SYLVIA SCARLETT — Katharine Hepburn pays for her transgressions

It’s hard to imagine Katharine Hepburn as anything but a Hollywood icon. But in 1935, director George Cukor’s dreamy, gender-fluid comedy SYLVIA SCARLETT derailed her career for years. Host Rico Gagliano tells the story of a movie with sexual politics way ahead of its time — and which paid for it dearly at the box office. Guests include movie star and Hepburn devotee Rebecca Hall (THE PRESTIGE), film scholar Elyce Rae Helford (WHAT PRICE HOLLYWOOD), and arts writer Lesley Chow (YOU’RE HISTORY).

The latest season of The MUBI Podcast – BOX OFFICE POISON — dives into six visionary films... that were also notorious flops. Inspired by the new book of the same name by Tim Robey, film critic for The Telegraph, every episode is a wild ride through a great movie's rise, and fall, and rise.

QUEER comes to cinemas in Mexico on December 12, in the UK, Ireland & Canada on December 13, and to Germany on January 2.

To stream some of the films we've covered on the podcast, check out the collection Featured on the MUBI Podcast. Availability of films varies depending on your country.
 
MUBI is a global streaming service, production company and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema. MUBI makes, acquires, curates, and champions extraordinary films, connecting them to audiences all over the world. A place to discover ambitious new films and singular voices, from iconic directors to emerging auteurs. Each carefully chosen by MUBI’s curators.

Transcript

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This episode includes adult language and spoilers. In the late 80s, Rebecca Hall hadn't starred in movies like <i>The Prestige</i> yet. She was just the only child of an opera diva, and she was looking for something to do. I mostly was raised by my mom. She was a single parent. She kept quite strange hours, so she would often sleep in pretty late in the morning and I would get up and be by myself. And the first thing I would do would put on a video or things that I would have recorded off the television. And one of the things that I watched over and over again when I was really quite small was <i>Bringing Up Baby</i>.<i>Bringing Up Baby.</i> That'd be the 1938 flick about a mild mannered paleontologist led into misadventures by a free spirit played by Katharine Hepburn.<i>Oh, David, if I could only make you understand.</i><i>You see, all that happened,</i><i>happened because I was trying to keep you near me, and I just did anything</i><i>that came into my head.</i> And I just... I just loved it. I loved Katharine Hepburn, this sort of fast paced, fast thinking, chaotic woman who is charming and funny and will sort of destroy your life, but you will love the process of it, is just so good! I don't know, it's just it feels so powerful for, I think, a young girl watching it from my perspective. I was like, oh, you can decide who you want to seduce. You know, you can decide who you want to love and you can kind of run rings around them.<i>David, can you ever forgive me?</i><i>- I, I...- You can?</i><i>- And you still love me.</i>- Susan.<i>You do? Oh, David.</i><i>Oh, dear. Oh, my...</i> After that, Hall went on a Hepburn movie binge.<i>The Philadelphia Story, Holiday,</i> total classics starring an actor who seemed like she'd always been a beloved icon. Or had she? When I became interested in Katharine Hepburn, I remember my mum, who was very interested in Golden Age Hollywood and where I get a lot of my interest in it from. I remember her being like,"Oh box office poison, box office poison!" She kept saying this, "You know, you know, she became box office poison." I was like, I don't know what you're talking about. And then I had to find out. But I always associated this phrase with her because of my mom saying that. Her mom was right. In 1935, Katharine Hepburn starred in a movie that bombed so bad it put her career on the skids for years, started a pushback against powerful women in Hollywood, and gave our season its name. Hi, I'm Rico Gagliano. Welcome back to the MUBI Podcast. MUBI's the streaming service that champions great cinema. On this show, we tell you the stories behind great cinema. This is season seven, which we've been calling yes, Box Office Poison, and it is inspired by the new book of the same name by this guy. My name is Tim Robey. I do film reviews in London for The Daily Telegraph. Every episode, with help from Tim and many more, we are diving into the story of a good film that did bad box office, and this time around is one of the mothers of all flops director George Cukor's<i>Sylvia Scarlett</i>, a cross-dressing comedy that a growing crew of devotees is considered downright revolutionary. There's nothing else like it in Cukor's filmography, and Katharine Hepburn's, perhaps