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The Women Behind the Camera in Early Hollywood
by Cari Beauchamp
Hollywood in the early 1900's was a magnet for creative and entrepreneurial misfits and with few taking filmmaking seriously as a business, the doors were wide open to women. Movies were an idea one week, before the cameras the next and in the theaters within a month. There were no paths to follow and no rules to break. Women wouldn't be "given" the right to vote until 1920, yet before then they were thriving at every level of movie making, as directors, producers, editors, and writers. While writers' names often did not appear in the credits of the early films, from the copyright records in the Library of Congress we know that almost half of all films written between 1912 and 1925 were written by women.
Alice Guy was not only the first woman director, she was one of the very first film directors period and is often credited with directing the first narrative film. She was a secretary to the Gaumonts in Paris in 1896 when they agreed to let her "play" with their cameras as long as her clerical duties didn't suffer. Her after hours creations were so successful she was made the head of their quickly formed film production company. She had literally given birth to the French film industry by the time she moved to America with her husband, the cameraman Herbert Blache. In 1910 she formed Solax in New Jersey and supervised another several hundred films over the next four years.
Gene Gauntier began in pictures as an actress in 1906, but quickly moved to writing and directing. She claimed she could turn out three, one reel scenarios in a single day. The Vitagraph actress Helen Gardner formed her own producing company in New York in 1912 and made a dozen feature films under her own banner.
New York and New Jersey were the hub of activity in the early years, but as entrepreneurs and "Trust busters" dared to stand up to Thomas Edison and his consortium who held patents on the cameras, the film and even the sprocket holes, few states were without some company with a camera at work. Southern California became an oasis -- not only was the weather almost always perfect for outdoor filming, it was 3,000 miles away from the Trust and their vigilantes.
The Los Angeles that greeted these pioneers who disembarked after their four-day train ride from the east was part boomtown, part frontier. Hollywood, founded in 1903 with a population of 166 by a prohibitionist from Kansas, was just one of forty incorporated cities within a thirty-five mile radius. Pueblos, miles of orange groves, a few hotels, large houses and clusters of businesses indiscriminately interspersed with lean-to refineries and thousands of wells, and then the occasional barn or deserted building on vacant land taken over by a roving band of movie makers shooting "on the lot."
Los Angeles had been introduced to the "screen machine" in 1896 when the lights were dimmed at the Orpheum and the image of a life sized Anna Belle Sun danced for a few precious moments, projected onto a large white sheet. The popularity of one reelers shown between live vaudeville acts had grown so quickly that by 1908, there were already 10,000 nickelodeons throughout the country desperate for product. As the demand for movies skyrocketed, the atmosphere was permeated with a sense of excitement. Anything was possible.
Opportunity beckoned and women flocked to Hollywood. One of the first and most successful to direct in Los Angeles was a Blache protegee, Lois Weber. A pianist turned actress, Weber began to write and direct as well and soon rose to the top using innovative camera angles, split screens and detailed backgrounds and locations. With stories that stressed social significance and questioned prejudice, abortion, and society's priorities, Weber became the highest paid female director in the country. Ardent in her beliefs, Lois opposed censorship and the death penalty and championed the discussion of birth control. Her controversial films like Hypocrites, featuring a reappearing naked woman dubbed "Miss Truth," packed the theaters and cemented her fame. "After seeing Hypocrites," said Variety, "you can't forget the name of Lois Weber."
Weber even owned her own studio for several years and actively promoted other women. She encouraged Cleo Madison and Dorothy Davenport to direct and hired Frances Marion as her protegee in 1914. In turn, Weber was the most famous of a dozen women directors who found a booster in Carl Laemmle, the head of Universal. Cleo Madison starred in and directed dozens of films at Universal as did Ida May Park, Ruth Ann Baldwin, Ruth Stonehouse, Lule Warrenton and serial queen Grace Cunard. When Laemmle’s “Universal City” opened in 1915, Lois Weber was named “Mayor.”
Nell Shipman traveled the country directing wild life adventures films. Jeanie MacPherson, another actress turned writer and then director, went on to lasting fame as the writer of many of Cecil B. DeMille's great epics. MacPherson and DeMille had adjoining offices and while many knew they enjoyed a decades-long affair, few confused their personal and professional lives; DeMille would have many mistresses, but only a few screenwriters.
Throughout the teens and early twenties, the pages of every new movie magazine announced scenario contests and advertised books like "How to Write for the Movies” by a scenario writer for Essanay studios in Chicago, one Louella O. Parsons. Moving Picture Magazine's article on "A New Profession for Women" claimed women were naturals since they were used to writing letters and regarding paper as a "confidante" for their dreams and fantasies. In the 1920 book Careers for Women, Ida May Park wrote the chapter on directing.
Because of the collaborative and fast moving nature of filmmaking in the teens, so different than today, it is easy to get caught up in the question of who directed, who wrote or who "first" did what. In reality, many women wore many hats and the bottom line is that for a brief but amazing time, they were encouraged to join a business where they were professionally nurtured by their bosses and each other. As Frances Marion noted at the end of her life, "I have found that it has always been one of my own sex who had given me a helping hand when I needed it." They took care of each other and were good friends; many of the friendships lasted throughout their lives, long after they had left the business.
