious cinemites and the straitened circumstances of Depression-hit audiences provoked considerable unease both within and outside the cinema industry. When the economic downtown struck cinema from 1931, Wall Street financial backers exerted pressure on the major Hollywood studios to rein in spending and rationalize production. The opulent lifestyles and extravagant salaries of elite movie talent were key targets of the studios' austerity drive as they sought to distance themselves from the boom years of the 1920s -when, as Reginald Taviner commented in a 1933 Photoplay article, 'Hollywood suffered from a delusion of aggrandizement, dreaming that it had all the money in the world'. 2 Well aware of public resentment at indulgence and extravagance, commentators in fan magazines and the popular press were more than willing to join the crusade. While it was relatively easy to scapegoat pampered and overpaid movie stars for the industry's financial predicament, the studios faced a more difficult public relations challenge when new federal legislation encouraged workers, including star performers, to demand improved labour rights and compensation terms by joining unions.
It is against this turbulent backdrop that Walter Wanger choose to produce Stand-In (1937), a satire of the contemporary film industry. On its release in October 1937 several reviewers identified the film as part of a cycle of Hollywood-on-Hollywood movies inspired by the success of David O. Selznick's A Star is Born (1937). 3 Wanger actually purchased screen rights to the Stand-In story before A Star is Born appeared in April 1937, but he may well have been influenced by positive media buzz inspired by its production and by the fact that several other Hollywood-on-Hollywood films were awaiting release. 4 As Steven Cohan points out, cycles of 'backstudio pictures' often emerge at times of 'significant crises in and transformations of the political economy of US film production'. 5 From this perspective, the concentrated manufacture of such films in the 1930s seems like an attempt by the studios to redefine the meaning of 'Hollywood' -as industry, as cultural institution, as entertainment brand -in the face of the disruptions wrought by the Great Depression. 6 While it revels in the eccentricity and frivolity that characterizes screwball comedy, Stand-In nonetheless reveals a serious concern with the value of filmmaking and movie entertainment at a time when Hollywood and the country as a whole were experiencing substantial problems. Its very rootedness in the cultural dynamics of this era may explain the film's comparative neglect, but this is precisely what makes it fascinating. As Terry Donovan Smith proposed in a 1996 article, Stand-In offers a 'microcosm of the political and economic forces at work in and on society in the 1930s'. 7 Drawing on an array of secondary and primary materialsincluding newspapers and magazines, the entertainment trade press, and the records of the Production Code Administrationthis essay explores Stand-In's engagement with key economic, industrial and social challenges that confronted Hollywood during this turbulent period. I focus, in particular, on an issue that distinguishes the film from other Hollywood-on-Hollywood movies: its emphasis on the centrality of labour to motion picture production. From the 1920s to the 1950s the Hollywood studio relied on an extensive and diversified workforce, ranging from blue collar manual labourers, to skilled technicians, to craftspeople, to office staff, and to creative talent such as actors, writers, directors and musicians. 8 Hollywood-on-Hollywood films frequently celebrate creative individuals (e.g. Sullivan's Travels (1941), The Errand Boy (1961)) or creative team work (e.g. Singin' in the Rain (1952), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)), but they rarely acknowledge the importance of the studio workforce to film production. Besides addressing the contribution of rank and file workers to Hollywood filmmaking, Stand-In also evaluates the star's significance as a labourer, albeit a highly privileged one. Stardom is an inescapable feature of Hollywood movies about the motion picture industry, but such films mostly focus on the trials and tribulations of the star performer as they pursue or seek to regain success, or as they strive to reconcile public image and private pain. With Stand-In, however, the upfront treatment of questions of labour and labour value resonates with the difficulties Hollywood itself was facing in relation to disputes about unemployment, union representation, and the responsibilities of employers and elite employees to the broader community.

In a glass darkly
Like A Star is Born, Stand-In emanated from a quasi-independent production outfit with close ties to the major studios: it was Walter Wanger's fourth film for United Artists after quitting Paramount as a unit producer in 1936. 9 Gene Towne and C. Graham Baker, former newshounds and Wanger's regular screenwriting team, adapted a serialized Saturday Evening Post novella by Clarence Budington Kelland, author of 'Opera Hat', the short story that was the basis for Frank Capra's hit 1935 comedy-drama Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. 10 Towne and Baker reworked Kelland's plot and added many details drawn from their extensive familiarity with contemporary Hollywood. 11 From the outset, the project rang alarm bells with the Production Code Administration (PCA), which tried to rein in what Daily Variety described as its 'penetrating, engaging and provocative screen play'. 12 One concern was the depiction of Hollywood's moral laxity. PCA reviewers routinely objected to excessive alcohol consumption, vulgar language and sexual suggestiveness, but these were more than usually troublesome in this context owing to the Hollywood setting. 13 The PCA was especially bothered by the implied affair between Hollywood star Thelma Cheri (Marla Shelton) and producer Doug Quintain (Humphrey Bogart). After reading a partial script in June 1937, the PCA's chief administrator Joseph Breen cautioned Wanger that 'Care should be taken, throughout, to avoid the suggestion of an illicit relationship between Quintain and Cheri, a married woman. It would be well to establish clearly that such an unacceptable relationship does not exist' (italics in original). 14 After repeated requests to tackle this problem, Wanger and the film's director Tay Garnett, who had revised Towne and Baker's initial script, eventually conceded by eliminating Cheri's marital status. 15 Such attempts to protect the Hollywood brand from moral blemish were commonplace in the PCA review process, but Breen also had more specific concerns. In an early consideration of Kelland's story, in March 1937, he warned that the 'specific and general treatment of the characters and situations, which reflect unfavourably upon the motion picture industry and its personnel, is objectionable from the point of view of general industry policy'. 16 One of Breen's main priorities was to limit the film's potential for reputational damage in its depiction of Hollywood's industrial and business practices. Thomas Doherty points out that, while the major companies had a vested interest in cooperating with the PCA, independent producers like Wanger, Selznick, Samuel Goldwyn and Howard Hughes often 'resented the violation of their property rights … [and] wrote angry memos protesting that the film was their business, not Breen's'. 17 Both as a studio executive and as an independent producer, Wanger had numerous altercations with the PCA and Breen was understandably wary of his attempt to turn the spotlight on the motion picture industry. 18 Anxiety about the approach Wanger's film would take to the industry was exacerbated by an item published in the New York Morning Telegraph on May 23, which teasingly hinted that it would expose the studios' innermost secrets: Every lot in town has two taboos: no stuff about how tricks are done, no stuff about doubles for stars in stunt shots … But Tay Garnett will smash the taboo on exposing tricks by making a picture which will show ALL of them … It's called  20 With Federal regulators and the media intensely scrutinizing the movie business, Breen urged Wanger to remove material that could reflect badly on it. His memo of June 29 regarding amended script pages included the following recommendations: Quintain's speech about Nassau's purpose in stifling competition is inadvisable from the standpoint of policy. This speech should be deleted or changed … The suggestion that the motion picture industry be submitted to an investigation by a Senatorial committee is not considered advisable, as a matter of policy. Therefore, dialogue referring to this should be deleted. 