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THE FIRST PIONEERS (1890s–1920s)

What if I told you that in the 1900s through to the early 1920s, there were more female filmmakers actively working at the top of Hollywood than there are today? Admit it, you’re surprised. Everyone is when I tell them this, even people who work in the film industry. And here’s more: during this time, half of all movies made in the United States were written by women, many famous actresses ran their own production companies, and the first person to be titled “Film Editor” was a woman.

The beginning of cinema—especially the silent era—offered more opportunities to women than we’ve seen since. So what happened? Let’s start at the birth of cinema and go from there.

The idea of moving pictures was born in the late 1870s, when photographer Eadweard Muybridge set up a series of cameras alongside a racetrack. Eadweard was trying to discover if horses lifted all four feet off the ground at one time while galloping. Spoiler alert: they do. In order to show the photos in quick succession, he made an early projector, to which he gave a catchy name: Zoopraxiscope.

In the 1890s, Thomas Edison invented the first motion picture camera, called the Kinetograph. To play the footage, you needed a Kinetoscope, where one person would squint into a peep-hole to view the images. Shortly after, the Lumiére Brothers in France created the Cinematographe, which projected motion pictures onto a screen, creating a shared viewing experience.

These inventions were sold around the world in touring exhibitions, with companies such as photography studios buying the cameras to start experimenting with them. At first, it was a simple matter of recording what was happening around them. One of Thomas Edison’s first films was of a laboratory assistant sneezing.

Then, inspired by the theater, filmmakers started telling stories, approaching them like filmed plays. Makeshift cinemas started to pop up around the country, mostly at vaudeville theater shows, where they were offered as an extension to their live acts. These were called Nickelodeons, because admission cost five cents, and their popularity grew very quickly. By 1910, as bigger theaters were being built, the cheap price of a ticket attracted a large rowdy working-class audience, who often chose the movies over the pub for a good night out.

The growing crowds created a big demand for content. Studios were built, and the process of producing films became more streamlined. Movie-making was both fast and furious, with each studio cranking out at least two short films per week.

During the late teens, film production began to center in Los Angeles. This was partly because of its ideal weather for filming and space to build studios, and partly because of Thomas Edison. He had tried to monopolize film production in New York by suing for patent infringement on his inventions, so everyone escaped to Los Angeles where they were free to use his inventions with less likelihood of legal trouble.

Silent films became longer and more intricate, and the films were screened in new movie “palaces,” elaborate theaters with lavish aesthetic design features that were designed to attract a more upmarket crowd. To fill the seats, theater owners specifically targeted female audiences.

The thought was that if you could entice white middle-class women into theaters, it would push out the raucous working-class crowd. These women would bring their husbands, and the theaters could charge more for tickets, advertising it as an elegant night out. So the palaces were built near shopping centers, coupons were placed in magazines, and free childcare was offered. This completely excluded non-white audiences of a lower class.

Movie studios wanted to cater to this middle-class female audience, so female writers and directors were hired to ensure the content would appeal. Karen Ward Mahar, author of Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood, says these women were “believed to lend a moral tone to the movies that the middle classes appreciated.”

The silent era saw actresses such as Mary Pickford, Lilian Gish, Theda Bara, Greta Garbo, and Clara Bow become hugely popular. The fame of these women was almost a reflection of the changing ideas about ladies during these decades. For example, Mary Pickford was the innocent Victorian-era girl, while Clara Bow was the sexy 1920s “New Woman.”

The New Woman was part of the first wave of feminism in the U.S., which saw protests for women’s rights grow throughout the teens and into the twenties. The movement was successful in winning the right for white women to vote in August of 1920 with the 19th Amendment.

By the end of the 1920s, silent films featured complex plots, artistic cinematography, and glamorous movie stars, and attracted big audiences. But a new filmmaking technology threatened this silent utopia. The ability to record sound heralded the arrival of “talkies,” which forced a complete rethinking of how to make movies—such as where to hide the giant microphones. All of this was wonderfully lampooned in 1952’s Singin’ In The Rain.

This brings us to why women were pushed out of the industry. Firstly, many filmmakers, writers, and actors struggled to make the transition to this new style of making movies. Secondly, the success of a couple of talkies, such as The Jazz Singer, saw a select few movie studios rise to the top, and independent companies (often run by women) just couldn’t compete, often as a result of a lack of finances.

The Great Depression caused many of these small studios to go under, and the financial gain of making movies became the biggest focus. Filmmaking started to be looked at as a business instead of a creative enterprise, and corporate structures were implemented, complete with executives in charge.

At this time, women were not perceived as being business-minded or executive material, so positions of power on a movie set, such as directing, now were given to men. From the 1930s onward, Hollywood became a boys’ club. And women have been trying to make their way back into the industry for almost 100 years.

Here’s just how dramatic and entrenched this boys’ club mindset became. Between 1912 and 1919, Universal had 11 female directors who regularly worked for them, and who made a total of 170 films in these seven years. But from the mid-1920s right up to 1982, the studio didn’t hire a single female filmmaker.

Reading film history books I learnt all about D.W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille, and Georges Méliès, but I didn’t know about the ladies who were working with them. When I started to research them, I was amazed by their stories. There were female directors who created techniques that filmmakers still use today. Movie actresses who not only demanded equal pay, but made more than the men. Female action heroes who performed their own stunts. Established women who supported younger women, giving them jobs in the industry. And much of this happened before ladies could even vote.

There are so many wonderful stories about revolutionary women in film who shaped the silent era. My hope is that by sharing a couple of them, you too will be inspired, and help to make sure they are not forgotten.

Alice Guy Blaché: The First Female Filmmaker

One of the first directors in cinema history was a woman. Her name was Alice Guy Blaché, and her history was lost for many years, because it was erased by the man who hired her.

Alice was born in Paris in 1873; twenty years later, she applied to be a secretary for Léon Gaumont—an inventor and the owner of a photography business. One day, Léon and Alice attended an exhibition put on by the Lumiére Brothers. They were showing off their latest invention, a camera which could record motion pictures. Léon purchased one, and Alice, inspired by the footage she watched, asked if she could borrow it.