not in the history of Hollywood. Which in 1935 was a bust from its first screening. No one was prepared for the way it went down, one of the worst preview screenings that Hollywood had ever known. To me it's the story of a couple of outsider artists who almost accidentally made a movie way ahead of its time. So pull on your most mannish duds, here's the gender bending tale of <i>Sylvia Scarlett</i>. So let's start in 1932, in a screening room on the lot of RKO Studios in Hollywood. I imagine a ton of cigar smoke curling through the light from a projector as two guys in suits watch the first screen test of a Broadway starlet named Katharine Hepburn. One of those guys is RKO's head of production, David O. Selznick. Like most of the industry, he is not impressed by what he sees. Katharine Hepburn. She had a lot of trouble in Hollywood at first. She was very thin and angular, and that was not in style. That's Elyce Rae Helford. She's Professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University. Her book about George Cukor's films is called <i>What Price Hollywood</i>? She had kind of pointed chin, she wasn't considered a classical beauty by 20s, 30s standards she might be today, but she wasn't considered a traditional beauty. It was also her voice, a bark as sharp as her cheekbones. Selznick couldn't imagine casting her in anything, but the guy next to him could. His name was George Cukor. 48 years later, interviewed for a documentary called <i>Starring Katharine Hepburn</i>. He still remembered the moment.<i>What really clinched it?</i><i>She reached down and she picked up a drink at a table next to her, and she did</i><i>that with such deep feeling and such power that I was very impressed with that.</i><i>And I thought, well, this girl has possibilities.</i> He cast her in his melodrama<i>A Bill of Divorcement</i>. It was the start of a long partnership between two super complicated people. Cukor, in his time, directed almost as many films as he had years of life, you know, 80 films and 80 years. He was known for being a studio director that did what they told him to do, and he was gay. It was known in Hollywood that he was gay. But back then you didn't have the paparazzi outing everyone, so it was a Hollywood open secret. And Cukor never had a long term partner. He was of the generation that did not have pride in his sexual orientation, or even full ease and comfort with it, so he had a lot of casual sexual experiences. In other words, he wore a lot of masks. He was a guy at the social center of Hollywood's gay scene who also aimed to please audiences of the straight mainstream. The son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants who aspired to the Gentile life. The more public face, and the side that he was most proud of was he would have these Sunday dinner parties where we'd have the cream of the crop of British Hollywood royalty. So Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh and Cukor even liked to spell words with British spellings. He would spell color with a U in it and things. He was a Britophile because he thought that was classy. And so were his movies. Sparkling screwball comedies, subtle screen adaptations of theater hits. Katharine Hepburn fit right into his world. Artistically and personally, they just got along. I mean, this is my argument. I don't know what other people would say. She had that pretentious New England accent. Do you know how she always sounds like, different than all the other characters? Her kind of almost Boston-y kind of accent. And he had his British pretentiousness. And so it may be that they felt they were playing a lovely life game together, doing these kinds of things. She was stubborn. He was stubborn. He loved to direct. She loved to act and be directed. I know that she respected him and genuinely liked him. And as he said later in the documentary,<i>The Men Who Made the Movies</i> with <i>A Bill of Divorcement</i> he made her career. There was an interesting moment in the picture where they first seen her, and she spoke rather forcefully, and the audience wasn't quite sure whether they liked her or not. And then there was, mercifully, an interval where she said goodbye to her mother, who was troubled. And you saw this girl go to the door and she smiled. And you saw that she had this lovely smile and the audience had time to take stock of her.<i>- Goodbye, darling.- Goodbye, mother.</i><i>- Bye, Sydney.- Goodbye.</i> And it was at that moment that Katharine Hepburn became a star. They'd go on to make ten movies together. Tim Robey says, the first few of which made them a professional power couple. He just saw in her something, a real quality that he thought he could nurture, which he started to do in <i>A Bit of Divorcement</i>. And then he cast her to play Jo March in his famous 1933 version of <i>Little Women</i>, which for many people is their favorite version of that much filmed novel. And one of the major reasons for that is how perfect Katharine Hepburn is as Jo. She really radiates that sort of spirit that the character is meant to have.