21 Breen persuaded Wanger and Garnett to delete contentious speeches about the major studios' anti-competitive tactics and 'the crushing out of independents', but contemporary reviews make it clear that several of the film's criticisms of the industry still hit home. 22 Many reviewers praised Stand-In's fresh outlook on the movie business, and discerned sinister undercurrents swirling beneath the comedy. 23 In the socialite magazine The Spur, for example, Carlyle Ellis noted that this 'swell piece of sophisticated clowning' delivers a 'devastating satire on studio manners and customs'. 24 Mae Tinee, pseudonymous reviewer for the Chicago Daily Tribune, went further in suggesting that Stand-In presents the unusual sight of Hollywood looking at itself in a glass darkly, and, frankly, not liking what it sees. That beautiful face is marred by blotches of extravagance; the eyes have a slight cast of treachery and there is a disconcertingly vapid expression caused by constant and often useless activity. 25 Similarly, the reviewer for Britain's The Sunday Referee newspaper regarded it as a film that characterises the Hollywood studio as a 'swamp of corruption, oozing with every kind of moral and commercial turpitude' and 'exposes cruelty, humbug, graft and worse, masquerading as art'. 26 Six decades later, Terry Donovan Smith was even more effusive about Stand-In's critical perspective on 1930s Hollywood, asserting that it presents a 'clear call to revolution' and 'a remarkably direct presentation of leftist ideology' comparable to the 'living newspapers' of the Soviet Union and Federal Theatre. 27 These are extravagant claims for a product of Hollywood's commercial cinema, but the film does build to an unorthodox scenario of industrial action that encourages Smith to read the film in this way. A more considered contextual approach to Stand-In's depiction of industry and labour casts the film's politics in a different light. Even so, as Ames argues, this is a 'rich and provocative film' that focuses on 'the relations between Hollywood studios and New York financial control, on the struggles between management and labour, and on financial conspiracies to bankrupt studios for essentially hostile takeovers'. 28 'That's the picture business!' In its depiction of the Hollywood studio Stand-In combines together problems that confronted the motion picture industry at different junctures in the Depression era. Its central plotline was inspired by events of the early 1930s, when New York finance houses sent representatives to Hollywood to rationalize film production. As I will suggest later, however, the film's treatment of relations between management and labour tapped into ongoing tensions within the movie capital. When production of the film commenced in 1937 the Depression appeared to be nearing its end, with Hollywood seemingly set to regain its former glories. Cinema admissions started to increase from 1934, and the major companies began to reap the benefits of rising profits and enhanced stock value. 29 Many movie houses that had closed during the worst years of the crisis were able to reopen and studios could gamble once more on high-budget prestige pictures such as A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935), Romeo and Juliet (1936), San Francisco (1936), Lost Horizon (1937) and The Good Earth (1937). 30 Despite the uptick in business, prospects for the film industry were far from secure: profits were modest by comparison with the pre-1931 era and cinema also remained vulnerable to external economic pressures. 31 As Stand-In was being shot, for example, the USA was hit by a rapid and severe recession that Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television derailed the nation's recovery. From July 1937 to May 1938 industrial production contracted by 30%, the stock market fell by 40%, and unemployment jumped from 15% to 19%. 32 The motion picture industry suffered once more from the tightening of consumer expenditure, experiencing a 42% drop in earnings in 1938. The recession shook the industry's confidence, with MGM the only studio to enjoy good business. 33 Stand-In starts out by evoking the precarious situation of the Hollywood studios after the Depression finally caught up with them in the early years of the 1930s. The severe economic downturn saw cinema admissions dropping sharply, revenues from overseas markets dwindling, production costs more than doubling, and most of the major film companies facing financial meltdown. 34 Many industry employees lost their jobs in the fallout from the crisis, or faced brutal salary cuts, with relations between the workforce and studio management deteriorating further as the latter tenaciously fought attempts to unionize. Panic set in among the Wall Street investment banks that had funded large-scale theatre acquisitions and the conversion to sound. When their agents visited Hollywood, they encountered a business culture that was, to their eyes, extravagant, wasteful and corrupt. 35 Through 1930 and 1931 the entertainment industry trade press reported frequently on the austerity measures bankers threatened to impose on the Hollywood companies, including across-the-board salary cuts and the slashing of production budgets. 36 In response, many commentators protested that Wall Street officials failed to recognize the unique character of the cinema industry. Any attempt to bring motion pictures into line with orthodox business culture, they claimed, would jeopardize its all-important showmanship values. In an October 1930 editorial in Motion Picture News, for example, Maurice Kann argued that 'the bankers have yet to learn that there is something in the celluloid make-up that doesn't respond to too scientific methods … Show business which is the film business is unlike any other'. 37 In a bid to counter what one trade journalist described as the 'Wall Street-ization of the picture industry', industry insiders went into overdrive to explicate cinema's distinctive character as a show-business. 38 Sam Bischoff, a former accountant and producer at Columbia, Universal and Warner Brothers, suggested that pressure from Wall Street to save money at all costs could potentially damage the production values that were a key factor in the pleasurability, and hence success, of Hollywood filmmaking. Instead of an indiscriminate retrenchment policy, Bischoff recommended more finely-tuned efforts at preplanning and production management. 39 Resentment against the tactics of Wall Street efficiency experts was exemplified by stories that highlighted the pettiness of some budgetary cuts, such as removing the ice from water coolers on the hottest day of the year. 40 Moreover, Don Gillette asserted in a July 1931 item for Film Daily that the bankers' 'uncompromising retrenchment orders' were impairing the quality of films: 'In ordering drastic economies and curtailments … the kings of finance have at the same time slashed away a good portion of the spirit and enthusiasm that play such a big part in the creation of box-office product'. 41 Bennie Berger, head of the Northwest Theatre Owners' Association recommended that the 'best way of meeting the situation is to kick Wall St. dictatorship and all the mathematicians out of the business and allow showman brains to again produce pictures'. 42 Stand-In casts Leslie Howard as a Wall Street efficiency expert who is modelled on the bankers who 'invaded' Hollywood in the early 1930s. The mathobsessed Atterbury Dodd, vice president of the venerable New York finance house Pettypacker & Sons, journeys from Wall Street to Hollywood to ascertain the financial viability of Colossal Studios, one of his firm's assets. When Dodd arrives in Los Angeles, the film details his inability to fathom Hollywood's modus operandi as a business and as a social universe. Moving from the rational verticality of Manhattan's financial district, he is flummoxed by the kitsch excesses of Los Angeles' architectural m elange. 43 Even more shocking is his discovery that seduction, gambling and extravagance are rife in the movie studio, its disorderly proceedings persistently excused by the catchphrase 'That's the picture business'.
