eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Weber made films on capital punishment, contraception, poverty, and addiction, establishing cinema’s power to engage topical issues for popular audiences. Her work grappled with the profound changes in women’s lives that unsettled Americans at the beginning of the twentieth century, and her later films include sharp critiques of heterosexual marriage and consumer capitalism. Mentor to many women in the industry, Weber demanded a place at the table in early professional guilds, decrying the limited roles available for women on-screen and in the 1920s protesting the growing climate of hostility toward female directors. Stamp demonstrates how female filmmakers who had played a part in early Hollywood’s bid for respectability were in the end written out of that industry’s history. Lois Weber in Early Hollywood is an essential addition to histories of silent cinema, early filmmaking in Los Angeles, and women’s contributions to American culture.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520960084 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 05/02/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 384 |
| File size: | 13 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Lois Weber in Early Hollywood
By Shelley Stamp
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-96008-4
CHAPTER 1
Creating a Signature
Weber's 1915 feature Hypocrites, the film that secured her place among the foremost filmmakers of her generation, opens with a still photograph showing her elegantly dressed, posed against a chaise lounge, eyes cast sideways out of frame. A handwritten signature across the corner proclaims, "Yours Sincerely, Lois Weber." Although viewers would have been accustomed to seeing favorite screen personalities introduced in opening vignettes, it was unusual to see a filmmaker so visibly embodied in her own production. A title card has already announced that Hypocrites was "written and produced by Lois Weber." By adding her photograph and the trace of her signature across the screen, Weber asserts full authorial control over Hypocrites. And she does so in a manner that is distinctly feminine and distinctly bourgeois. Certainly this brief prologue tells us just how far Weber had come after a few short years in the motion picture business, evolving from an unknown actress working behind the scenes, writing and directing her productions, to a filmmaker of commanding authority whose personal signature guaranteed quality cinema. But the prologue also tells us a great deal about how Weber negotiated the terrain of feminine propriety, how keenly aware she was of the need to embody and visualize her femininity within and around her own work. Indeed, Weber evolved a highly public persona in the early years of her career, quite unique for a filmmaker in this era. She used this persona to demonstrate a distinctly feminine mode of authorship and artistry in the new art form.
Weber entered the movie business at a time of significant transformation, her early career fueled by developments of the transitional era, some of the most far-reaching in U.S. film history. Single-reel films, which had dominated the market since late 1908, were being replaced with longer offerings of two, three, and even four reels, signaling the growth of more intricate storytelling and more nuanced demands on audience attention, and paving ground for feature-length titles. As films grew in complexity, scenario writing became a more valued and better understood component of filmmaking, and acting for the screen a more nuanced art. Independent production companies, such as Rex and later Universal, became viable alternatives to the powerful Motion Picture Patents Company (known as the Trust), which had attempted to monopolize film production and distribution. Los Angeles became the center of U.S. film production, and enormous new facilities like Universal City showcased the evolution of moviemaking there, while also signaling a growing standardization of film production in factory-like studio settings. An energetic and vocal trade press helped stabilize and solidify the industry throughout this period, while also providing an increasingly sophisticated discourse on aesthetic aspects of moviemaking. Cinematography, performance style, and storytelling were evaluated with considerable nuance during these years. New fan magazines and regular newspaper coverage of films and filmgoing culture put movies and movie stars at the forefront of the nation's cultural imagination. Industry leaders made a concerted effort to woo middle-class patrons, and motion pictures became, for the first time, the preferred recreation for most Americans.
Even as Weber's career flourished in the burgeoning movie business, her work sometimes challenged dominant filmmaking norms emerging at the time. Working at Rex with founder Edwin S. Porter and her husband, Phillips Smalley, Weber honed a collaborative, artisanal mode of production that she would retain throughout most of her career, long after it had fallen out of favor, replaced by the highly rationalized, highly stratified Hollywood studio model. Even in the early 1910s Weber's approach to filmmaking remained out of step with a general drive toward greater standardization and formula. Weber also embraced her growing celebrity as a female filmmaker, assuming leadership roles first at Rex and then as mayor of Universal City, and speaking out for "better" pictures and quality scenarios. Publicity at the time attempted to position her as a matronly embodiment of refinement behind the scenes—and subsequent historians have also aligned her with this cause—but a closer look at her comments on screenwriting and, especially, at her films reveals a much more radical approach to filmmaking than simple feminine uplift. What emerges is a body of work at Rex and Bosworth in which complex, well-developed, often unconventional female characters dominate, and in which institutions like marriage and the family are interrogated. In Weber's case, the reality of a feminine hand, so desired in the industry at the time, was a near-wholesale rejection of popular female screen types. As Weber's own celebrity grew, she evidently became all the more aware of cinema's role in circulating, reformulating, and challenging feminine norms.