- It's plucky.- Yes, exactly. Actually, plucky was kind of par for the course with Hepburn's roles at the time. She played confident, fiery women who just go for it. Like the aspiring actor in 1933's <i>Morning Glory</i>.<i>I don't want to use my family name because I should probably have</i><i>several scandals while I live, and I don't want to cause them any trouble</i><i>until I'm famous, when nobody will mind.</i><i>That's why I must decide on something at once while there's</i><i>still time before I'm famous.</i> She won her first Oscar for that, by the way, and soon she was known for being just as take charge off screen. She said what she thought.- She wore pants.- Literally. Around the same time, she did a film with Hollywood's only studio, female studio director Dorothy Arzner, who was an out lesbian director. She was willing to take risks, and she was doing surprisingly well, given how different she is from other Hollywood leads at the time. To the point that just three years after arriving, Tinseltown was her oyster. Katharine Hepburn essentially had her choice of which film to make next for RKO for their 1935 release, and she didn't opt for something that she was personally obsessed with. She looked over at Cukor, who wanted to make an adaptation of this book called <i>The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett</i>. This is a 1918 novel by a Scottish writer called Compton Mackenzie. This extremely long book of 600 or 700 pages long. And it needed every one of them. The book follows its title character through years of daring adventures all over the world, but Cukor and his initial screenwriter, John Collier, decided to focus on just one small part of it. The movie is the story of a young woman called Sylvia, who has to flee France at the beginning of the film across the channel to England. The reason being that she and her father, who is an embezzler, are in danger of being caught.<i>Get my bag out, will you? Not much time to catch the train.</i><i>- What do you want to do?- I'm going with you.</i><i>No, no, no. You'd only be a hindrance.</i> And she decides it's going to help them both escape if she poses as a boy.<i>They'd be able to trace a man with a girl.</i><i>Well, then I won't be a girl. I won't be weak and I won't be silly.</i><i>I'll be a boy, and rough and hard.</i><i>I won't care what I do.</i> And so within the first few minutes we see her shearing off her hair. And she becomes Sylvester. And she stays in that guise for almost the entire running time. Yeah, it's that kind of movie where someone comes up with a questionable plan and everyone just says great and rolls with it. Like when on their way to England, Sylvester and his her dad get duped by a cockney con man, played by rising star Cary Grant, and suddenly figure it'd be a great idea to join him and be con men themselves.<i>- I'm free, I see life, rolling stone.- Yeah, I'm a rolling stone, too.</i><i>Well, here, why don't you two come and roll along with me? Proper threesome.</i><i>- One for all and all for one.- Like the Three Musketeers.</i> Later, the trio try to rob a house, get drunk with the maid, and they all randomly decide to become traveling entertainers together.<i>No, I shall have to stay here slaving away instead of performing by the sea.</i><i>The sea, but, but we...</i><i>But we must perform by the sea.</i> We'll team up and we'll become traveling circus buddies. Because you know why not? Every 5 or 10 minutes, the plot makes a kind of hairline turn into some other territory. And you're in another milieu. You're meeting other characters. It feels extremely frivolous and sort of everything is happening by accident. And it's, I think, to a modern audience, I think there's something quite delightful about that.<i>I do like to be beside the seaside.</i> Yeah, after a while, the movie feels almost hallucinogenic. Nothing is constant. Everything is fluid. The plot, what the characters want, how they act, who they love, and of course, the hero's gender. I was actually doing a write up, a tribute to Katharine Hepburn. I was watching absolutely everything that she had done, and this was the most exciting of her movies that I found. There's nothing else like it in Cukor's filmography in Katharine Hepburn's perhaps not in the history of Hollywood. That's culture critic Lesley Chow. She's written for Salon, CNN and many more about iconic women in music and movies. I mean, if you think of Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in terms of their later personae, you think of something very