Dodd soon finds himself battling a conspiracy to bankrupt Colossal by stock juggler Ivor Nassau (C. Henry Gordon) and his pampered and venal cronies: narcissistic movie star Thelma Cheri, profligate European director Koslofski (Alan Mowbray), and corrupt publicist Tom Potts (Jack Carson). Nassau's accountancy scheme seeks to drive down the price of the studio so he can purchase it for half its value and sell off its assets. Like the Wall Street bankers of the early 1930s, Dodd initially aims to impose financial discipline on this wayward business. After recognizing the value of the ordinary workers who service the film industry, however, he seeks instead to replace the self-serving elite with a more democratic, flexible and creative economic order. In the climactic scenes of the film Dodd abandons his credo that 'in matters of business, one is forced to ignore human factors', to take direct action that will safeguard the livelihoods of the studio's 3000 workers. Inspired by news coverage of a sit-down strike in a steel plant, Dodd locks the studio gates and persuades an initially hostile workforce to occupy the studio so they can complete Sex and Satan, the film that will save Colossal from ruin. 44 Jeered when he addresses his 'fellow workers' ('Get out of the way, white collar', one retorts), Dodd wins over the studio employees with an impassioned speech that renegotiates conventional political affiliations: 'You regard me as your enemy, don't you? I'm capital and you're labour, that's the way you see it, isn't it? Well it isn't as simple as all that. Let me tell you who our stockholders are … Is there anyone here who owns any Colossal stock? [a worker who owns a few shares steps forward]. Here we are men, there's your capitalist. And there's a streetcar conductor in Denver, a bricklayer in Chicago, a soldier's widow in Memphis -30,000 of 'em. Their savings built this plant. And what's happening now? A small group of financial tricksters, headed by Ivor Nassau is trying to close it. Well, the stockholders can't afford to see it closed, any more than we can. There's no trouble here that a good picture won't cure … . ' Pleading with the workers to volunteer their labour for 48 hours, Dodd vows: 'Do as I ask and I pledge you my word that I will convince the stockholders that we are entitled to an interest in this business that we have saved. Let's not sit down, let's stand up and fight.' (Figure 1) Dodd leads the workers back to the heart of the studio, pausing only to eject Nassau from his office. The workers then toss the corporate raider over the studio wall and recommence production of Sex and Satan.
It is easy to see why Smith could misrecognize the film's remarkable climax as a revolutionary gesture. As the labour force banishes Nassau from the studio, the film hints at the radical prospect of replacing his asset-stripping enterprise with a workers' cooperative. However, it is a progressive agent of capital who initiates and legitimates the occupation of the studio. Dodd emerges as an enlightened financial manager who has learned to respect the humanity of the workers rather than viewing them as units servicing the machinery of production and profit. He facilitates economic recovery by striking a new compact with the workers, offering a mildly Rooseveltian ideal of cross-class solidarity as an antidote to the corrupt business culture that provoked financial collapse in the 1920s. Dodd's 'new deal' proposes to outlaw capitalist malfeasance and allow a (limited) measure of profit participation for the labourersat least, for those who purchase stock in the company. As Ames points out, Dodd 'falsifies the situation' by characterizing stockholders as 'humble individuals', downplaying the corporate capitalization of Hollywood studios by Wall Street finance houses and their trustees. 45 Moreover, Ames suggests, through this conclusion 'the imagery of worker rebellion (a mob of milling and angry labourers) is transformed into a comic resolution that preserves the studio and enshrines the banker as hero'. 46 Cohan agrees with Ames' reading, noting that although Dodd supports the right of the studio's employees both to work and to profit from their work, they remain workers for hire rather than financial partners who can reap the full benefits of their labour. 47 In reviewing the film for the Marxist journal New Masses Robert Stebbins (aka. filmmaker Sidney Meyers) was initially excited by Dodd's speech in defence of 'the significance of workers' lives in the scheme of things', but he dismissed it as a cynical coup de th eâtre. Towne and Baker, he argues, were seeking to dazzle audiences with the paradoxical spectacle of a 'top efficiency man in a Wall Street holding-company [aiming] to pull a sit-down strike himself. You get it. What a twist! We'll even dignify the working class if it'll work'. 48 But it is hardly surprising that the film treads carefully in its treatment of Hollywood's labour force. The Supreme Court's ratification of the Wagner Act (National Labour Relations Act) in April 1937 triggered a wave of union organizing across the country, with the Act guaranteeing the right of private sector workers to join unions and seek improved employment conditions via collective bargaining and industrial action. Union membership in the USA surged from just under 4 million in 1936 to over 7 million by the end of 1937. 49 In Hollywood itself, 6,000 artisanal workerspainters, plasterers, plumbers, cooks, hairstylists, set decorators, etc.walked out of the studios on 30 April, demanding union recognition. 50 As David F. Prindle puts it, Hollywood was experiencing 'labour warfare, with the companies and other unions caught in the crossfire'. 51 From March to July 1937 the script for Stand-In was being developed in a climate of heightened industrial agitation in the movie capital. 52 The production team clearly aimed to address the highly topical issue of labour relations, which does not feature at all in Kelland's original story, while working within the regulatory constraints of the PCA. 53 Depicting conflicts between capital and labour was a high-risk strategy for films at this time, especially if they critiqued the motives and actions of employers. For example, Warner Brothers' 1935 release Black Fury, a social problem melodrama that dealt with labour problems in the coal industry, faced the threat of boycotts in several states, even though PCA intervention substantially toned down the most controversial features of its script. 54 Given Breen's concerns about 'industry policy', a film about contemporary Hollywood was unlikely to get away with portraying industrial unrest in the motion picture studios, whatever the filmmakers' political sympathies. Stebbins, Ames and Cohan are certainly right to point out the compromises that beset Stand-In's perspective on labour, management and capital, but even so, as Ames acknowledges, the film 'comes as close to dealing directly with union issues within the movie industry as any contemporary Hollywood film'. 55 Even if the film sidesteps the union battles currently being fought within the studio gates, its climactic scenes function as a stand-in for this troubled context. 56 When it comes to tackling questions of politics or labour rights, Stand-In, like most Hollywood films, communicates through multiple evasions and displacements -which nonetheless circle tantalizingly around real-world problems. Its comic framework allows Stand-In to set in play a teasing game of assertion and disavowal. A telling instance of this process can be found in a minor yet illuminating gag. After a disastrous preview of the original cut of Sex and Satan, producer Doug Quintain is held to blame, accused of drinking excessively during the shoot. Dodd has no option but to fire him, and Quintain goes on a two-day bender to obliterate the pain of losing both his job and Thelma Cheri, the woman he adores. When Quintain is refused entry to the Caf e Trocadero, one of his favourite haunts, the film cuts outside to show the drunken producer and his ever-present Scotch terrier picketing the establishment (Figure 2). They parade outside the entrance carrying placards that protest the Trocadero's unfair treatment of them. Through this gag the film acknowledges industrial action while rendering it disarmingly humorousbut it is, all the same, a gag that evokes the emotive and potentially explosive topic of picketing, and thus symbolizes the broader industrial troubles faced both within and outside Hollywood. The film's climactic scenes work in a similar fashion, suggesting the upheavals of the time while simultaneously disavowing their seriousness, yet raising them as latent possibilities all the same.