"MY LIFE WORK"
Details about Weber's early life are difficult to verify and come mainly from interviews and profiles published later in her career, but two distinct themes emerge from her recollections. She grew up in a household that valued creativity and the arts; yet her early forays into professional life were marked by a persistent struggle against social expectations for "respectable" young women of her generation. Weber's passion for creative work and her determined efforts to challenge restrictive gender norms would inform her entire career, so it is not surprising that she stressed these elements of her upbringing when talking about it later in life.
Florence Lois Weber was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, in 1879, the middle daughter of George and Tillie Weber. Her older sister, Bessie, had been born two years earlier; their younger sister, Ethel, with whom Weber would remain especially close, joined them eight years later. Weber spoke with tremendous fondness about her father, an upholsterer and decorator who had worked on the Pittsburgh Opera House. "We were great pals," she said, recounting his talent for telling "fascinating fairy stories," his penchant for waking her up early to see the sunrise, and his obvious pride once she began writing stories of her own. When he finished his work on the opera house, "mine was the first opinion he wanted," she recalled with evident delight. To him she credited her artistic temperament and her talent for writing stories. "I don't remember when I did not write," she said. "Certainly I've written and published stories ever since I could spell at all." As a young girl Weber also had a flare for the dramatic, performing ballads at church and reciting historical narratives at school, often with significant embellishment. "I never studied," she explained, "but crammed at the 11th hour and dramatized the recitations of others. I was terribly impatient of book learning."
Musical training was also an integral part of Weber's childhood, and at age sixteen she was already working as a concert pianist, sometimes touring with famed mandolinist Valentine Abt. She often told interviewers a story of how she had been startled one night when a piano key fell apart as she was playing. "The incident broke my nerve," she confessed. "When that key came off in my hand, a certain phase of my development came to an end." After a brief stint back in Pittsburgh teaching kindergarten, Weber left again for New York City, eager for a career in light opera and armed with the address of a singing teacher given to her by a family friend. Her father did not approve, worried that the opera might lead her into the theater world he considered unsavory. But off she went nonetheless. "I was very green," she recognized later. "New York seemed a very large place to me." Setting up camp at the YWCA on 124th Street, she discovered that her singing teacher had left town for the summer. Without much in the way of savings and with only one good dress to her name, Weber lived a meager existence before finding a post as an accompanist at a girls' school, taking a room across the street with two friends from the Y. She took up voice lessons in the fall when her teacher returned, moving to a boardinghouse in Greenwich Village where she received free room and board in exchange for playing piano for other tenants. Her sister Ethel visited and was apparently very impressed.
But after the girls' father fell ill, Weber was called back home to help support Ethel's schooling—crying "tears of ice" all the way, she remembered. She offered to sing again in her church choir, but because she had appeared on stage, the deacons would not allow it. It is clear that, though for years associated with respectability and bourgeois refinement in her motion picture publicity, Weber's early independence and her dogged commitment to work on stage challenged reigning assumptions about what refined young ladies ought to do with their time. "If you have chosen a worldly career, don't pretend to be religious," her grandmother advised her, warning her against becoming a "hypocrite." Weber's break came when an uncle who was a theater producer in Chicago helped get her into musical theater. He alone among her relatives supported her creative ambitions, and she recalled him telling her that folks "out West" were more "broad-minded" about careers for women—an impression that surely must have stuck. With her uncle's help Weber joined the Zig Zag Company and toured with them through Pennsylvania and New England for six months. "It does not require much effort of the imagination," one writer later declared, "to see the earnest, ambitious little concert singer of twenty-five years ago in the magnificently poised, vibrantly magnetic Lois Weber of today."
To "atone" for her disreputable life in the theater, Weber explained, she spent much of her spare time engaged in missionary work, providing entertainment in prisons, hospitals, and military barracks, including penitentiaries on New York's famed Blackwell's Island, and working with impoverished women in the city's urban tenement districts. She was determined, it would seem, to challenge her grandmother's assumptions about the incompatibility of entertainment and religion. As a seventeen-year-old in Pittsburgh Weber had joined a "church army" group that toured the city's red-light district with a small street organ and a hymnal—"a terrible experience for a young girl," she later recognized. These encounters left a lasting impression on the filmmaker, for she later described how cinema, with its mass appeal, allowed her to overcome the limitations of working one-on-one with individuals, many of whom, she recalled, "spoke strange tongues." By contrast, cinema's "voiceless language" was a "blessing," a medium that allowed her to "preach to my heart's content."
When work with the Zig Zag Company dried up, Weber joined a touring production of the popular melodrama Why Girls Leave Home in Holyoke, Massachusetts. There she met stage manager Phillips Smalley. As Smalley later recalled, he asked her to marry him the very next day, and they wed just three weeks later at her uncle's home in Chicago, though records indicate as many as three or four months elapsed between when the couple met and when they married. Still, it was a hasty courtship. Weber was twenty-four at the time. Smalley, fourteen years her senior, had, according to one observer, "a certain well-built erectness of bearing; six foot in height; direct, brown eyes; sleek, black hair; his accent is slightly English, and his manner is the extreme of courtesy." Several years later the couple had a daughter, Phoebe, who died in infancy, their only child, though Weber never spoke publicly about the episode.