With this camera, Alice made a short movie called The Cabbage Fairy. This was 1896. As you may guess from the title, this was a simple scene of a fairy pulling babies out of cabbages. It was created to show Léon’s customers what a motion picture camera could do, but now stands as one of the very first movies in history which featured a story. Alice didn’t think it was a masterpiece, but said, “the film had enough success that I was allowed to try again.”

Around this time the first movie production companies were being set up, and Léon decided to create his own—the Gaumont Film Company. Alice was put in charge of making the films, and she proceeded to direct every single movie out of the company for the next eleven years.

Slowly, Alice’s productions became more elaborate, and new technicians were hired to help her out. Alice had gone from being a secretary to a powerful figure at the fledgling studios, and she had to learn how to take charge.

On one of Alice’s movies, a camera operator fell ill, and an English man by the name of Herbert Blaché-Bolton was sent in his place. He was new to the equipment, and found his director to be cold and distant. “No doubt he was right,” Alice said later, “still young, in a job where I had to give proof of authority, I avoided all familiarity.”

Over the course of working together, however, Alice began to trust Herbert, and they fell in love. Unfortunately, their first film wasn’t as successful. When the print was developed, it was found to be over-exposed, scratched, and unusable. Alice cited faulty camera equipment—which could be true, cameras were not very reliable in those days—but I prefer the romantic version that she was trying to save any blame from falling on Herbert. Not long after, the two were married, and three days later they set sail for a new life in the United States.

For a few years, Herbert and Alice ran the new Gaumont Film Company in New York. But Alice wanted her own production company, so in 1910, she built Solax Studios in New Jersey. This made Alice the first woman to ever start her own motion picture studio.

At Solax, she oversaw the production of more than three hundred films, everything from comedies to dramas and westerns. She directed about fifty of those films and continuously experimented with new filmmaking techniques, such as in her movie Beasts of the Jungle, where she used a split screen effect to make it appear as if a lion were on the other side of a family’s front door. Really it was two recordings side by side, one of the house and the other of a lion at the zoo.

Alice also coached her performers towards a realistic acting style, with the words “Be Natural” emblazoned on a large banner inside her studio. This was unusual for the time, because in silent film, actors were taught to “pose,” using over-the-top gestures to indicate their emotions. But if you look at the acting on one of Alice’s films, such as Falling Leaves, about a child suffering from tuberculosis, it’s toned down and realistic.

In the end, Alice had a sad conclusion to her career. Solax couldn’t compete with the major Hollywood studios, so she had to shut it down. Her marriage to Herbert also didn’t survive, so Alice moved back to France in 1922.

Five years later, she returned to the U.S. to get copies of her films, hoping she could use them to find work as a director in Paris. But out of her one thousand plus movies, Alice couldn’t find a single print.

This was very common during the silent era. Nobody thought movies would become a cultural phenomenon or that the preservation of film history would be important. It’s estimated that 90 percent of all silent films made in America have been lost. Negatives were destroyed after they played in the theater, and if they were nitrate prints, storage was often hazardous. This type of film stock was highly unstable and had a nasty habit of combusting when not maintained in exactly the right conditions. And once nitrate film caught fire, not even water would put out the flames.

So unfortunately for Alice and many other silent filmmakers, most of her work disappeared, and today only around 130 of her movies remain.

Now broke, Alice had to lean on her children for financial help. In 1930, to make matters worse, Léon Gaumont published a history of the Gaumont Film Company which didn’t mention anything before 1907. He omitted all of Alice Guy Blaché’s work as a director. Consequently, nobody knew for a long time how significant a role she played in setting up his very successful studios and in the birth of film itself.

Ten years before Alice passed away, the French Government discovered her accomplishments, and gave Alice the “Legion of Honor” in 1953. A year later, Léon Gaumont’s son Louis admitted in a public speech, “Madame Alice Guy Blaché, the first woman filmmaker … has been unjustly forgotten,” and film historians started to take notice.

In 2011, Martin Scorsese awarded a posthumous Director’s Guild of America Award to Alice Guy Blaché. In his speech, Martin called the loss of her history “a tragedy,” saying that Alice was “a pioneer in audiovisual story-telling … more than a talented business woman, she was a filmmaker of rare sensitivity, with a remarkable poetic eye and an extraordinary feel for locations.”

Lois Weber: Social Issues on Film

In 1916, one of the biggest hits in theaters was a movie about abortion, directed by a woman. That woman was Lois Weber, an actress, producer, writer, and filmmaker who pushed the content of movies from simple entertainment to tackling serious social issues.

Lois began her life in Pennsylvania in 1879, with a father who liked to tell fairy stories. He encouraged Lois to start writing 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 came to negotiating her salary. Mary pushed for, and won, a pay rate twice as large as the original offer. This was unheard of, but Mary was now the breadwinner in her family, so she was determined to get enough money to support them. She quickly proved her worth by acting, writing scenarios, and learning everything she could about lighting, costumes, make-up, stunts, and the art of movie-making. In her first year, she starred in fifty movies.

Mary was often directed by D.W. Griffith. He was a big proponent of close-up acting, and that tighter shot required smaller expressions and as much real emotion as possible. He was known for his temper and often “inspired” these emotions by being cruel. One famous example of this involves sisters Lillian and Dorothy Gish. As the story goes, they came to his studio for an audition, and D.W. took a gun and fired it several times into the ceiling, just to see their reaction. “You have expressive bodies,” he told the terrified sisters, “I can

use you.”

Mary described her early days at the studio as hostile, putting up with unwanted advances from male colleagues and clashing with D.W. She later wrote that she “wanted more than ever to escape,”

but knew she had to stay to support her family. So she decided to fight back.

The 1909 movie To Save Her Soul saw Mary cast as a choirgirl opposite Arthur Johnson as her lover. In a pivotal scene, his character is overtaken by jealousy, pulling out a gun in the suspicion that she hadn’t been faithful. The problem was that over lunch, Arthur had had a bit to drink, so when he pointed the gun, according to Mary, “he waved it at me as if it were a piece of hose.” She found it hard to conjure up genuine fear, and D.W. became frustrated. He ran onto the set and grabbed Mary roughly by the shoulders, shaking her and yelling, “I’ll show you how to do this thing! Get some feeling into you, damn it! You’re like a piece of wood!”

In response, Mary leaned down, and bit him. “Sir,” Mary said defiantly, “if I am not an actress you cannot beat it into me. What gave you the right to lay your hands on me? I’m finished with you and motion pictures and the whole thing!” And she stormed off.

