Her decision to leave MGM in 1945 and form Mars Film Corporation was partly creative ambition and partly a response to the offers she was or was not receiving. The Strange Woman and Dishonored Lady were respectable productions. They did not build her back to the level she had held. And without the MGM publicity machine behind her, the attention that had always been focused on her image began, gradually, to move elsewhere.
## The Invention in Context
The Second World War was fought with improvisation. The military establishments of all the combatant nations were overwhelmed with problems they had not anticipated and timelines that allowed no orderly sequence of research, development, testing, and deployment. Practical engineering concerns dominated every decision about weapons technology.
In this context, the Lamarr-Antheil patent faced obstacles that were real and not merely institutional. The proposal was elegant — genuinely so, as engineers who examined it decades later consistently acknowledged — but the elegance was in the concept, and the implementation required hardware that 1942 technology could not produce at the scale and reliability the military required.
The perforated paper strip mechanism was the heart of the system, and it was also its greatest vulnerability. Paper was sensitive to moisture. Mechanical systems accumulated wear over time. The synchronization depended on both strips advancing at exactly the same rate, and even small deviations would cause the transmitter and receiver to drift apart — exactly the problem Antheil had been solving with Ballet Mécanique’s player pianos, but in a context where the tolerance for error was zero and the environmental conditions were a submarine or a surface ship in combat.