It would be as writers that women prospered for the longest period of time: the names of Frances Marion, Anita Loos, Bess Meredyth, Adela Rogers St.Johns, Zoe Akins, Lenore Coffee, June Mathis, Frances Marion, Sonya Levien and Catherine Turney laced the credits of films from 1914 into the 1950s. Before writing Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Anita Loos wrote the athletic comedies that brought Doug Fairbanks to stardom. Adela Rogers St. Johns wrote westerns and social commentaries, Dorothy Davenport examined the evils of drug addiction and prostitution, Bess Meredyth wrote and directed Tarzan films and helped bring Ben Hur to the screen, June Mathias discovered Rudolf Valentino for her adaptation of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and Jane Murfin wrote and produced Strongheart films, the popular forerunner of Rin Tin Tin. These women and dozens more like them wrote every conceivable genre of film. And no one was more in demand or more prolific from 1915 through the late 1930s than Frances Marion. For over two decades she was the world’s highest paid screenwriter –male or female – wrote two hundred produced films and won two Oscars for her original stories, The Big House and The Champ.
Marion’s friendships were as legendary as her scripts. It was the Vaudeville star Marie Dressler who first urged the San Francisco born Marion to “jump into the movies” and the director Lois Weber took Marion under her wing as a protégé in 1914. When Weber died 25 years later, Marion was at her bedside and paid for her funeral.
Marion’s passion was writing and when she met the rising star Mary Pickford, the actress had played everything from Madame Butterfly to Cinderella. Pickford and Marion teamed up to create a character who stayed a child throughout Poor Little Rich Girl a and while the studio bosses balked at this little girl on the screen who reveled in mud fights, audiences clamored for more. From 1917 through 1919, Pickford and Marion perfected the girl with the golden curls persona in a dozen classics like Pollyanna, Little Princess, and M’Liss. In the process, the women became the best of friends. Marion was with Pickford the first time she met Douglas Fairbanks and it was Pickford who introduced Frances to the Army Chaplin and champion athlete she married and turned into a top cowboy star, Fred Thomson. The two couples even honeymooned together in Europe in 1920. Their friendship was to last a life time.
Adela Rogers St. Johns called Frances Marion “the senior all of us sophomores want to be” not only because of the respect she received within the film business, but because of her successful private life as well. Marion managed to raise two sons on her own after her husband Fred Thomson died suddenly of tetanus in 1928 and she kept her priorities clear. She joked that her huge estate on the top of a Beverly Hill was “the house that bunk built” and confided to her best friends that, with the exception of Fred, she had spent her life “searching for a man I could look up to – without lying down.” When Marie Dressler’s style of comedy was so out of fashion that she was facing dire poverty, Frances convinced Irving Thalberg at MGM to cast Marie in a dramatic supporting role in the film Frances adapted for Greta Garbo, Anna Christie. Frances then wrote Min and Bill for Marie and the role won her the Best Actress Oscar. When Frances examined her own Oscar she declared it “a perfect symbol of the picture business: a powerful athletic body clutching a gleaming sword, but the half of his head, the part that held his brains, completely sliced off.” Always practical, she used her Oscars for doorstops and occasionally as nutcrackers.
There were dozens and dozens of other women who helped blaze the path. Margery Wilson, who played "Brown Eyes" in Intolerance shortly after arriving in Los Angeles in 1914, directed several feature films as well as writing a half dozen books. And Marion Wong was president of Mandarin Film Company, reported to be "the only Chinese producing concern" in America.
It is difficult to overstate the impact that the films these women made had on the hinterlands. Different mores, fashions, lifestyles and foreign lands were all seen for the very first time. Oh, you could read about these things in books if you sought them out, but suddenly there it all was, around the corner on the local big screen. Suffragettes marching in the newsreels built support for their cause, "A Girl's Folly" revealed both the tangible benefits and the emotional price of living the high life, the work of Margaret Sanger was promoted in "The Hand that Rocks the Cradle," and the list goes on and on. Their movies literally and figuratively opened up a whole new world to an entire generation.
Yet just as quickly as the opportunities for women to control their own creative product had opened, they began to close. Large studios became the only economical method to churn out these new high budget "talking" films. Sound required a massive influx of capital and Wall Street invested. The hundreds of production companies that had flourished at the beginning of the decade fell victim to consolidations, mergers, and bankruptcies, reducing the number of profitable studios to only a handful by 1930. New layers of bureaucracy were added, jobs were tightly delineated and with production and distribution controlled by only a few, women were pushed aside. Movie making was now big business.
When Cleo Madison could no longer find backers for her own films, she returned to acting in "minor roles in minor films" and as early as 1919, Gene Gauntier became convinced the business had "passed her by" and moved to Sweden to write novels. Both Lois Weber and Alice Guy Blache suffered from the professional jealousies of their husbands and both couples separated in the early twenties. Blache returned to France and her efforts to direct in the late 1920s were rebuffed. Weber's "message films" left the Jazz Age audiences cold and while she attempted several "comebacks" during the twenties, when she died in 1939, she was managing an apartment building in Fullerton. “The premier woman director of the screen and author and producer of the biggest money making features in the history of the film business" only two decades before, warranted only a few lines of an obituary in Variety.
A precious few of the women survived in the business into the late thirties, compromising along the way to the point where Frances Marion said "screenwriting became like writing on the sand with the wind blowing." Just as Rosie the Riviter was sent home after World War II, the women of Hollywood were no longer welcome in jobs men now wanted. A handful of women would continue to work behind the camera, but directors like Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino were the rare exception to the rule.
Many of the films these women created have been lost forever, but archives such as the Museum of Modern Art, Eastman House, UCLA and the Library of Congress and organizations like the National Film Preservation Foundation and the Women’s Film Preservation Project are racing against time to preserve those that remain. And while the number of women working in Hollywood today does not touch those of the early years, they are on the upswing once again and today’s women have a rich history to inspire them and claim as their own.
>>> Cari Beauchamp is the author of Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood, winner of the National Theater Library Book of the year, and a Writers Guild Award Nominee for co-writing and producing the documentary Without Lying Down.
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