D.W. came to her dressing room later to apologize for his behavior and persuaded Mary to return to the set. Without any rehearsal, he started rolling the cameras, and Mary channeled her anger into improvisation, giving an electrifying performance.

She was strong, but with her five-foot frame and curls, Mary was often cast as a child or a child-like woman. These movies kept her young, de-sexualized, and virtuous, as was the desired female type at the time. But Mary’s sassier roles were also popular, where she played feisty ingenues, such as in 1910’s Wilful Peggy where she beats up a man with his own hat after he tries to kiss her.

In the early days of silent film, actors weren’t listed in the credits. But Mary Pickford became so well-loved, directors and theater owners would make sure her name was prominently displayed. She went from being called the “Biograph Girl” or “the girl with the curls” to Mary Pickford, movie star, and her image graced the covers of magazines and the front pages of newspapers around the country.

The press followed her to California when she left Biograph to work with a variety of different studios. Her mother Charlotte came out to help her get settled, and one day, she overheard an interesting conversation about her daughter on the Paramount lot.

Two executives were talking about block booking, a practice later made illegal. Studios would force theater owners to buy a block of their movies, ensuring release dates for every single film, no matter the quality. If a theater wanted one of their prestige pictures, they had to buy the whole lot. So, the executives were saying, if they had a new Mary Pickford picture, they could rest easy about their other films.

Charlotte realized the unique power that Mary now had. She was so popular with audiences, theaters were desperate to play her movies, and studios were clamoring to make them. In fact, much of the success of selling their other films depended on it. Charlotte encouraged her daughter to be tougher. And in 1916, Mary negotiated a contract which gave her a salary of $10,000 per week plus a $300,000 signing bonus, 50 percent of the profits from her movies, and the creation of the Pickford Film Corporation. This was more money than Charlie Chaplin was making, and by age twenty-four, Mary Pickford was earning a million dollars per year and was the highest paid star in Hollywood.

It was money well spent, because she continued to have top hits at the box office. Some of her biggest successes came from a collaboration with her friend, writer Frances Marion. Together they made Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, which gave her the “America’s Sweetheart” moniker, and one of her most famous roles, “The Poor Little Rich Girl” from 1917. Its plot was very melodramatic, with Mary playing a rich girl suffering at the hands of abusive servants. At one point they almost kill her with too much sleeping potion.

At the New York premiere, Mary sat next to Frances, trying to be incognito by wearing dark sunglasses and a hat. She watched in amazement as the audience reacted passionately to her movie, laughing, crying and cheering at all the right moments. When Mary removed her sunglasses to wipe away her own tears, she was instantly recognized by an usher, and a large crowd of crazed fans quickly gathered. They ripped fur from her coat and wanted snippets of her hair, and Mary had to be escorted out of the theater by police.

Though “Little Mary” had reached the pinnacle of Hollywood stardom, she didn’t quite have the full creative control she craved. Together with D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks Sr., in 1919 Mary formed the United Artists Corporation (UA). This was the first star-driven production company, and it gave each of those actors the chance to produce five projects of their choice—offering financing and distribution independent from a movie studio. “The inmates have taken over the asylum!” exclaimed the president of another studio when he heard the news. But UA was successful, and continued to profit throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The company is still around today, and is now owned by MGM.

The news about the creation of UA also served as a handy distraction from gossip about two of its founders. Mary and Douglas Fairbanks had been friends for years, but it had turned into more. This was complicated, because they were both married when they first got together, albeit unhappily so. He filed for a divorce, and then so did she. And three and a half weeks later, Mary Pickford married Douglas Fairbanks.

There had been shock from moviegoers who disapproved of this scandalous relationship. But once they married, studio publicists managed to spin it, selling America on the idea that Mary and Douglas were Hollywood royalty. Fans became obsessed with this power couple (who were perhaps rather like the “Brangelina” of their time), with newspapers reporting on their every move. They lived in a mansion the press nicknamed “Pickfair,” where they wined and dined celebrities like Charlie Chaplin and Albert Einstein. Mary and Douglas remained a source of fascination throughout their ten-year marriage, until Douglas fell in love again, this time with a British socialite.

Towards the end of the 1920s, Mary further cemented her place in film history by helping to set up the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1927. She was one of only a few women among the thirty-six original members, and the founding of the Academy led to the introduction of the Oscars.

By this time, Mary Pickford was eager to shed her innocent persona. She cut off those famous ringlets, and in 1929 made her first sound movie, Coquette. “I wanted to be free of the shackles of curls and playing little girls,” said Mary, “and I thought that [sound] was one step toward it.” Coquette was made in the early days of talkies, where seamlessly capturing audio hadn’t yet been fully mastered. Giant microphones were hidden inside furniture, forcing the cast to stand awkwardly beside the pieces of furniture to deliver their lines. But Mary worked hard on her first speaking role, and it paid off. Her performance in Coquette won the second-ever Academy Award for Best Actress.

Though Mary successfully made the transition from silent to sound films, she never quite felt at ease in them. Her final appearance as a screen actress came in 1933, but throughout the next forty years she remained active in Hollywood. Mary worked behind the scenes as a producer, and mentored new female stars like Shirley Temple. In 1976, Mary was awarded an honorary Oscar for her overall contribution to film. Three years later, Mary Pickford passed away, at age eighty-seven.

My favorite images of Mary Pickford are the ones where she is posing with animals. There are quite a lot of them, including a famous picture where Mary is sitting with a cat on her shoulder.

On the surface, these photos show the sweet innocence that made her famous. But I like them because I know that underneath that calm smile, Mary Pickford was a badass. Her gutsy determination pulled her family out of poverty and empowered her to become the first movie star, the highest paid actor of her time, a pioneering independent producer, and a woman who stood up for her worth before any other woman in film.

A 1924 edition of Photoplay magazine summed her up the best: “No role she can play on the screen is as great as the role she plays in the motion picture industry. Mary Pickford the actress is completely overshadowed by Mary Pickford the individual.”

Margaret Booth: The First Film Editor

Outside of the film industry, very few people knew the name of film editor Margaret Booth. But in the industry, her name was revered, and a little feared.

