A Review of: “McCormack, Naomi, dir. and prod. Out of the Question: Women, Media, and the Art of Inquiry.”

McCormack, Naomi, dir. and prod. Out of the Question." Women, Media, and the Art of Inquiry. Philadelphia, PA: Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, 2009. 38 minutes. Free download available at http://www. outofthequestion.org/Women-of-the-Film/Default-aspx. Out of the Question: Women, Media, and the Art of Inquiry, a documentary, tells the story of five women who were engaged in early media-effects research in the 1930s and 1940s. The women, Thelma Ehrlich Anderson, Joan Doris Goldhammer, Gladys Engel Lang, Thelma Herman McCormaek, and Yole Granata Sills, worked in places like Columbia University's Bureau for Applied Social Research, the Voice of America, and the Social Science Review Council. This short documentary uses appropriate period-sounding music and interesting (but largely unidentified) archival photos and film footage to tell the women's stories from childhood onward. It consists of interviews with the five women and voice-over narration, which is uncredited. The only production aspect that seems off is the choice for the titles: they are made to look like cursive, neon lights. The highlight of the documentary is the first few minutes. It begins with an anecdote from Goldhammer. She talks about how Paul Lazarsfeld, the well-known sociologist, once walked into a room where she and several other women were working and announced to his companions that they could talk in that room because "nobody's here." That opening, and the approximately two minutes of clips that follow, sets up the documentary's focus on how women were treated in the early days of media research. Unfortunately, the rest of the documentary never quite lives up to that expectation. After the titles, the documentary moves into a five-minute discussion of each woman's early childhood, complete with anecdotes about where they were born and raised and their parents' professions. From Anderson's story of a corset falling on her mother's head as she walked down the street shortly after she immigrated to the United States, to Lang's talk about growing up in Atlantic City during the Depression, the stories included are mostly generic and focus on the difficulties of growing up during the Great Depression rather than how their youth influenced their careers in media. The next section, "Early Aspirations," lasts for about 90 seconds and includes McCormack and Lang discussing what they first wanted to be. There isn't much relevant content in this 90-second segment, but the next section is the meatiest of the film and lasts for just over eleven minutes: "The 1940s: WWII and the Bureau." This section begins with Sills discussing her wartime work for the Voice of America in Italy, where she wrote news/propaganda broadcasts in response to intelligence reports. The documentary then transitions to the other women with voice-over narration claiming that while propaganda was being used, it wasn't yet fully understood. The Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University, headed by Lazarsfeld, is the focus for the rest of the section. Three of the women, Goldhammer, Anderson, and McCormack, discuss how they came to join the bureau and the work they did. Goldhammer talks about doing in-depth interviews to discover why Kate Smith was so effective at selling war bonds. She also mentions doing content analyses on fiction in popular magazines to see how the heroes and villains were portrayed. Anderson notes that she studied Superman comics, and then she went to work on the Decatur study, which aimed to discover what influenced women's decision making. McCormack talks about how Lazarsfeld brought in refugees to work at the bureau and mentions his claims that women at the bureau did the "dumb" jobs-interviewing, coding, and calculating. What is never made clear is if any of the women interviewed worked together. The next six minutes are devoted to "The Interviews." In it, Goldhammer, Anderson, and McCormack talk generally about interviewing. …