The occupation of the studio by Dodd and Colossal's rank-and-file workers is the film's most daring and spectacular sequence. Critical commentaries on Stand-In focus extensively on these scenes as they are so unusual in Hollywood films, and especially in films about Hollywood. However, labour recurs as an issue throughout the film, especially in relation to stardom. As the public face of Hollywood, stardom, especially female stardom, emerged in the Depression era as a high-profile battleground for competing definitions of how the cinema industry should be run. Stand-In responds to this context by interrogating assumptions about the glamorous exceptionalism of movie stars, framing high-priced screen talent in relation to the low-paid employees who comprise the bulk of the studio workforce. It offers a further perspective on contemporary female stardom by critiquing the abuses of the contemporary child-star phenomenon, as exemplified by Shirley Temple.

Raspberry or vanilla? -The child star
As soon as Dodd arrives in Los Angeles, Potts, the studio publicist, seeks to ply him with liquor, luxurious accommodation, and pliant starlets. Dodd is affronted by such venality and takes Potts' behaviour as a sign of Hollywood's general profligacy. Soon afterwards, he is confronted with a further 'pimping' scenario when a mother (Anne O'Neal) foists her precocious young daughter upon him as a contender for screen stardom. The skimpily clad Elvira, played by seven year-old Our Gang veteran Marianne Edwards, launches into a euphoric rendition of 'Is it True What They Say About Dixie?' with the jauntily hyperbolic mannerisms associated with Shirley Temple (Figure 3). Dodd, who knows nothing about films and film culture, looks on in queasy astonishment as Elvira delivers a series of bump-and- grind moves in her miniscule frilly satin dress. When the performance concludes, Elvira's mother asks for his opinion. Shocked by this 'revolting exhibition', Dodd accuses the mother of 'robbing [her] daughter of her childhood'.
Shirley Temple was then at the height of her remarkable four-year run as a boxoffice champion, so 1937 audiences would clearly be in on the joke. 57 But it is quite a complicated joke to decipher. From today's perspective, hypersensitivity about paedophilia and childhood sexuality make it difficult to come to terms with both Temple's extraordinary fame and her onscreen relations with adult men. For example, Gaylyn Studlar charges that contemporary (feminist) scholarship is obsessed with reading Temple as a perversely eroticized object of the male gaze. 58 This tendency, she argues, greatly limits and simplifies how Temple functioned for 1930s audiences as a 'symbolically loaded figure' who simultaneously 'supports traditional 'family-centred' values but also excites through her unsettling of age, gender, and sexual boundaries'. 59 Kristen Hatch similarly cautions against viewing Temple's star configuration through a contemporary lens: what might seem to us like paedophilic spectacle, she insists, would have been accepted in the 1930s as a more complex mode of 'child loving' that encompassed 'a broader, more amorphous range of pleasures, erotic and otherwise, produced by the child and celebrated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries'. 60 In her films, Hatch argues, Temple's priceless child solicits men's nurturing devotion in order to heal generational divides and the dislocating impact of the economic crisis on the family and masculinity. 61 Although (Twentieth-Century) Fox pitched Temple's screen vehicles as 'love stories between the girl and middle-aged men', Hatch posits that the male character's 'adoration of the child demonstrates that he is not ruled by sexual passion but instead is willing to exercise sexual restraint'. 62 By facilitating the bachelor male's social reintegration and guiding him towards adult heterosexual union, Temple's characters play a central role in the films' circuitry of desire. Her movies thus seek to achieve a delicate balancing act, in which the child mediates adult sexuality while remaining untarnished by the economy of erotic exchange. But, as Lori Merish insists, sexual implication is not absent from Temple's movies, as they Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 'are in fact replete with sexual references. In particular, these films flirt with illicit sexuality, especially paedophilia and (father-daughter) incest'. What is most crucial, however, is 'the structure of sexual disavowal' through which the films consistently reclaim the Temple figure as 'innocent' and 'cute'. 63 The Elvira scene from Stand-In evokes Temple's pervasive familiarity to 1930s audiences, and thus her complex cultural resonance, while liberating the 'child star' performance from the framework of narrative disavowal bound up within the 'Shirley Temple formula'. 64 By so doing, the sequence presents a flagrantly eroticized spectacle of pre-pubescent girlhood. The audience can laugh at Dodd's discomfort because this 'human comptometer' lacks awareness of who Shirley Temple is and what she meanswhich is a running gag in the film. 65 At the same time, his very ignorance allows Stand-In to scrutinize the Temple phenomenon from an outsider's perspective, exposing the subterranean currents that familiarity with the child star can mask. Via the stand-in of Elvira, then, the film strips away disavowal and normalization to lay bare the paedophilic implications of Temple's stardom. By curtailing the audition just as Elvira is about to launch into her impersonation of Mae West, Dodd unwittingly confirms the inherent perversity of this child-star configuration. 66 Unsurprisingly, Joseph Breen was especially concerned about the handling of the Elvira scene. Commenting on an early script, he advised Wanger that 'The child should not sing "Frankie and Johnny". "Bumps", or other suggestive gestures, should not be used'. 67 'Frankie and Johnny' was an extremely popular song from the 1920s and mid-1930s, and featured in many films, but its association with violence, race and sexual corruption proved increasingly troublesome for Hollywood's censors. 68 Stand-In further nods towards Temple's career, and the broader child stardom craze, by including Elvira's mother in the scene. Temple's huge success -she reputedly earned three times as much as the US President -inspired what journalist Eunice Fuller Barnard identified as 'a new American get-rich-quick vision' as '[m]asses of able-bodied Americans are plotting to make the youngest and weakest member of the family the chief breadwinner'. 69 This new Californian gold rush, Barnard reports, led 10,000 parents to besiege the Central Casting Bureau in 1935, aiming to register their children as screen extras for work at the larger Hollywood studios. Many other parents enrolled their offspring in beauty contests, dancing schools and the like, to equip them with the skills necessary to emulate the fabulously talented Temple. 70 The Elvira sequence taps into this unsavoury scenario of Depression-fuelled desperation. In sharp contrast to her daughter's eye-catching showgirl garb, the mother's drab and shapeless black polka-dot dress implies she is investing everything in the bid for surrogate stardom. Despite boasting that 'There's not a child in Hollywood who can do the things my Elvira can do', the mother's abject self-delusion is all too evidently exposed by the derivative nature of her daughter's performance. Elvira is clearly a stand-in not just for Shirley Temple but also for her mother's desire, and the willingness of this archetypal stage mother to sexualize Elvira suggests an unwholesome readiness to sacrifice maternal nurturing for fame and profit.