Unlikely to find work together on the stage, Weber and Smalley initially decided to pursue separate engagements, and Weber soon found work singing at the New York Hippodrome. But after being advised by the actress Ellen Terry, a friend of Smalley's mother, never to separate from her husband, she declined the appointment and then, by her own recollection, spent two years on the road with him, writing scenarios in hotel rooms while he appeared on stage and waiting for her own opportunity. Like many other women of her generation, she "first became interested in pictures through writing scenarios," as she put it. When she began to sell these stories, with but few connections in the business, Weber was delighted and "surprised ... no little bit. Not that I doubted their meriting production," she confessed, "but I imagined they had to be introduced to the scenario editor by some person with influence. I was wrong, and the check I received testified to the illusion under which I had labored."
To hear her describe it, Weber's start in the motion picture business was almost accidental. "To keep my mind off the horror of our first separation," she explained, "I went out to the Gaumont Talking Pictures. I wrote the story for my first picture, besides directing it and playing the lead. When Mr. Smalley returned ... he joined me and we co-directed and played leads in a long list of films." What is striking about this memory, apart from the offhanded way Weber characterizes her beginnings, is the fact that it was Weber, not Smalley, who initiated work in the movies, then still considered somewhat tawdry employment for theater folk; that she aimed to combine writing, directing, and acting from the start, not entirely uncommon for the time but still remarkable for its ambitious reach; and that Smalley followed her into the business, assisting Weber's far-reaching ambition from the outset. Indeed, Weber was forever grateful for the support her husband had shown in leaving his stage career to join her in the "movies," by all accounts a risky venture at the time. "My husband, who had a great deal of faith in me, left a splendid position on the dramatic stage, to act in [my scenarios]," she later recalled. Dissatisfied with the material they were given to work with, Weber recounted her frustration with hastily thrown-together scripts containing weak characterizations and thin plots, "insipid in conception and pathetic in sentiment"—material that, even then, did not live up to her ideas about the medium's potential. "No amount of clever acting can redeem a character poorly drawn, or a play that is hopelessly deficient in plot and execution," she pronounced in retrospect. "So I began to write scenarios around the personalities of Mr. Smalley and myself. It was not such a difficult matter for one with my experience in legitimate and motion picture drama to improve on the scenarios of that period."
Recollecting her time at Gaumont, Weber described an easy transition from writing to performing and directing, her tendency to take the lead evident early on: "I wrote, or rather devised, the story as we went along. There was no technique, no settled method or procedure, and no one had had much experience.... My principal task was to synchronize the plot with the words and music of the record. As I knew more about stories, or thought I did, than anyone there, I took charge of the directing. I played in the picture too, of course." Weber's capacity for leadership and her desire to be fully engaged at all levels of production are obvious even in these earliest forays into motion picture work: she "knew more" than anyone else, "took charge" of directing, and "of course" acted in the productions as well. Her stage experience as a pianist and singer also seems to have served her well at Gaumont, where she made Chronophone films with synchronized sound-on-disk technology. Alice Guy Blache, also directing at American Gaumont during these years, later remembered only that Weber "recorded several songs" for the Chronophone. Weber's account, however, suggests that her responsibilities were far wider ranging. Curiously, Weber makes no mention of Guy Blache. But the seasoned filmmaker, who had been directing for more than a decade at this point and was only a few years older than Weber, would likely have made a strong impression on the newcomer. As Guy Blache remembered it, rather dismissively, Weber "watched me direct ... and doubtless thought it was not difficult."
In the end it was Guy Blache's husband, Herbert Blache, then in charge at American Gaumont, whom Weber remembered. He gave her "every encouragement," she recalled. "I was fortunate in being associated with broad-minded men. Both Mr. Smalley and Mr. Blache listened to my suggestions." Recounting how the trio worked "in perfect harmony," she explained, "We brought our individual talents into an effective combination ... [making] many original and successful photoplays." Writing, performing, and directing, she was able to employ her gift for storytelling, her love of performance, and her ability to visualize entire imaginary worlds. After having been hampered by restrictive notions about careers that women ought or ought not to pursue, Weber must have been relieved to find such fulfilling work at Gaumont. "I grew up in the business when everybody was so busy learning their particular branch of the new industry," she later explained, "that no one had time to notice whether or not a woman was gaining a foothold." However she got there, Weber had discovered her true calling. "In moving pictures I have found my life work," she pronounced in 1914. "I find at once an outlet for my emotions and my ideals."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Lois Weber in Early Hollywood by Shelley Stamp. Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Portrait of a Filmmaker
1. Creating a Signature
2. "Life’s Mirror": Progressive Films for a Progressive Era
3. Women’s Labor, Creative Control, and "Independence" in a Changing Industry
4. "Exit Flapper, Enter Woman"; or, Weber in Jazz Age Hollywood
Conclusion: "Forgotten with a Vengeance"
Notes
Filmography
Index