Backwards and in Heels. Alicia Malone
at a young age, and fostered her creative spirit through music lessons. As a teenager, her independence impelled her to move to New York, where she paid her rent by playing piano for the tenants of a boarding house. At seventeen, Lois started touring with a theater company. She got this job through her uncle, who was a theater producer in Chicago and one of the few relatives to support her ambitious drive.
During one of her theater tours, Lois met stage manager Phillips Smalley, and they quickly fell in love, marrying within weeks. When their theater tour ended, Phillips joined another, and Lois tagged along. During these two years spent on the road, Lois kept herself busy by writing scenarios—bare-bones scripts for silent movies. She mailed them to film companies and was surprised when they began to sell.
When Phillips was hired for a new tour, Lois decided not to join him. Instead, she approached the American Gaumont Film Company. This was run by Alice Guy Blaché and her husband Herbert. In Alice, Lois had a role model of a female director, and Herbert was also encouraging of her talent. She joined Gaumont and not only wrote scenarios, but directed and starred in them too.
When her husband returned, this time it was Phillips who followed Lois. He got a job at Gaumont acting in her movies and helping direct. Together they churned out one short film after another. This was around 1910, when a structure for movie production was still evolving. The frantic pace actually gave Lois an advantage. As she said later in her career, “I grew up in the business when everybody was so busy learning their particular branch of the new industry, no one had time to notice whether or not a woman was gaining a foothold.”
Lois and Phillips got a chance to work on higher quality filmmaking when they both got jobs at the Rex Motion Picture Company, which eventually became part of Universal Pictures. The head of Rex, Edwin S. Porter, wanted to make tasteful, intimate dramas with small casts, and Lois excelled in that type of movie. She wrote intricate scenarios, pairing them with creative direction and editing. With her own signature style for each of her productions, Lois was an early auteur, or “author” of the cinema.
One of the most impressive films by Lois and Phillips is 1913’s Suspense. This ten-minute short is often cited as a film that pushed forward the art of visual storytelling. The movie is about a young mother (played by Lois) who becomes trapped inside her house with a homeless man, and calls her husband, who races home to save her.
In one landmark scene, Lois and Phillips heighten the tension by superimposing three different shots. On the left, the homeless man is seen entering the house. On the right, the wife calls her husband for help. And in the middle, the husband receives the distressing phone call. This was a clever way to show simultaneous action, and it was a technique audiences hadn’t seen before.
Though Phillips and Lois were a team for many years, she was often singled out for her talent. Professor Shelley Stamp, author of Lois Weber in Early Hollywood, says Lois was truly an innovator of cinematic style. “She had an extraordinary capacity for visual storytelling and was really pioneering in terms of using moving camera and superimposition,” Shelley said. “And what strikes me is the way she was able to convey the interior psychology of a character visually, using a whole bunch of techniques to help the audience understand what was going on inside a character’s head. That’s really hard to do.”
It was especially hard given her choice of subject matter. Lois said she wanted to make films which would “have an influence for good in the public’s mind.” So between 1914 and 1921, she made a series of “social problem” movies, becoming one of the earliest directors in America to tackle morally complex issues. Her 1916 film, Where Are My Children? is the one I previously mentioned, which focused on abortion. This was released around the same time as the arrest of activist Margaret Sanger, jailed for promoting the idea of family planning. Margaret Sanger’s story and the debate of legalizing birth control was the subject of Lois’ follow-up 1917 movie, The Hand That Rocks The Cradle. Then, in The People vs. John Doe, she looked at capital punishment, Hop, The Devil’s Brew was about drug abuse, and poverty was her subject in Shoes.
It’s amazing to think that these films were made back then, that a movie about birth control written and directed by a woman was not only allowed, but was really successful. You could not picture that happening today.
In 1921, Motion Picture magazine wrote, “When the history of the dramatic early development of motion pictures is written, Lois Weber will occupy a unique position.” She started making movies when films were silent, a maximum of twenty minutes long, and not yet a business venture. She finished when they had sound, were feature-length, and were thought of as profitable products. Lois was also the first female director to ever make a feature film in the United States, with 1914’s The Merchant of Venice. Her final film was 1934’s White Heat, about a romance between an interracial couple. She passed away five years later, aged sixty.
It’s true, Lois Weber’s name should be written in the history of film, and she does occupy a unique position in it. She showed how movies can be a powerful medium and how they can candidly explore important issues and engender moral discussion, while also being significant pieces of visual art.
Mary Pickford: The Movie Star Businesswoman
With her blonde ringlets, wide-eyed innocence, and naive childlike roles, Mary Pickford epitomized the pure Victorian girl. But this persona belied who she really was: the most powerful woman to have ever worked in Hollywood. Mary Pickford’s life actually encompassed a lot of opposites. She went from poverty to a President’s paycheck. She was the first movie star as well as an independent producer. She was the original “America’s Sweetheart” but was actually born in Canada. And she was known as Mary Pickford, when her real name was Gladys Smith.
Her childhood was anything but easy. In fact, it could almost be a plot from one of her later dramas. Gladys’ alcoholic father abandoned the family when she was three years old, leaving her mother Charlotte scrambling to care for their children. A year later, Gladys almost died from severe diphtheria. She was so gravely ill that a priest was called for an emergency baptism. When she was six, her father returned, but that jubilation was short-lived, because he died soon after from a blood clot. The night he passed away, Gladys heard her mother’s desperate screams, and Charlotte was so overwhelmed by grief that the children were sent away to temporarily live with other families.
Their lives changed when the family took in a boarder to help pay the rent. This stranger was the first person to suggest that Gladys try acting. He was a stage manager looking to hire a child actor for a local production. And because it paid money, Charlotte let her daughter act in the play. From her very first moment on stage, she was a natural, improvising and getting the biggest laugh of the night.
The acting bug had bit, as well as the realization that this might save them from destitution. So the Smith family packed up their bags and went to the stage, touring as their own theater group.
The raw talent that Gladys exhibited had her stealing every show, and critics took notice. One review prophesied that the eleven-year-old would “someday make a polished actress … deserving of great credit for her work.”
This prophecy began to come true when Gladys won a coveted role in a play on Broadway. The producer suggested that she should change her name from Gladys Louise Millbourne Smith to something a bit catchier. They looked into her family tree and chose Pickford from her grandfather John Pickford Hennessey, and came up with Mary as a version of Marie, the name the priest had baptized her. And so the legendary Mary Pickford was born.
Once the Broadway play closed, Charlotte encouraged her daughter to look for acting roles in movies. Mary wanted to stay in theater, but movies offered steadier pay, so she approached The American Biograph Company in New York. Director D.W. Griffith was the boss at the studio, and Mary convinced him to give her a screen test. Watching the test footage, D.W. saw Mary’s potential to be a star; she just had a presence that was so sweet. He hired her to be a full-time actress.
She was not so sweet when it