Carlotta Valdez is an aspiring Hollywood starlet who is ready for bigger roles but is limited to using her beauty to help further her male counterparts’ careers. Her appearance on Hail, Caesar! (2016) is brief, but she embodies what it was to be a young woman working on a Hollywood production lot. As Heidi Kenaga explains in “Promoting Hollywood Extra Girl 1935” for Screen the studios sought to promote the Hollywood fantasy instead of acknowledging a women’s economic mobility, ensuring that women would stay loyal to the company. She writes “industry could demonstrate its paternal, custodial role over young movie hopefuls while exerting a greater measure of production control over those more opportunistic individuals” (84). Set in 1950-something, Carlotta Valdez seems to fit the category of “opportunistic individual” because of the willingness to do whatever the company, Capitol Pictures, suggests. Eddie Mannix, the studio ‘fixer’ and talent handler whose main purpose seems to be keeping Hollywood’s scandals quiet bears resemblance to the image of industry management Kenaga credits DeMille with constructing. She suggests that “DeMille constructs an image of industry management as a benevolent patron of all those female movie hopefuls whose earnest aspirations should not be denied, but rather monitored and controlled” (87). This idea can be understood in Carlotta Valdez and Hobie Doyle’s dinner scene, set up by Eddie Mannix. Hobie suggests they are “fixin’ to be friendly” but realistically they are “fixed” because Eddie Mannix has promised an exclusive on the young stars’ relationship to a gossip columnist. Commodifying Carlotta Valdez’s beauty and exploiting her aspirations allow Carlotta Valdez to very much embody the Hollywood dream to go from “Extra Girl to Studio Girl” (86).
Works Cited
Hail, Caesar! (2016)
Kenaga, Heidi. Promoting Hollywood Extra Girl 1935, Screen, Volume 52, Issue 1, Spring 2011, Pages 82-88, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjq062
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