definite, very clear, definite, distinctive voices. But in this film, there arguably are no real characters. It's more a series of people playing dress up and trying on different personas and seeing which ones stick, which is a pretty radical idea for a Hollywood movie of 1935, and something we won't see again until maybe Jacque Rivette's avant garde films in the 70s. In this film, almost anything can trigger a change of character falling asleep or being given a new prop or costume to play with. In other words, it's pretty easy to read this story as a celebration of people choosing whatever identity they want, whenever they want. Radical, for sure. Even if Cukor and Hepburn's main goal probably wasn't to make some sort of social commentary. There's this history of Katharine Hepburn's characters resorting to role play. In <i>Little Women</i>, she plays a tomboy who teaches her sister how to play a swooning damsel. I think Katharine Hepburn reaches a peculiar intensity when her characters are playing someone other than themselves, so it was probably exciting for Cukor to have a film where that was the basis of the character, transformation, cosplay, roleplay. Interesting. So you think that he, like, comes upon this book and is like, Katharine Hepburn could really sink her teeth into this.- Right.- And also, let's be honest, from Hepburn's point of view, it's not like the basics of the story were all that radical. I wonder if she thought to herself, well, this happens in Shakespeare. You know they're in <i>Twelfth Night</i>. Viola poses as a boy throughout that play, and that's famous and beloved. She could wear really cool, androgynous clothes. And she's not the only actress who was dabbling in this sort of thing in 1930s Hollywood. If you think about Marlene Dietrich and all of those suits she wears in <i>Blonde Venus</i> and the kind of black ties she wears. So perhaps Hepburn was sort of thinking to herself, I'm going to dip my toe in that. Still, there are moments in this movie that everyone involved just had to know were toying with sexual taboos of the day.<i>- No.- Hold still now. Wait a minute.</i> Like the scene where that maid draws an eyebrow pencil mustache on Sylvester, says...<i>I say, I wonder what it'd be like to kiss anybody</i><i>with a mustache like that.</i><i>- I don't know.- Let's try.</i> And then, totally macks on him, unaware she's kissing a woman.<i>Don't you like kissing? It's high time you had some practice.</i> That's the gayest thing in the movie. And I think they thought it would be fun. Oh, yeah. Like, one argument that I find very persuasive is like, say, magazine advertising. When they used to do the Guess ads that would have young, pretty men in underwear. A woman looks at it and goes,"Wow, that's great." A gay man can look at it and go,"Wow, he's great." And a straight man can look at it and go, "Wow, I want to be that." And the more diverse an audience you can bring in, the better. And so Cukor said, this will be fun and people will laugh at it'cause it's so over the top. Yeah, he can have his cheesecake and eat it too.- In a way.- Absolutely, absolutely. Now, RKO producer Pandro S. Berman wasn't a fan of this story or the script, but who is he to say no to another Cukor and Hepburn joint? He gave Cukor free rein to make <i>Sylvia Scarlett</i>, and the director took it. It was shot around Malibu. Cukor said that every day was Christmas. They kept giving each other presents. They were sunbathing all day. They were picnicking on the cliffs and Pandro S. Berman was nowhere near the set, so they were just getting away with this every day and having just a delightful time. And then there was a visit, one day. A plane circling overhead landed in the field nearby. And this was Howard Hughes, who was already a good friend of Cary Grant's. This is, of course, the notorious bazillionaire. Yes, exactly. He wanted to meet Katharine Hepburn, he decided, I must meet her. So he literally landed his plane in the field next door to the shoot, and they met and went and played golf straight away. And anyone who's seen Martin Scorsese's<i>The Aviator</i> perhaps remembers that Cate Blanchett's first scene as Katharine Hepburn is when she meets Hughes, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, in that film.<i>I read in the magazines that you play golf.</i><i>On occasion.</i><i>Well, how about nine holes?</i><i>Now, Mr. Hughes?</i><i>If it would be convenient, Miss Hepburn.</i> And then they have this affair, which essentially began here. Their affair began on the set of this film. So there was a lot of social joy and excitement happening on set. But as cameras rolled, the same disjointed story that delights folks like Tim and Lesley Chow and me, started to feel a little different to Katharine Hepburn.<i>I think we just somewhere went wrong on the script.