Dr. Hannah Thuraisingam Robbins

they are not prepared for her and Edwin to come in and negotiate what she is and isn't going to do.

So with his help, she says that they're not going to accept any old part.

And he says that he could just hire Lena Horner, a maid with his own money.

So she's not going to be playing servants on screen.

They also negotiate that she won't play any illiterate or uneducated parts and she won't play any jungle or Tarzan stereotypes.

So she'd done a couple of independent black films at the end of the 30s, but you're basically those had not been widely distributed.

They were not prominent movies.

She had the appeal.

I think that's the thing we can say.

She had the appeal, but also they saw an opportunity to.

to represent a different kind of music within some of these film musicals that are made she gets in the end a seven year film contract which and she was the first black actor of any gender to get such a major deal this was that one year they were really doing dei at mgm and they just really knocked it out of the park and nobody else ever got that deal ever 1942 to 1943 yeah

Panama Hattie is an adaptation of a stage musical by Cole Porter.

Yeah.

And I think it's

a really interesting insight into what MGM attempted to do with her.

They deliberately immediately start to lean on the idea of her being slightly ethnically ambiguous.

But I think it's also really important to say that this is also a time where black actors were sometimes listed as props and not as cast people in the paperwork at the studios.

So the complexity of the ways in which they are conceptualising race cannot be overstated.

give me an example of how they were listed as props so they would produce these documents outlining the contents of the films this would include the list of scenes the number of songs who the cast were and then they would have a prop list where they would have table kettle six chairs and in one and louis armstrong yeah

Like it was it is a bleak fact, but it is a really important nuance to understanding what it might have been like to be making a film for her at that time.