Behind the Cameras

Mildred Marion Coughlin

Mildred Marion Coughlin married writer Patterson McNutt in 1924. They moved to Los Angeles in 1930 where he wrote screenplays for the movies (including Shirley Temple's "Curly Top'). Hollywood was booming during the Depression as people wanted escape and the extravaganzas of the time showed a world of glamor and glitz as well as social commentary. Coughlin walked between both worlds, gently satirizing Hollywood as well as showing the behind-the-scenes moments that involved the workers that put it all together.

Such is the case with "Behind the Cameras", a lithograph done around 1935, during the Great Depression. Coughlin captures a moment as the chorus members rehearse to the a single bulb light, a stage hand stands to their right and a man reads a script. At the left men perch on stools. Behind them all are the large stage lights and cameras pointed toward the lighted stage where the action is occurring.

This impression was from the collection of German-born Los Angeles Master Printer Paul Roeher who had moved to Los Angeles around 1912, going to work for a commercial printer T.V. Allen and then opened his own shop where he began to print for artists, including Coughlin, Thomas Craig, Richard Day, Ivan Messanger, Warren Newcombe and many others. He was printing in Los Angeles at the same time as the Kistlers, William and Lynton, who also began working with artists in the 1940s.

Mildred Marion Coughlin, painter, printmaker, illustrator, and scenic designer, was born 16 July 1892 to James M. and Mary Welter Coughlin in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Her father was the superintendent of the public school system in Wilkes-Barre and she graduated from the Wilkes-Barre High School in 1910. She received her B.A. degree from Wellesley College in Massachusetts, and then furthered her studies at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. While in New York she studied at the Art Students League.

As a printmaker, Coughlin made etchings while in France and New York but during the 1930s she produced a number of lithographs depicting and gently poking fun at the Hollywood movie scene. She captured the hot lights and crowded set in Hollywood Close Shot and Behind the Cameras, the glitz and glamour of the Hollywood starlets in The Great Ziegfeld, and haute boredom of the coifed patrons in Trocadero. In her distinctive drawing style, she rendered daily life at the Los Angeles Farmers Market and race day at Santa Anita racetrack. Coughlin also made a series of etching depicting the game of golf, also in her deftly humorous style.