Margaret’s career in Hollywood spanned seven decades. She was there at the birth of editing itself, when the process involved cutting film with scissors. She worked during the transitions of silent film to sound, from black and white to color, and from studio system to New Hollywood. She was the great woman behind the great men, working with D.W. Griffith, Louis B. Mayer, and Irving Thalberg. She was also the first person to be titled Film Editor.

All of this began after a family tragedy. Margaret Booth’s older brother Elmer was an actor who worked for D.W. Griffith and supported the entire family with his salary. One tragic day in 1915, Elmer was in a car with two other actors when they were hit by a train. Elmer died instantly. At his funeral, D.W. Griffith delivered a eulogy, and approached Margaret to offer her a job as a film joiner

to help pay the family bills.

D.W. Griffith was the director who revolutionized the art of cutting film. At the start of cinema, this process didn’t exist. Movies were one continuous shot with a single camera angle, and went straight into theaters as they were. The first cut movie was Edwin S. Porter’s

The Life Of An American Fireman in 1903, which added a simple close-up so the audience could easily see the fireman’s hand pulling an alarm.

But D.W. Griffith showed that film joining could be an important storytelling device. He realized that by cutting the film between different points of view, he could tell a larger narrative and shape the story. It was also a handy way to create tension, which he often did by cutting between hero and villain during an action scene.

The job of a film joiner or negative patcher was originally an entry-level position which didn’t require any prior skills. This opened the door to Margaret, who learned how to cut films in D.W.’s studio. It was a frustrating process—joiners squinted at negatives through a magnifying glass, trying to determine where to cut with scissors and where to rejoin with tape. They couldn’t watch the film as they were working on it, so their only way to see the print in action was to pull the negative quickly between their fingers. Margaret said, “Sometimes there’d be a tiny pinpoint on the negative, and then you knew you were right, but it was very tedious work. Close-ups of Lillian Gish would go on for miles, and they’d be very similar.”

The process became easier with the arrival of the first cutting machine in 1919, which had foot pedals to run the film and a spy-hole to view it through. It looked similar to a sewing machine, and perhaps because of that (and because it was a low-level job), there were many women working as film cutters.

After a few years with D.W. Griffith, Margaret Booth got a job with another Hollywood legend, Louis B. Mayer. Also working at his studio was director John M. Stahl, whom Margaret would observe as he edited. He would shoot much more than he needed, and then leave the extra footage (quite literally) on the cutting room floor. At the end of each day, Margaret would gather up the excess film and stay overnight practicing cutting techniques. One day, John was frustrated that he couldn’t make a scene work. When he left, Margaret gave it a try, cutting it how she thought it should go.

When he saw her work, he hired her on the spot to be his personal cutting assistant.

When Louis B. Mayer’s studios merged with Samuel Goldwyn’s company and Metro Pictures, they became known as MGM. Louis hired the young executive Irving Thalberg to head production. Irving noticed Margaret’s talent and assigned her to cut MGM’s biggest movies. Irving also kept encouraging her to direct, but she wasn’t interested.

By the late 1920s and early 1930s, cutting was no longer an entry-level job. These workers were highly skilled, and integral to the success of a story. Margaret continued to hone her skills and learned new techniques with the arrival of sound. She never made a cut just for the sake of it, and she had the innate ability to know exactly where one should go, and how much should be trimmed. “Rhythm counts so much,” Margaret once said; “the pauses count so much.”

Irving Thalberg realized the title of Cutter didn’t live up to how important Margaret Booth was, so he changed her title in the credits to Film Editor. Previously, the term of Editor was only used for a position like Script Supervisor, but after this, it was adopted by the entire film industry. It was also used for the Academy Awards, who added a Best Film Editing category in 1935. Margaret Booth was nominated in 1936 for her work on Mutiny on the Bounty. A year later, Irving Thalberg passed away. Margaret stayed at MGM, and Louis B. Mayer promoted her to the highly respected role of Supervising Editor, responsible for the post-production of films. Margaret stayed in this position for thirty years, overseeing classic films like The Wizard of Oz and Ben-Hur.

Director Sidney Lumet wrote about Margaret Booth’s unique talent in his book Making Movies. He recalled a moment in the 1960s when Margaret had flown to England to watch rough cuts of three MGM films in production. She screened the movies back to back; when she met with the directors, she told Sidney, “You’re running two hours and two minutes, I want the picture under two hours.” He and his editor got to work, but found it difficult to cut down. The next morning, Margaret came in, and when he told her of his frustration, she instructed him on the exact shots to cut and by how much. “Her film memory was phenomenal,” wrote Sidney Lumet, “she named seven or eight moments, always perfect on where the shot occurred,

what took place in the shot, how its beginning or end might be trimmed—and she’d seen the picture only once.”

Margaret Booth received an Honorary Oscar in 1978 for her contribution to film, and died in 2002 at the age of 104.

Frances Marion: The Award-Winning Writer

The highest paid screenwriter in the 1920s and 1930s was Frances Marion. She was also the first person to ever win two Academy Awards in the same field, worked as a battlefront correspondent during World War I and was called “the all-time best script and storywriter the motion picture world has ever produced.”

With all of these accomplishments, it seems only appropriate that her name should be similar to that of a famous American Revolutionary war hero, although Frances Marion was not actually her original name.

Marion Benson Owens was born in 1887 in San Francisco. As a child she constantly wrote in her diary, and she had a gift for art. Both of these skills came in handy when she was employed as a young adult at the San Francisco Examiner. Her job was to report on theater productions, write stories and draw sketches to accompany them.

One day, Marion was given the assignment of interviewing and sketching Marie Dressler, an actress of the stage and screen. As she left, one of the head reporters called out to her that if she failed, she would be fired.

Marion didn’t know if this was a joke; she raced over to the theater and went to see Marie backstage. Unbeknownst to Marion, Marie was in the middle of a huge fight with William Randolph Hearst, who owned The Examiner. So when Marion announced the paper she was from, she found the door shut in her face pretty quickly.

Desperate not to lose her job, she stayed backstage, and when Marie came out, Marion told her she’d be fired if there was no interview. Marie paused and asked, “Is that what those bastards told you?” and then agreed to give Marion “the golldarndest interview I ever gave to any reporter!” They spoke for over an hour, and Marie left Marion with the words, “I’ll see you again.”

