2013 Essays

Gloria Swanson

Buck, Julie

By the time Gloria Swanson started her own production company, she had already been part of the film industry for over a decade. Many actresses started their own production companies in the 1920s and ’30s in an effort to gain more artistic freedom and a bigger percentage of the profits. Rarely, however, were actresses involved in the day-to-day workings of such an arrangement. Directors, husbands, or studio heads usually handled details. Gloria Swanson, however, remains an exception as she handled the business side of her first company; she did it not for “artistic freedom” but, according to Swanson herself, in retaliation against Jesse Lasky (Swanson 261).