By such means, Stand-In articulates a recurring anxiety that haunts the phenomenon of child stardom, and one that is often manifested though over-compensatory mechanisms of denial. 1930s fan magazines continually assured readers of Gertude Temple's conscientious handling of her daughter's career and well-being, outlining the measures she took to safeguard Shirley against overwork, excessive exploitation and indulgence. 71 For example, several articles detail how Gertrude and George Temple relinquished even greater wealth by rejecting sponsorship offers and personal appearances to keep Shirley healthy, playful, natural and unspoiled. 72 Despite such pledges, it is hard to imagine how the parents of Shirley Temple, or any other hugely successful young performer, could possibly strike a healthy balance between the responsibilities of child-rearing and financial dependency. As Barnard proposed in a 1936 article for the New York Times Magazine: the movie child has little of the freedom and chance for self-expression recommended by some modern educators. Underneath all the gilding and glamour he [sic] is in strict fact a child labourer, with an uncompromising schedule of working hours. Upon his 6-year old wits and efforts depend in most cases the fortunes of his family. 73 John F. Kasson explores this dilemma in a 2008 discussion of Temple's career, describing the work conducted by actors in general, but especially by child performers, as emotional labour. 74 Arlie Russell Hochschild used this term in her 1983 book The Managed Heart to describe adults in the service economy, such as flight attendants and bill collectors, whose jobs rely on their deployment of emotions normally considered private and discretionary, and on the suppression of emotions that do not fit the bill. 75 This is precisely the business of actors, who must fabricate and inhabit fictional identities, equipping them with a mise-en-sc ene of believable emotional responses. The crucial difference between adult and child actors, of course, is that the latter can in no way be considered as fully self-possessed agents in the process of either delivering the performance or of negotiating for, and benefiting from, the economic value of their labour. As Kasson suggests, contemporary accounts insistently dodged this issue by codifying Shirley Temple's work as a natural expression of childhood play rather than as exploitative child labour. By stressing the mother's beneficent stewardship, and the close intimate bonds she shared with her daughter, such rhetoric sought to conceal the degree to which Shirley herself lacked ownership of her labour. 76 For Kasson, Temple's emotional labour only partially comprised the work she conducted in delivering her screen performances, and thus in servicing the sentimental economy of Depression-era America. Another key strand of her emotional labour consisted of the work she performed to please the adults who benefited financially from her services, including her family, film directors, and studio executives. 77 Gertrude Temple herself may not have been as horrendously pushy as some legendary stage mothers but, as Kasson puts it, Shirley nonetheless 'found that fulfilling her mother's ambitions was the source of her most intense emotional work'. 78 Allan Dwan, who directed the young Temple in Heidi (1937) and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1938), once remarked that 'Shirley was the product of her mother, the instrument on which she played'. 79 Stand-In's Elvira sequence thus exposes unpalatable aspects of the maternal commodification of childhood that were ordinarily masked by the generally favourable public discourse on the relationship between Gertrude and Shirley Temple.
A later scene extends the satirical expos e of Hollywood's obsession with child stardom, developing this in relation to questions of labour value. Lester Plum (Joan Blondell), Dodd's assistant and eventual love interest, tells him that under the name 'Sugar Plum' she had been the Shirley Temple of her day (Figure 4). 80 This leads to a discussion about the exorbitant salaries Hollywood pays its child performers. As Sugar Plum, Lester confides, she earned $4,000 a week whereas as an adult worker, when she can find employment, she draws a mere $40 weekly. In customarily rational terms, Dodd protests the unfairness of this drop in the market value of her labour: 'An inventory taken today would show that you have the same assets that you had as a child. Your mind's matureabove average, if I may say so … Physically, you are stronger. Potentially, if you were worth 4,000 a week then, you should be worth 8,000 a week now. It's simple mathematics'.
To counter this line of reasoning, Lester resorts to a parodic rendition of Shirley Temple's signature song 'On the Good Ship Lollipop', from Bright Eyes (1934) ( Figure 5). Her adult body delivers the dance moves familiar from such child performers as Temple, Baby Peggy and Baby Rose Mariechannelled earlier by Elvirawhile her childlike vocalizing burlesques their studied cutesiness. She thus reverses the polarity of Elivira's performance, rendering grotesque the juxtaposition of adult and child. The effect is to underscore the robotic otherness of this imagining of childhood, laying bare an exploitative commodification that strips the performer of agency. As Sugar Plum, Lester was but one of a long productionline of machine-tooled 'cute' child performers, who were summarily dropped when they outgrew their usefulness. To challenge Dodd's faith in the overarching logic of 'simple mathematics' as a means of explaining the labour payment differential, Lester informs him, in her characteristically wisecracking manner, 'The point is, sonny boy, that I'm now dishing raspberry and John Public still likes vanilla'. Besides its catamenial implication, Lester's comment suggests that what counts is not the skillset of the performer but how they can be packaged and merchandized as a generic productin this case, the cute Temple-esque child. By offering her idiosyncratic lesson in Hollywood economics, Lester punctures Dodd's condescending expertise and demonstrates his limited understanding of the highly particular, seemingly irrational yet merciless operations of the picture business.