This came true many years later, when Marion was living in Los Angeles with her second husband. It was 1914, and she was in a park sketching. A woman sat down next to her, feeding popcorn to the birds, and Marion realized this was Marie Dressler. She didn’t say anything for fear Marie wouldn’t remember her, but as soon as Marie saw her, she asked, “Are you the girl who interviewed me in San Francisco?” And then, “I’ve often wondered what became of you. Hate to lose track of anybody I’m fond of.”

They caught up over lunch, and Marie told Marion that with her good looks, she should get into acting. Marion insisted she only wanted to work behind the scenes, but promised she would visit the studio. But by the time she was able to get there, Marie Dressler had left for New York. So this wasn’t to be Marion’s break into Hollywood, but the two had cemented a real friendship. In the future Marion would play an important part in Marie’s career.

Another chance encounter led to her meeting Mary Pickford. This came through a friend, who introduced her to actor Owen Moore at a party. Owen was married to Mary at the time, and Marion couldn’t help but tell him how much she admired his wife’s talent. He replied gruffly, “Mary has an expressive little talent, but hardly what one would call cerebral.” Marion was shocked he would talk about his wife in this way and walked off. Later, he approached her and offered the chance to meet Mary and sketch her portrait. It was an invitation she couldn’t decline.

When the two met, they hit it off, chatting easily for an hour and sharing personal stories about their unhappy marriages. This was the start of a very close friendship and eventually a working relationship, but again, this was not how Marion got her first break.

Marion’s chance to work in Hollywood actually came through a different friend, journalist Adela Rogers St. Johns, who was lunching with director Lois Weber when Marion happened to walk by. Lois saw something in the young, pretty brunette, and asked Adela to arrange a meeting. This was common for Lois, who was known for hiring and mentoring young women.

Marion met Lois at Bosworth Studios with her portfolio of sketches in hand, and said she’d like to design costumes and movie sets. Impressed, Lois offered her a studio job as “one of my little starlets.” Confused, Marion insisted she only wanted to be on the “dark side” of the camera, but Lois explained that at her studios, everyone did a bit of everything. She also wanted Marion to change her name. When she signed her contract, Marion Owens became Frances Marion.

Lois Weber became a huge inspiration for Frances, who watched her in admiration as she filled every role from writer to actor to director with ease. She spent a few years working for her and learned as much as she could, but when Lois got a job at Universal Pictures, Frances decided not to join her.

By 1917, her friend Mary Pickford had become the most powerful woman in Hollywood. Although Mary wasn’t technically supposed to have a say in hiring, she insisted that Frances Marion be the writer of her next movie, The Poor Little Rich Girl. From this success came more, with Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Pollyanna and many others. Later, Mary would call Frances, “the pillar of my career.”

This is something I admire about Frances Marion. Throughout her career, she made long-lasting friendships with many women, who supported each other in work as well as their personal lives. She was a great writer with a sharp wit and a flair for complex plots. But even more remarkable than her abilities was how she became pivotal to so many careers.

She met Greta Garbo on the set of The Scarlet Letter in 1926, and four years later wrote Greta’s first speaking film, Anna Christie, for which Greta won an Oscar. She persuaded Marie Dressler to come back to Hollywood, writing scenarios for her when everyone else thought Marie was past her “use-by” date. Marie won an Oscar for Min and Bill in 1932, was nominated for an Oscar for Emma in 1933, and had a pivotal role in the classic 1934 ensemble comedy, Dinner at Eight. All were written by Frances Marion.

She helped these women and many more, because she too had been helped at the beginning of her career. “I owe my greatest success to women,” Frances said later, “Contrary to the assertion that women do all in their power to hinder one another’s progress, I have found that it has always been one of my own sex who has given me a helping hand when I needed it.”

Through hard work and a lot of determination, Frances became the highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood. She also directed films, albeit briefly: 1921’s Just Around the Corner and The Love Light with Mary Pickford. And while others struggled with the transition from silent film to sound, Frances sailed through. Her greatest critical success came with two talkies, 1930’s The Big House and 1931’s

The Champ.

The Big House was a realistic crime drama set inside a prison, and it won Frances Marion an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. She was the first woman to win this category, and a year later became the first writer with two Oscars when she won Best Story for The Champ. This was about a washed-up boxer trying to reconnect with his son; it had a 1979 remake starring Jon Voight and Faye Dunaway.

Eventually, Frances Marion got tired of Hollywood. With the introduction of the studio system and stricter censorship, it became too restrictive to be creative. As she quipped, Hollywood was like “writing on the sand with the wind blowing.” So Frances walked away from the movie business, but kept writing, and in 1937 she released the first ever guide book on screenwriting, called How to Write and Sell Movies.

By the time Frances Marion ended her career, she had written over 325 films across every single genre. She produced, directed, and broke barriers for future women in screenwriting. She is an inspirational figure because of her talent, her ambition, and her support of other women.

She has also inspired contemporary writers such as Cari Beauchamp, the author of a book about Frances Marion called Without Lying Down. The title is from a great quote by Frances, who once said, “I spent my life searching for a man to look up to, without lying down.” Cari says Frances is someone she looks to as a reminder of what women can overcome. “Anything I’m going through, she went through,” said Cari, “I spend very little time on angst, because it’s been faced before, it’s been overcome before. Once you know you’re a link in the chain, then you’re not alone, you’re not battling this by yourself. You’re a link in the chain, and it’s tremendously empowering and liberating.”

Helen Holmes: The Action Hero

During the height of her fame, actress Helen Holmes was not happy with her scripts. She was frustrated by a lack of daring stunts, and claimed the male screenwriters refused to write action for women if they weren’t capable of performing it themselves. “If a photoplay actress wants to achieve real thrills,” she told a magazine, “she must write them into the scenario herself.”

Helen Holmes was one of the first female action stars, a courageous, independent woman who was at the center of a long-running, popular franchise. Her fearlessness in performing death-defying stunts made her a mythic hero.

Helen’s own history is a bit of a myth itself. There are no official records to show exactly when or where Helen was born, but it’s been estimated as being somewhere close to 1892. Around the age of 18, Helen moved to Death Valley in California, where stories say she learned to pan for gold with Native Americans. Some history books have her moving to New York and becoming a stage actress before heading to Hollywood. Others say she went straight to Los Angeles from Death Valley. Either way, Helen found herself living in Hollywood in her early twenties, where she struck up a friendship with silent film star Mabel Norman. Mabel then introduced Helen to the “King of Comedy”—director and producer Mack Sennett, who then encouraged her to become an actress.

