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| A General Film Leader Lady |
A running theme of the Academy Museum's "Color in Motion: Chromatic Explorations of Cinema" is that color was women's work. Displays focus on early Disney color animators—overworked, underrecognized, and almost all female—and on the formidable Hollywood color maven Natalie Kalmus. It was Kalmus who decreed that Oz's wicked witch should be green, the better to show off her husband's Technicolor patents.
Still another sort of unsung women's work is that of the "leader ladies." Analog films were distributed with test images of women posing with color or grayscale cards, incorporated into the numerical countdown. Audiences were never intended to see the leader ladies, and for the most part, they didn't. It is only lately that cineastes, feminist film historians, and devotees of vernacular photography have championed these invisible film stars. The subjects were usually workers in film labs, and their names are lost to time. The patriarchy being what it was, they were young, pretty, female, and Caucasian, though all these qualifications were negotiable.
Because their raison d'être was color calibration, leader ladies were shown without make-up. Hair styling was optional. Leader ladies were anti-movie stars, a mute rebuttal to the studio perfection of the actors in the films that followed. While many ladies emulate the glamor poses of old Hollywood and Madison Avenue, it is their momentary, contingent, and imperfect manner that resonates today.
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| Leader Ladies installation in "Color in Motion," Academy Museum of Motion Pictures |
The Academy Museum's display of leader lady stills is drawn from
an engaging online archive assembled by the Chicago Film Society.
The name "leader ladies" is a contemporary interpolation. Technicians and projectionists of the time knew them as "China girls." It's not entirely clear why. One theory is that early examples used porcelain dolls rather than actual people. There are surviving examples with dolls and creepy, Thunderbirds-style effigies. #ChinaGirlsSoWhite was never a hashtag, but the changing culture gradually led to a more diverse set of leader ladies.
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| Fake dudes can be leader ladies too |
"Color in Motion: Chromatic Explorations of Cinema" is at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures through July 13, 2025.
Comments
A more ascetic or hipster format ideal for the Broad, MOCA or Hammer may not be quite as good for AMPAS. Moreover, recent reports indicate that only 20% of scripted TV and film productions are now based in LA. That would make for a worthwile topic for the Academy's museum too.