Luxurious cinemites?
While the Elvira sequence allows the film to scrutinize the contemporary child stardom craze, Stand-In uses Thelma Cheri to explore another topical concern in 1930s Hollywoodthe question of whether stars merited their high salaries and lavish lifestyles. The film characterizes this 'fading feminine super-sex star' as a talentless and narcissistic performer who manipulates her star power and her overly generous contract to pack Sex and Satan with languorous and costly close-ups. By depicting Cheri as a greedy and wasteful opportunist, the film draws on a recurring ambivalence about the exceptionalism and market value of the star, which was inflamed by the troubled economic climate. Given that the top grossing stars of the 1930s were female, such ambivalence was explicitly gendered. 81 84 Stars continued to function as idols of consumption, as Leo Lowenthal puts it, but the Depression made such salaries, and the right of stars to enjoy Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television them, much harder to swallow. 85 Stand-In's exploration of economic and human paradigms of value intersects with a discourse on stardom that was shaped by an often rancorous off-screen debate about the salaries paid to Hollywood talent, with producers, performers, government regulators and various journalistic interests battling over the very identity of the motion picture business. Stand-In's portrayal of Thelma Cheri clearly responds to the process of critical self-examination this debate inspired within the Hollywood community.
During the economic crisis of the early 1930s the major studios sought to curtail star salaries, blaming them for the industry's economic woes. 86 Media commentators also stirred up public resentment at overpaid screen talent, missing few opportunities to castigate Hollywood stars for their lavish lifestyles and their seeming indifference to the economic hardship suffered by many Americans. 87 Faced with such sentiments, movie stars had little option but to consent to financial cutbacks imposed by management as the film industry plunged further into the red. As Laura Benham observed in September 1932, 'a salary-slashing epidemic is raging in the film factories'. 88 Besides cutting pay the studios also reduced payments for contract renewal, by signing actors on a picture-by-picture basis, rather than long-term option contracts, and by recruiting newcomers (such as Joan Blondell, Clark Gable and Johnny Weissmuller) instead of higher-paid actors. 89 The process of retrenchment came to a head in March 1933 when, amidst bitter wrangling, the major studios introduced across-the-board salary cuts for an 8-week period to keep production centres operating. 90 Like other film industry workers Hollywood performers grudgingly accepted these emergency strictures but they were less amenable when, in June 1933, long-term salary rationalization was proposed after the implementation of the National Industry Recovery Act (NIRA). The National Recovery Administration (NRA) required cinema, like other industries, to draft a code of fair competition to help stimulate and stabilize business. 91 Across the next few months star salaries were a hotly debated issue within negotiations over the Code of Fair Competition for the Motion Picture Industry. 92 Believing that producers were lobbying for the inclusion of a salary-fixing clause in the Code, along with other unfavourable measures, more than 500 screen performers banded together to form the Screen Actors' Guild (SAG), with Broadway and Hollywood entertainer Eddie Cantor as their president. 93 The major film producers continued to blame talent costs for damaging the industry's recovery, arguing that the Code should limit star salaries and star raiding. 94 NRA officials agreed that excessively high salaries, for executives as well as creative workers, impeded the industry's stability. Deputy Recovery Administrator Sol A. Rosenblatt sought to levy fines of up to $10,000 (equivalent to $198,835 in 2021) for producers who paid salaries 'in excess of the fair value of personal services', arguing that this 'results in unfair and destructive competition'. 95 The NRA's chief administrator, General Hugh S. Johnson, also declared that there was 'considerable feeling in the country that with all but one of the major companies in receivership, many of the salaries are grotesque'. 96 With the energetic and charismatic Cantor as spokesperson, SAG launched a vigorous campaign against the demonization of Hollywood stars, threatening strike action if contentious clauses were not removed from the Code. 97 Cantor insisted that very few actors received the extravagant 'headline' salaries of $3,000-10,000 per week (equivalent to $59,000-$198,000 per week in 2021), and that those who did only received such sums for a small fraction of the year. He argued, too, that the peak popularity of most movie stars was short-lived, largely because producers used them in too many pictures. 98 Citing how Mae West's phenomenal success had allegedly saved Paramount from bankruptcy, Cantor also claimed that stars merited high salaries because of their crucial importance to the industry's fortunes. 99 In November 1933 Cantor persuaded Franklin D. Roosevelt, a personal friend, to veto proposed clauses against star raiding and salary curtailment in the motion picture Code. 100 Cantor's provocative op-ed in the January 1934 issue of The New Movie Magazine accused film producers and their Washington representatives of using salary control as a smokescreen to block investigation of their own shady business practices and poor financial management. 'The producers who squawked the loudest recently in Washington,' he charged, 'are the very ones who voted themselves large salaries and fat bonuses and gave their stockholders such a raw deal that it makes Wall Street and its methods a Sunday school picnic'. As SAG president, he vowed to 'fight these unscrupulous individuals with everything at my command'. 101 The actors may have won a significant victory against the film majors but the battle was far from over. Subsequent years saw fierce struggles between SAG and producers over the question of union recognition, with star salaries continuing to face intensive scrutiny. 102 For entertainment journalist Mark Dowling and other commentators, movie star salaries indicated deep-rooted problems within the business culture of the film industry, which the actors accused of being run by 'financial buccaneers'. 103 Rosenblatt's final report on the motion picture Code, in July 1934, confirmed that the film industry required substantial reform. Lamenting the lack of uniformity in its business procedures, he argued that rationalization of production costs was essential to the industry's financial rehabilitation. 104 Although the report vetoed curbing star salaries, Rosenblatt recommended the creation of a salary commission to establish clearer standards. As currently configured, he suggested, the star system 'tends to create an artificial scarcity of talent'. 105 A small group of in-demand artists and executives benefited excessively, Rosenblatt claimed, because 'inflated values … have created a vicious circle of bidding for their services'. 