Within a year of first being in front of the camera, Helen made twenty pictures. A year later, she had a contract with Kalem Studios, where she fell in love with director J.P. McGowan. The two were married sometime between 1912 and 1915. Again, the date remains a mystery, with no marriage certificate to be found.

Both Helen and J.P. had fathers who worked in the railroad industry, and perhaps inspired by that, they began making films which starred Helen in or around (or frequently, on top of) trains. This was at the same time that first-wave feminism was growing, and Helen was eager to prove that women could be action heroes too.

At the theaters, serials were all the rage. These were long-running series featuring a main character in different adventures across multiple episodes, usually with a cliffhanger ending. These serials screened before the feature film, with each episode lasting around twenty minutes. And it was the female-led serials which gained the biggest following; audiences loved seeing lady protagonists in action scenarios. I enjoy their titles: The Perils of Pauline, The Exploits of Elaine, and The Hazards of Helen. The latter starred Helen Holmes.

Helen’s character in The Hazards of Helen. was a railroad station telegraph operator who fought crime on the side and did indeed get herself into hazardous situations. She jumped onto moving trains, wrestled men who were holding guns, leapt between burning buildings, galloped horses down rocky mountain cliffs, and saved the railroad company from financial ruin. Many of these adventures were written by Helen herself, and she also filled in as director when her husband was hospitalized after a nasty fall on set.

After almost fifty episodes, Helen and her husband left The Hazards of Helen. and Kalem Studios to set up their own company. At Signal Film Productions, they made more popular serials, such as The Girl and the Game and A Lass of the Lumberlands, featuring Helen partaking in even more exciting railroad-themed adventures.

The press had a fascination with Helen and wrote stories about her daredevil antics with breathless headlines like “Houdini Outdone by Helen Holmes!” Another article noted her strength, saying Helen liked “pretty gowns” but could “burst the sleeves of any of them by doubling her biceps.” And Moving Picture World magazine covered the excitement of “Helen Holmes Day,” for which the California State Fair had organized Helen to perform a live stunt. In front of an audience of around 250 people, she jumped from a moving train into a moving car mere seconds before the train crashed.

For some of her more dangerous scenes, Helen was doubled by a professional stuntman. But she insisted on performing as many as she could, which led to some scary moments, such as the time the brakes on her truck failed as she was speeding downhill, or when she narrowly escaped a burning train, and that other time when her eye was punctured by cactus thorns. There’s also an unconfirmed rumor that Helen’s thumb was severed when she jumped from a horse onto a moving train.

But it was a broken heart that did the most damage. When her marriage to J.P. McGowan fell apart, Helen stayed off the screen for two years. The strain of working together in remote locations and performing intense action scenes had taken their toll on the couple. Their separation was reported in the Los Angeles Times with the headline, “Helen Holmes Principal in a Domestic Smash Up!” To make matters worse, the financial company backing Signal Film Productions went bankrupt, taking their studio down with it.

Helen returned to the screen a few years later and created Helen Holmes Pictures to produce her own work. She even reunited with her estranged husband briefly, both romantically and as collaborators, but they never quite reached the success of their earlier serials.

As the 1920s wore on, the image of women changed. The modern flapper girl and the goth-like vamp were in, while the adventurous serial star was out—well, for women anyway, there were still serials starring male actors throughout the 1920s and 1930s. (And these characters inspired another decades later, in the form of Indiana Jones.) In 1936, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times noted the change for women, writing, “There are no more serial queens … the serials now prefer to let their menfolk wear the pants.”

But in her day, Helen Holmes was a hero. Along with other serial stars, Helen showed audiences what a fearless woman looked like, right at the time when women needed to be brave and fight for their rights. Even “The Duke” had a thing for her. John Wayne admitted that as a teenager, Helen Holmes was his first crush.

STRUGGLING IN THE SYSTEM (1930s)

It’s staggering to learn that in the first three years of the Great Depression, approximately one hundred thousand jobs were lost in America each and every week. The stock market crash of 1929 had a huge impact on industries; movies were not immune, and nearly a third of all theaters shut down by 1933.

Hollywood suffered, but managed to survive by adjusting the way it made films. Feature-length sound films were costly to produce, so studios relied on banks to finance their projects. Producers had to make sure they got their investment back, and the most powerful were ambitious young men like “Boy Wonder” Irving Thalberg, who was just twenty years old when he was put in charge of production at Universal. Professor Karen Ward Mahar explains that this was when women started to disappear from Hollywood. “Banking interests came to town, and defined women as unfit to handle large numbers of people or large amounts of capital.” They preferred to deal with male executives.

In the 1930s, eight movie studios ended up with most of the power, and they produced two-thirds of all Hollywood feature films during the decade. There was the major “Big Five”, comprised of Twentieth Century Fox, MGM, Paramount Pictures, RKO, and Warner Bros, and the minor “Little Three”: Columbia Pictures, United Artists, and Universal Studios. All of these companies were run by men except United Artists, where Mary Pickford continued to work.

With this new concentration of power, the big movie studios became an oligopoly, a word I needed to look up. According to the Oxford Dictionary, it is “a state of limited competition, in which a market is shared by a small number of producers or sellers.” To put it simply, a few movie studios controlled the majority share of film revenue in America. They had their own labs to print their films, and bought theaters to exclusively play their product. They mastered the art of Vertical Integration, where they controlled every part of their own production, distribution, and exhibition. This was otherwise known as the “Studio System.”

Each studio began to have its own identity. They placed their biggest stars under contracts so they couldn’t work for anyone else, and created movies based around them. There were also specific genres for each studio—for example, Warner Bros had gangster films, Universal was the home of horror, Paramount made comedies with the Marx Brothers, and MGM had “more stars than there are in heaven.”

A constant across all of these studios was the type of people working for them. The images on the screen may have been black and white, but the actors were overwhelmingly one color. When non-Caucasian actors appeared in movies, they were relegated to the sidelines and given roles fraught with racist stereotypes. They also had to deal with segregation on film sets and lower pay. Sometimes white actors would replace them completely, playing different races with crude “blackface” makeup.