</i> She talked about it in a BBC doc called <i>RKO: A Woman's Lot</i>.<i>And I began to realize about four weeks in,</i><i>it took us 200 years to shoot the picture.</i><i>Everything had calmed down by then, and I thought,</i><i>I wonder whether George Cukor thinks that this is as bad as I think it is.</i> Audiences sure did.<i>Sylvia Scarlett</i> changes Hepburn's identity from superstar to persona non grata. That's coming up in just a minute. Stay with us. All right, everybody, MUBI is the global film company that champions great cinema, bringing it to you wherever you are in as many ways as we possibly can. We stream movies, we produce them, we release them in theaters. These are movies from any country, from legendary auteurs or brilliant first timers, and we've always got something new for you to discover. And here's something I'm just incredibly excited for you to discover coming to cinemas in mid-December. It's the new movie by Luca Guadagnino called <i>Queer</i>. Luca is, of course, the director of some of the coolest and the most sensuous movies of the last many years, including two of my favorites,<i>Call Me By Your Name</i> and <i>Challengers</i> and <i>Queer</i> is no different. It's set in the 1950s. It is a lush adaptation of the cult William S Burroughs novel. It's full of desire and longing, and it stars none other than Daniel Craig, who The Guardian said is in this film,"magnificent, which is par for the course with him,"but very much so in this movie." Also, if you are a <i>Challengers</i> fan, this movie is written by the same guy, Justin Kuritzkes. It's got the same composers, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and the costumes are by the same designer, none other than Jonathan Anderson. Great. So you're going. You can catch <i>Queer</i> in cinemas starting December 12th in Mexico, December 13th in the UK and Ireland, and January 2nd in Germany. For details, check the show notes of this episode. Speaking of which, let's get back to this episode. So it's 1935 production on <i>Sylvia Scarlett</i> is marching on in Malibu, and despite Hepburn's misgivings, the vibe on the set is staying pretty good. So there was just this benevolent chaos that I feel as though I would love to have been on set for the movie. I feel as though everyone was just having the best time. But the costs were rising.$641,000. A third more than Little Women cost, and the most expensive movie RKO made that year. And it's not like this was some musical spectacular. The film doesn't have particularly elaborate sets or anything like that. You can't really see where the money is going. There's a lot of location shooting in it, but they spent quite a bit of time making it, and I feel like they had a lovely party essentially, and the cost just kept climbing. I guess, you know, there was a lot of champagne flowing. Meanwhile, if Cukor shared Hepburn's worry about the loosey goosey story, and he did later confess some scenes felt, quote, very difficult to direct. At the time he kept it close to his chest. I suspect he's slightly lying to himself about it, just hoping that he'll get away with it and that people will just respond to Hepburn in it the same way as they had to her in <i>Little Women</i>, that his rather loose hold on the plot won't matter too much, because there are other Cukor movies which have slightly loose attitude to their plotting as well. But no one was prepared for the way it went down when it was first screened in December 1935, in San Pedro. One of the worst preview screenings that Hollywood had ever known. San Pedro, a port neighborhood in southern L.A.. Not exactly glamorous Hollywood. Sometimes I feel as though there was an element of worry that we need to suppress bad buzz that might be trickling out about the film within the Hollywood community. So you try and hide it by doing it a little bit out of town. So that's what they did in San Pedro. But unfortunately the screening was such a disaster that it was impossible to suppress. Hepburn was there with her costar Natalie Paley.<i>And Natasha was sitting next to me and she said, "Kate, why don't they laugh?"</i><i>And I said,"Because they don't think it's funny."</i> No one was laughing from the word go. The entire comic conceit was falling flat. No one liked Katharine Hepburn being Sylvester. According to Cukor, people were literally running out of the aisles to escape the film. The president of RKO, B. B. Kahane was pacing around at the back, apparently just head in hands at the amount of money they'd spent on it, and Hepburn remembered going to the ladies room for a breather and finding this woman lying down there prostrate on a sofa, sort of fanning herself. And Hepburn said to her,"Did our picture finish you off?" And all the woman did was just roll her eyes to the rafters as if to say, this is the worst thing I've ever seen. By all accounts, Hepburn and her director knew immediately the gig was up. They escaped by limo and rendezvoused with Pandro Berman at Cukor's house. In that BBC doc about RKO, Berman remembered their mea culpas.