106 As well as upholding several accusations SAG activists had levelled at the producers' handling of the salaries issue, his report further noted that while the studios had released salary figures for highly paid stars, seemingly to inflame public outrage, they were reluctant to disseminate information about executive pay. 107 As an alternative to existing salary arrangements, Rosenblatt proposed some form of profit participation for star performers. 108 Although several stars and other creative workers had already consented to percentage deals, many feared they would lose out financially or found it hard to agree on appropriate terms. 109 Some producers, however, saw advantages in such a system. As it was impossible to work out fair salaries for hugely popular stars, Adolph Zukor argued, percentage deals could prove the fairest way of rewarding them in line with box-office performance. 110 Besides the discrepancy between a star's salary and their marquee value, a further problem with existing financial terms was the substantial variation in salaries achieved by stars with roughly equivalent popularity. 111 (1935). 112 Such discrepancies were exacerbated by the producers' strategy of recruiting new performers, often from the stage, to replace established actors 'whose popularity has failed to keep pace with the upward salary tilts provided for in their contracts'. 113 Thus, Irene Dunne was passed over for the lead role in the Paramount drama Valiant is the Word for Carrie (Wesley Ruggles, 1936) in favour of the much cheaper Gladys George, who earned $400 a week (equivalent to $7,548 in 2021) for the role. 114 Tay Garnett, the director of Stand-In, joined in the debate about film industry salaries, and his views on the subject may well have influenced the film's critique of Thelma Cheri. Along with fellow directors Gregory La Cava and Leo McCarey, Garnett advocated some kind of profit-participation plan to replace salaries, not just for stars but also for directors, cameramen, producers and other personnel. 115 He outlined the benefits of such a scheme in a 1938 New York Times article, 'There's Profit in Sharing Profits'. Writing at a time when the studios were investing in capital-intensive prestige pictures, Garnett argued that Hollywood artistry was hampered by 'the curse of too much money'. In such a high-risk financial environment, he reasoned, profit-sharing deals for artists could prove a more efficient and more equitable alternative to the current salary system. By encouraging stars to see themselves as part-owners of the film, a profit participation strategy could boost creativity, commitment and quality, even if they ultimately received the same financial compensation for their services. 116 Thelma Cheri emblematizes the flaws in the current system. A key sequence foregrounds her abuse of the privileges of stardom, which is contrasted explicitly with the conscientious labour of Colossal's rank and file workers. On his first visit to the studio, Dodd is shown round the facilities by Quintain. Challenging Dodd's description of the workers as 'units' and 'cogs in the machine', Quintain insists they are human beings whose livelihoods are threatened by Ivor Nassau's financial manipulations. He then takes Dodd onto the shooting stage to witness the filming of a scene from Sex and Satan. Besides exposing the indulgences of director and star, the sequence that follows illustrates the communal promise of collaborative labour. On a set simulating an alpine slope, Lester Plum, Cheri's stand-in, walks upwards on a tilted treadmill. Sweltering in winter apparel under the studio lights, and facing the onslaught of an artificial blizzard, Lester grafts while the star relaxes in her dressing room. As Lester informs Dodd early in the film, 'Thelma Cheri's a star, and like most stars she's a pretty fragile cut of steak. She mustn't be fatigued or mussedand, above all, she mustn't be so vulgar as to perspire. Hence the stand-in does her sweating for her'. Unlike the sparse winter scene being filmed, the studio itself is packed with a bustling retinue of workers who labour to fabricate illusions for the industry of make-believe. These include: an army of camera, lighting, sound and electrical technicians; two men in charge of a huge electrical fan and artificial snow; a labourer who manually operates the treadmill; a small team responsible for manipulating scenery during the shot; a script girl; and attendants who silently and efficiently step in to dust fake snow from Dodd and fix his hair (Figures 6a-f).
Amid this ceaseless activity Potts dallies with the starlets he tried to foist on Dodd, while the capricious Koslofski disrupts proceedings by insisting that the use of fake rather than real edelweiss jeopardizes his creative integrity. Compared to the unselfconscious labour of the studio workers, Cheri and Koslofski come across as indulged and recalcitrant prima donnas. While Lester toils on the treadmill, Quintain takes Dodd to meet Cheri in her dressing room (Figure 7). When the two are alone, Cheri treats Dodd to a lament about the burdens of stardom: Through her exaggerated gestures and speech inflexions, Marla Shelton underscores the performative insincerity of a woman who is addled by stardom ( Figure 8). Writhing in studied affect as she entertains the patently embarrassed banker, Cheri is content to let Lester 'fry' on the treadmill. Lester is only liberated when shooting commences, and the star replaces her to deliver a simulation of effort to the camera. The sequence suggests that Cheri rather than Lester really qualifies as the 'stand-in', as the latter sweats it out while the former reaps the glory.
An earlier sequence amplifies this concern with Hollywood's unpretentious, underprivileged yet dignified workers. To escape from Potts' seductive wiles, Dodd forsakes the gaudy hotel room supplied by the studio in favour of Mrs. Mack's humble boarding house, where Lester resides. The occupants of the boarding house may be, as she puts it, an eccentric collection of 'hams, failures and hasbeens'together with a trained seal and a penguin -but they offer a positive countercurrent to the venal powers that run the studio. As Christopher Ames notes, the boarding house offers a supportive community of Hollywood outsiders who have not been corrupted by success. 118 Dodd's encounter with the stunt-man Tommy (Emmerson Treacy) makes this especially clear. A disconsolate Tommy returns to the boarding house from a movie shoot, having failed to land a job. 'It was a tough stunt,' he explains to Lester, before demonstrating a perfectly realized tumble down the stairs. As he rises from the floor, he complains: 'And they wanted me to do that for seven and a half bucks. Can you imagine that?' Lester is sympathetic, claiming the producers should pay him at least $15, but Dodd exclaims in astonishment: 'But he just did it for nothing!' To which Tommy replies: 'I got my pride, haven't I? Besides, that's the picture business'. At this early stage in his learning process, Dodd is unable to fathom Tommy's objection to selling his labour for less than what he considers a reasonable rate. Even though he owes Mrs. Mack for rent, Tommy would rather execute the fall for nothing than volunteer his services for exploitation. Unlike Cheri, who expects to be paid handsomely for what little work she does, this is an artisanal labourer who takes pride in his craft and is determined to demand fair recompense for it.