So, why would non-white actresses even want to enter a business which actively excluded them? That’s what author Nancy Wang Yuen explored in her book Reel Inequality. These actors were as Nancy said, “very realistic about their chances of success. But many of them saw it as activism in Hollywood, and I was surprised by how much they were interested in changing the system from within. Tiny, minuscule changes like costume … to invoke authenticity. Over and over again, actors of color across different groups were able to challenge the system, and saw themselves as change agents in the system.”

The few and limited opportunities for non-white actors were further restricted with the arrival of the production code, with its ruling against interracial romance. The code was a form of censorship, brought in after protests started over the content of movies. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, studios began producing riskier films full of sex and violence, hoping to get audiences into theaters by offering more “bang” for their buck. Groups like the Catholic Legion of Decency complained, and a list of rules were enforced. The subjects outlawed included many that were particular to women, such as abortion, birth control, and pretty much everything other than fashion and love.

The 1930s represents a sharp decline for women holding power in Hollywood, as they were restricted by the studio system, star contracts, and the production code. But despite numerous obstacles, several brave women stood out.

Dorothy Arzner: The Only Female Filmmaker

During the 1930s, Dorothy Arzner was the only female filmmaker who continued to work in Hollywood. She made commercial hits, wore suits, invented the boom microphone, and was the first woman to be invited into the Directors Guild of America, as well as a fierce feminist and a lesbian. She was definitely ahead of her time.

As a teenager, Dorothy helped her father serve customers at his restaurant in Hollywood. The clientele included several celebrities like Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and D.W. Griffith. As Dorothy wanted to study medicine, she enrolled at college. But she never finished her degree, because when America joined World War I, she dropped out to volunteer in France in the ambulance corps.

When Dorothy returned to America, a friend she had made in Europe introduced her to William C. DeMille. He was the brother of high profile Hollywood director Cecil B. DeMille, and he too worked in the movies. William gave Dorothy a job as a script typist at the Famous Players Lasky studio, which soon became Paramount.

Dorothy was a hard worker, who quickly moved up from typist to screenwriter and then to film editor. She set her sights on directing, and in the late 1920s, she told the studio if they didn’t let her in the director’s chair, she would go to Columbia Pictures.

In 1927 she directed her first feature, called Fashions for Women. This was a silent film with a mistaken identity plot, all about a cigarette girl who pretends to be a famous fashion model and falls in love with a duke. It was a huge commercial success and proved to Paramount they had made the right choice by giving in to her demands to direct the film.

As the ΄20s turned into the ΄30s, silent films were making way for sound. Before the production code governing censorship was created, there were seven glorious years we now call ‘pre-code’. More than just a time before the production code was enforced, for cinephiles these films remain a rare gift. Pre-code movies were almost defiant in their raciness, with open discussion of sex, drugs, interracial relationships, and homosexuality. All these subjects were banned once the code came in. For women, pre-code films offered interesting roles where they were more in charge of their sexuality.

One of my favorite of the pre-code films is Dorothy Arzner’s 1929 work The Wild Party. This was Dorothy’s first sound film, and also star Clara Bow’s debut speaking role. Clara was the original “It Girl,” a term given to her after she starred in a film called It and became the poster child for the flapper movement. Clara had had a tough life; she’d grown up with a father who had sexually abused her and a mother who tried to murder her (and was later institutionalized), and in Hollywood she’d often felt used by male directors on set. But with Dorothy, Clara was well cared for.

The Wild Party was a remake of an earlier silent film Dorothy had directed. Clara played a college student who loved to party and had a crush on her professor. It featured a largely female cast, and underneath its antics, it was really about female friendships and women choosing independence over a man.

While she was making The Wild Party, Dorothy noticed how Clara couldn’t move freely while worrying about the microphone, which was large and had to be hidden somewhere in clothing or furniture. Having to worry about talking directly into a stationary microphone greatly restricted where an actor could move, which was a distraction to their performance. So Dorothy had a brilliant idea. She asked her crew to put the microphone on a fishing rod, and dangle it above Clara, moving the mike as she moved. This worked, and the boom microphone was born.

The common theme throughout Dorothy Arzner’s work concerns the complexities of women and their relationships. Looking at her films now, they are a treasure trove of feminism, and it is absolutely astounding to think that she made them during the male-dominated studio system era.

One of the great examples of this is the 1933 film Christopher Strong, in which Dorothy cast Katharine Hepburn in a role that was perfect for (or perhaps, helped to create) Hepburn’s persona as an adventurous, strong-willed, independent woman. In a nod to the serial queens of the silent era, Katharine plays aviator Lady Cynthia Darrington who falls in love with a married man, the titular Christopher Strong, and in a reversal of the normal gender roles, seduces him in a very direct manner. When Cynthia falls pregnant, she realizes Christopher will never leave his family and that she doesn’t want to be the “other” woman. So she takes on the aviation challenge of breaking the record for flying the highest altitude, which she knows she won’t survive.

In the end, Cynthia chose to keep her own independence and to not hurt the wife any further. And though the title is named after the male character, the film is told from Cynthia’s perspective. This was noted by critic Pauline Kael, who wrote that Christopher Strong is “one of the rare movies told from a woman’s sexual point of view.” The costumes are wonderful too, with Katharine wearing pants and at one point, a magnificent metallic moth evening gown (which is never quite properly explained, but which should be Googled to be believed).

Dorothy’s most famous film is Dance, Girl, Dance starring Lucille Ball and Maureen O’Hara. It was made in 1940, but didn’t find an audience until decades later, when it was embraced by second-wave feminists in the 1970s. It was truly ahead of its time and made pointed remarks about the male gaze in entertainment, and how women are persuaded to be part of it.

Lucille and Maureen play two dancers, Bubbles and Judy, who are constantly dealing with aggressive male behavior, unwanted flirtation, and pressures to perform in a strip burlesque show. Bubbles agrees to do it, but Judy just wants to dance ballet. This causes tension between the two friends.

All of the dance scenes are shot from spectators’ viewpoints—whether it is Judy’s teacher watching her practice or the sleazy audience at the burlesque show.