<i>Katharine and George, who wanted to be nice to me, said, "We loved it,</i><i>"and you hated it, and you let us make it,</i><i>"which was very nice of you, but we're very sorry,</i><i>"and we want to make it up to you for it.</i><i>"We will both make the next picture for you free of charge."</i> They said, don't worry, you don't have to pay us. Just consider this one a write off. But who would ever do that these days? No, no...- Yeah, right.- A-list Hollywood director or star would ever say such things? Yeah. It's like Tom cruise is like, I'm really sorry about that.- The next Mission Impossible is on me.- Exactly. Yeah. Anyway, Berman, for his part, did not accept the offer.<i>And I said, God Almighty.</i><i>Heaven forbid, I never want to see either one of you again.</i> The film lost RKO over 360 grand. One of their biggest flops ever. Plenty of critics pinned the blame on the movie's perplexing plot, but some folks blamed Hepburn and her character right from that first grim premiere. There was one report card that came back from someone in the audience saying rather prudishly"My only reaction was one of repugnance at witnessing such a lewd portrayal." Which seems a little much, right? Sure, the hero is a girl dressed as a boy, but gender swap comedies go back to Shakespeare. Remember? In fact, a few years after this, Cary Grant himself played a soldier who's got to go undercover in a dress in <i>I Was a Male War Bride</i>.<i>Oh, wait a minute. I forgot something.</i><i>- What- Can you talk like a woman?</i><i>- You mean, like this.- Oh, that's awful.</i><i>- Can't you do better than that?- No.</i> No one batted a false eyelash. But <i>Sylvia Scarlett</i>'s hero, was different in a crucial way. Yeah, this is one of my favorite things about the film is that she stays in the male disguise long past the point where it's actually necessary, and to the point where it becomes quite, almost quite deranged that she does so. And the only real explanation, even though I'm not sure that Cukor and Hepburn would have admitted this to themselves, or put it this way, is that she wants to be a boy. She wants to stay that way. She's more comfortable in that skin. You know, like, I think people were comfortable with the idea of doing a gender swap if it was like, "Ha ha, look at this. Isn't this a hoot?" But like, she's not playing, you know, that character isn't playing. You remember Rebecca Hall from the top of this episode? She says, actually, in this movie, the heroine has the hardest time being a girl.<i>Poor mama.</i> It's that old adage of the mask reveals the truth because it's-- She doesn't ever perform masculinity. In the beginning of the film, she's performing femininity, being the daughter, and she looks completely constrained, and she gives kind of a bad performance of being like a sweet, doting daughter. And you start off the film sort of thinking, oh, God, like, what's she doing?<i>You've got me, father, dear.</i><i>I'll work for you just as hard as mother did.</i><i>- And I'll cook for you.- You don't know?</i> Yeah. that opening sequence is so over the top.- It's almost ridiculous.- It's ridiculous. It's like an old school, like 1800s melodrama or something. Totally. And then, you know, she becomes this boy and suddenly she's, you know, you don't see her doing the stuff that you'd expect. You don't see her like, oh, I've got to remember to perform masculinity. You just see her sitting down and, like, walking how she feels comfortable walking and, like, smacking someone in the face because she's mad.<i>I hate his rotten face the minute I saw him.</i><i>I'd like to see him again now.</i><i>You know, I'd give him a smack in the jaw. Why I take hold</i><i>of that oily black hair of his, and...</i> It's like she's expressing herself. And then you look back at the beginning of the film and you're like, oh, she was completely-- That was the performance when she was being the good little docile girl.<i>Oh, what a nerve. Ha ha ha!</i> And that is quite bold and radical and quite modern, because mostly cross-dressing in comedy is something that is forced upon you, and it's a form of humiliation that you have to endure as briefly as possible. Cary Grant in <i>I Was a Male War Bride</i>. You know, you have him putting on the silly wig, and he's cringing and embarrassed and blushing, and it's very funny. But he wants out of that as quickly as possible. And yet something about Sylvia just feels more comfortable, I think. And that made audiences uncomfortable. For the movie's major players.