Tommy's story also highlights the fact that most workers in Hollywood studios during the 1930s earned far less than the movie stars and executives, and that their employment was more precarious. The Code of Fair Competition for the Motion Picture Industry attempted some measure of protection by specifying minimum wage rates for designated craftspeople and labourers in Hollywood production, while the strengthening of union representation later in the decade resulted in several pay increases. By 1939, for example, gaffers could earn (2021 equivalents in brackets) $1. 41 119 In reporting these figures, the Motion Picture Herald noted that the wages of craftspeople in film production may have been higher than in other industries but the labour force did not enjoy comparable security: the fact remains that employment in Hollywood production is casual, never steady except in cases of 'key' men and department heads. With the rise and ebb of production, men are hired and laid off. Few can tell in any given month how many pictures will be on the stages and how many will be nearing final stages of preparationnecessitating the building of sets, stages, props and the like. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television As a result, there can be no average wage scale determined for an individual craft. When there is work, craftsmen are busyeven to the extent of getting time and a half and double time for overtime. When there is no work, they sit by telephones or in the union hiring halls, earning nothing. 120 Good woman, bad actress 'Women today may be able to support themselves, and earn big salaries and hold high positions. But they are paid the salaries by men, and given the positions by men … I have heard it said that this is a woman's town, but it isn't! Men own the picture business, men produce the pictures, men give out the contracts. It is a man who hires even the biggest woman star and a man who directs her work.' (Miriam Hopkins, 1935). 121 By having a female performer embody its critique of star excess, Stand-In's gender agenda inevitably skews its perspective on the politics of labour. Like Singin' in the Rain, the film resolves its plot by overthrowing an uppity female star who jeopardizes the common good by manipulating an overly generous contract for selfish ends. After a disastrous preview of Sex and Satan, Cheri prevent Quintain and Dodd from re-editing the film by insisting that 'My contract gives me approval of cast, direction, cutting … '. This is an unlikely scenario, as option contracts were generally rigged in favour of the studio, which regarded stars as expensive assets over which they exerted full managerial rights. Contracts also restricted the ability of most performers to choose roles or working conditions, or to have substantial input into the determination of their careers. 122 Like Singin' in the Rain's Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen), Thelma Cheri is a misogynist caricature of female ambition. In the first two versions of A Star is Born Norman Maine (Fredric March, James Mason) is emasculated by his commodification as image, but Lamont and Cheri flourish in the spotlight and seize every opportunity to parade their misperceived splendour. This gendered demarcation posits screen stardom, and the desire to identify oneself as image, as inherently more 'feminine', while simultaneously attacking women for choosing such a career path. This is certainly the case with the way Stand-In castigates Thelma Cheri for her patent narcissism, even though this is a key criterion for, and biproduct of, star glamour.
Stand-In's treatment of Thelma Cheri was part of a backlash against the dominance of female stars in 1930s Hollywood. With women assumed to constitute the bulk of the cinema audience, female stars were vitally important as box-office attractions. Laura Benham noted in a 1934 Picture Play article that they earned the largest salaries, received the most fan mail, and had the greatest influence over fashion trends. 123 Very few male stars, she suggests, had sufficient stature or marquee value to rival stellar screen performers like Greta Garbo, Katherine Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, Janet Gaynor, Norma Shearer or Constance Bennett. 124 Indeed, Benham argues, the success of Hollywood's top male actors often depended on their being teamed with influential female stars. 125 Apart from anything else, these were hugely dedicated and successful career women: as Benham puts it, 'never have so many women accumulated so much wealth by their own efforts as they have in the cinema to-day'. 126 Emily Carman considers how several ambitious and business-savvy female stars of the 1930s leveraged their popularity to free themselves from standard optioncontract arrangements and secure substantial creative and financial control over their films and their careers. 127 Such success, however, destabilized the traditional gender hierarchy at a time when many men were suffering privation and unemployment. By exemplifying and embodying star glamour, moreover, major female performers were key ambassadors for Hollywood, and could thus serve as ready scapegoats for its excesses and miscalculations.
The gender prejudice underlying the depiction of Thelma Cheri is emphasized in the film's romantic subplots. To distract Dodd from investigating Colossal's finances, Nassau and his cronies encourage Thelma to seduce him, a ploy that succeeds until Lester Plum shows the lovestruck executive the error of his ways. Cheri is also responsible for the downfall of Doug Quintain, the gifted and principled producer who made her a successand who plunges into alcoholic despair when she spurns and then betrays him. The film clearly endorses Quintain's patriarchal critique of Cheri, when he declares that stardom has turned her into an applause addict who is content to let her hips do the acting. The end of the film resolutely puts Cheri in her place, when Quintain and Dodd join forces to combat her sexual tyranny. They cook up a scheme to break Cheri's contract on grounds of moral turpitude, with Dodd squiring her around Hollywood's nightspots on a debauched crawl that provokes scandalous headlines. Overturning her authority, they are able to re-edit Sex and Satan to transform the star-driven vanity project into a comedy that renders Cheri a supporting player to their new star, Kongo the gorilla. 128 The implication is that her career will be ruined and Cheri will retreat into domestic servitude with Quintain. As he puts it, destroying her career is 'the only way to make a good woman out of a very bad actress'.
As the 'amused and amazed' reviewer for Britain's Sunday Referee noted, Stand-In is a 'curious extravaganza' that takes pot-shots at a range of Hollywood targets. 129 The satirical critique of Thelma Cheri may conform to contemporary studio and media propaganda about spoiled and overpaid star talent, as well as to patriarchal prejudices against female ambition and independence, but this is only one aspect of the film's multi-faceted probing of the flaws of Depressionera Hollywood. Cheri is certainly a 'luxurious cinemite' but Stand-In counterbalances the negative depiction of her excesses, and of Elvira's grotesque 'nursery wiles', with a celebration of the unpretentious workforce that labours conscientiously in the shadows of the silver screen. 130 Although its sympathetic representation of rank and file employees is ultimately tempered by sentimentalizing a beneficent capitalism that is steered by an enlightened member of the managerial elite, Stand-In nonetheless offers a highly unusual perspective on the ethics of motion-picture production. As Time magazine commented, unlike the 'acrid satire' of Hollywood dished out by Once in a Lifetime (1932) or Boy Meets Girl (1938), both derived from Broadway plays, the laughter of Stand-In 'is large, warming and contagious'. By virtue of its insider knowledge and its emphasis on 'the vast army of skilled film technicians', the review notes, Stand-In emerges as 'the most human as well as the most biting comedy yet written about Hollywood'. 131

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.