2013 Essays

Wanda Tuchock

Koerner, Michelle

Screenwriter Wanda Tuchock retains a singular role in film history as one of the few women who began her career in the silent era and was able to maintain her career in Hollywood during the early sound years. It is now well known that after the end of the silent era, the number of women directors trickled down to nearly zero. Anthony Slide highlights this for us by pointing out that screenwriter Wanda Tuchock was the only woman apart from Dorothy Arzner to receive a directing credit on a Hollywood studio film in the 1930s (Slide 1996, 136). Tuchock shared the directing credit with George Nichols, Jr., on the RKO production Finishing School (1934). This legacy must have defined her career, as it is highlighted in her Chicago Tribune obituary, which also offers the information that she entered the industry in 1927 from work as an advertising copy editor, and this would have been when she was nearly thirty years old (A6).