<i>Sylvia Scarlett</i> was a turning point. Elyce Rae Helford says it was the last time Cukor went for anything daring. Cukor has written about it as like talking to himself."Well, buddy, you better not be so damn risky anymore.""You better rein it in" because it was more important for him to make films than to make any specific film. Yeah, but more than to make a statement. He just wanted to keep making his movies and being part of the Hollywood glamor show. Yep, and being respected, I think was important to him, and that can go along with being gay in an era when it was looked down upon. He wanted to be respected and admired as a director. He was also very honest about things, you know, that he kind of talked about himself as more a master of ceremonies. And here he is hosting this film as a party and it flops. Nobody enjoys the party. So his next film was a very safe option, which was the MGM version of<i>Romeo and Juliet</i>, which infamously stars 43 year old Leslie Howard and 35 year old Norma Shearer as the teenage main characters. Very sexless adaptation of the play, which really feels like a kind of safe retrenchment into classy don't-rock-the-boat cinema. And as for Hepburn, her next four movies were flops <i>Bringing Up Baby</i>, the classic that sparked young Rebecca Hall's imagination years later. Back then, that was a flop too, and the losing streak continued. Cukor didn't dare direct Hepburn again for another several years when he did with <i>Holiday</i>, which was a real hit on Broadway, in which she was reunited with Cary Grant and gives one of the great performances of her career, as does Cary Grant. Even <i>Holiday</i> didn't do well because the <i>Sylvia Scarlett</i> effect was still kind of percolating through. That was 1938, and that was the same year that Katharine Hepburn was infamously dubbed 'box office poison' in the press. Well, not so much by the press as by a big chunk of the film industry. In May 1938, the head of the Independent Theater Owners Association took out a full page ad in The Hollywood Reporter. And they were all peeved about the underperformance of certain films by big stars, big stars with expensive contracts who were getting to make films year after year. The other actors involved were Mae West, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Joan Crawford. It was almost all women. And that, Lesley Chow says, was probably by design. I think there's always, even now, a sense of women being who become too powerful, too successful, too invulnerable. Instead of capitalizing on that, studios decide that they need to be taken down a peg. And this was a very efficient way of trying to wipe out the careers of female stars who had gotten too big, maybe too expensive and too powerful. Hepburn was especially ripe for a takedown because she'd also used her power politically. The daughter of a famed suffragette, she'd always advocated for women's rights. In 1934, she stumped for the socialist Upton Sinclair for California governor. The year this ad came out, she urged women to protest media censorship. She was in people's faces. I think audiences kind of connected the two together because they saw her sort of tomboy antics in <i>Sylvia Scarlett</i> and her sort of independent sexuality in that film. And then they connected that with the kind of righteous feminist advocacy, and they didn't like any of it. And Katharine Hepburn was public enemy number one on this advert. Stop casting Katharine Hepburn. She's box office poison. The only redemption came when a role was written especially to try and bring her back into public favor, and that was her main character in <i>The Philadelphia Story</i>.<i>The Philadelphia Story</i>, based on a play and directed by Cukor, came out in 1940. Hepburn plays one of her classic characters, a headstrong socialite, except this time, right off the bat, she and symbolically Hepburn get put in her place in a wordless scene where she tosses her husband, played by Cary Grant, out of their home along with his golf clubs. These kind of phallic symbol, masculine sports tools. And as she's throwing them out the last golf club, she breaks over her knee and throws it, and Cary Grant's character walks up to the door and raises his fist, rears his hand back to punch her in the face, and then opens his fist, takes his hand, and pushes her as hard as he can until she falls onto the ground in the doorway... and then walks off with his golf clubs. I find that a very troubling scene. Cukor wrote that scene. He added that scene into the film. There's no more, how much more comeuppance do you want than physical violence against her character? Yeah, right. And that wasn't even in the play. He put it there. It's like, this is what the audience needs to see to take you back.- Yeah.- At the end, Hepburn's character realizes she was wrong all along, calls off her second marriage, rejects the nice guy she'd been flirting with on the side, and takes back Grant. We're knocking her right down, and we're going to rebuild her from scratch. That whole film was very calculated to do that, and it did work because the film became her first successful movie in six years, and it paved the way for her to recover ground and become a beloved A-list star. After that, Hepburn still played capable women, but Robey says they kind of knew their place, like when she teamed up with her real life partner, Spencer Tracy. He was a much bigger star, much more highly paid star than her in the early 40s, and by kind of hitching herself to him in nine films where they usually played husband and wife, she was kind of tamed, if you like, and rendered palatable for for audiences, it's we can deal with Katharine Hepburn as long as she's got Spencer Tracy bossing her around. But for me, for my money, and I'm probably not alone in this, I think her earlier performances and characters who have more independence to them, they stride out on more of a kind of a mission to be their own woman, if you like. That's where my heart lies in terms of what I want to watch from a Katharine Hepburn character. Even so, whatever the role, the work never suffered. She won three more Oscars for a total of four, the most of any actor ever. And off screen, she was never anyone's sidekick.<i>Is that going to be with me?</i><i>I can put my glass of water in the crease on that.</i> This is infamous footage of her getting ready to be interviewed on Dick Cavett's talk show in 1973. It looks like she's the director. She approves of Cavett's outfit, thinks the color of his pants complements her own.<i>You look, you look nice.</i> She insists that he swapped seats with her.<i>No, I think I go the other way.</i> She disses the dingy carpeting. She calls for a set change.<i>And, can't we have a stationary table?</i><i>- Can we have a table that's...- John?</i><i>Nobody answers.</i> And when a table arrives, she casually props her foot up on it, just like Sylvia/Sylvester. Like she absolutely belongs there, hanging with the boys.<i>If anybody can survive that carpet,</i><i>I personally am going to dye it by tomorrow morning.</i><i>Gee whiz!</i> So last question for you. Today, of course, you're a movie star. You direct movies. What do you think Hepburn would make of the industry today? I think she'd be really excited that... actresses are not so readily pigeonholed, and that there are more opportunities for all types of humans. I think she, 'cause I think humanity was really the thing, like she was, that's what she was interested in. But she was also, you know, she was, I think she'd also probably be a little... I think she'd still be dogged and a little angry. I don't think she'd be like"Ah no, that's great, and I rest my case and everything's fine." I think she'd be, I think she'd still think there was a work to be done. And that's the MUBI Podcast for this week. Follow us this season for more stories about great films with bad box office. Next time indie heroes the Coen Brothers get paired with blockbuster producer Joel Silver. What could possibly go wrong? He turned to me and said, on her first days watching dailies, he said, "Roger, what the fuck is this?" And I said, "Joel, didn't you read the script?" The story of <i>The Hudsucker Proxy</i> with guests including the guy who shot it legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins. Follow us so you don't miss it. Meanwhile, if you love the show, tell the world by leaving a five star review wherever you listen, won't you? Let them know we're not your standard movie chat show. Also, if you've got questions, comments, or just want to tell us about how you channel your inner Hepburn, email us at podcast@mubi.com Now let's roll credits. This episode of the MUBI Podcast was written, hosted and edited by me, Rico Gagliano,

based on the new book 'Box Office Poison: 36:24

Hollywood Story in a Century of Flops' by Tim Robey that is published by Faber and Faber in the UK and Hanover Square in the US. Go get it. Ciara McEniff is our producer. Jackson Musker is our booking producer. Steven Colon does our sound mastering. Our original music was composed by Martin Austwick. Extra thanks this week to Adrian Harris, Mat Ozee at WMOZ in Nashville, Curtis Hatton at Studio Truth in Melbourne, David Harper for recording Tim and as always, thank you, Carina Lesser. This show is executive produced by me along with Jon Barrenechea, Efe Çakarel, Daniel Kasman and Michael Tacca. And finally to stream the best in cinema, including some of the films we talk about on this very podcast. Just head over to Mubi.com to start watching. Thanks for listening. Go watch some movies and remember, failure is okay.