In one remarkable scene, the crowd is heckling Judy to strip while she is dancing ballet; fed up, she walks to the edge of the stage and looks down at the audience. “I know you want me to tear my clothes off so you can look your fifty cents worth. Fifty cents for the privilege of staring at a girl the way your wives won’t let you.” She continues angrily, “We’d laugh right back at the lot of you, only we’re paid to let you sit there and roll your eyes and make screaming clever remarks. What’s it for? So you can go home and strut before your wives and sweethearts and play at being the stronger sex for a minute? I’m sure they see through you just like we do!”

In response, one of the women in the audience stands up and gives Judy a clap, and slowly, the rest of the crowd joins in. It’s a triumphant moment, but as Judy leaves the stage, Bubbles slaps her in a jealous rage, claiming she stole her spotlight. Judy slaps back, and the two have a cat fight on stage, while the audience glares on.

This is a scathing message about women in film. By having Judy looking back at the audience and seeing their perspective, Dorothy reverses the power of performer and spectator, pointing out how women are seen as objects to be looked at, expected to shut up and strip. And then, Dorothy quickly returns the power to its usual place, as the two women degrade themselves and ruin their friendship in front of the crowd.

Sadly, Dance, Girl, Dance was Dorothy’s final film. While working on her next movie in 1943, she contracted pneumonia, and after directing sixteen feature films in total, decided to leave Hollywood. She found her place teaching film at UCLA, where she mentored a young director by the name of Francis Ford Coppola.

When she died in 1979, she had no Oscars to her name; but Dorothy Arzner nonetheless left a legacy, for when female filmmakers started to slip back into Hollywood in the 1970s, they looked to Dorothy for inspiration. She was someone who had everything working against her—a lesbian, a feminist, and a female director in the 1930s—but she was hugely successful. As Katharine Hepburn wrote to her in 1975, “Isn’t it wonderful that you’ve had such a great career, when you had no right to have a career at all?”

Mae West: The Sex Symbol vs the Code

In 1930s Hollywood, Mae West was a terrifying prospect. Here was a woman who really owned her status as a sex symbol, and used it to make pointed remarks about America’s fear of sex. And it was that fear which ruined her career.

From a young age Mae West was well aware of how she appeared. “I’d always look at myself in the reflection of the store windows to see how I’d look,” said Mae, “I never wanted to be seen carrying a big, ugly package—only pretty, little ones tied with ribbons.” Her father had been a boxer, and her mother was a corset model. The combination of those two things is exactly how I think of Mae: she was a fighter, dressed in a corset.

Mae performed from almost the very start of her life. At age five, she started winning amateur neighborhood talent shows, and by thirteen she was being paid to act on Broadway.

After years of performing, Mae decided to write her own play, under the pen name Jane Mast. She called it simply, Sex, being purposely provocative to grab attention. The play centered on a prostitute in Montreal, but it went deeper than that; it was a thoughtful look at how sex is treated as taboo. As if to prove her point, newspapers refused to run print ads for the play because of its title. But Mae was a smart businesswoman, and she went public saying that this was a form of censorship, knowing that the papers would cover her protest.

They did, giving her exactly the publicity she needed to engage audiences. The show was a hit and ran for 375 performances. But bowing to growing pressure from those who thought it was obscene, the show was raided by police in 1927. Mae West and around twenty cast members were arrested on charges of indecency. She refused to shut the show down, and in court, the judge asked Mae if she was trying to show contempt. She responded, “On the contrary, your Honor. I was doing my best to conceal it.”

It was that kind of witticism that made Mae West so brilliant. She was sent to prison for ten days, but as she left, she sold her story to a magazine for one thousand dollars, then used the money to set up the Mae West Memorial Library at the female prison.

Mae’s next plays were also controversial. The Drag was about gay men, and is often called the first play to show homosexuality in a sensitive light. Pleasure Man featured a troupe of female impersonators. This show was also raided by police twice, and 60 cast members were arrested while still in costume. Mae bailed the actors out both times, and was acquitted in court thanks to a split jury.

Then in 1932, Paramount found itself in financial trouble and looked to Mae West for help. The studio wanted to buy the play which had been her biggest success, called Diamond Lil. It was about a saloon singer and prostitute in the 1890s, and had Mae wriggling her way through her sexy starring role, resplendent in elaborate costumes. As often was the case with Mae’s work, it was about sex, but actually featured nothing indecent.

Universal Pictures had tried to buy the play a few years earlier, but had been warned by the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), which advised on the content of films, that it had too many “vulgar dramatic situations” to be made. Paramount got around this by altering a few details, including changing the title, to She Done Him Wrong. Mae chose to cast Cary Grant as her co-star, saying that she loved his voice. He wasn’t yet famous, but this film helped to promote him as a sexy leading man.

Audiences around the country loved the film so much that there were reports of people sitting through multiple screenings. Photoplay magazine ran an article saying Mae was “blonde, buxom and rowdy,” and that she specialized in “naughty ladies with big souls and golden hearts.” The film, its star, and her body became famous.

Mae’s voluptuous figure was coveted, both because it was different and because this was in the middle of the Great Depression, when many people were starving and thin. Her attitudes toward sex were also bold and new. Mae had ownership over her body, and saw sex simply as a natural act. “We can no more eliminate the primary emotion of sex-hunger from our birthright, then we can remove our hearts,” said Mae. By being so open with her thoughts, Mae removed any smuttiness and shame. The New York Times said she was “the healthiest influence which has reached Hollywood in years.”

When Paramount came knocking a second time, Mae was able to make some demands. She wanted final cut approval, the ability to choose her director and leading man (Cary Grant once again), and most importantly, she wanted to write a new script, one not based on a play. For I’m No Angel, she consulted her existing joke books for sexy one-liners to add to the film. One of the most famous was, “When I’m good, I’m good, but when I’m bad, I’m better.”

At the time, censors were becoming uncomfortable with the content of movies. Despite the MPPDA making suggestions, they weren’t always heeded. There was a rush of violent gangster films like Public Enemy and a slew of sexual movies, including the two Mae West pictures. The Catholic Legion of Decency and some women’s groups protested about the “morally corrupt” content, and the production code came into force.

With its list of strict rules, the change was dramatic. In 1933, Mae West had topped the box office, but in 1934, it was Shirley Temple.

The code restricted Mae’s fierce sexuality and was the beginning of the end for her career. Mae had been working on her next film, I’m No Sin, but with the code it was quickly changed into a pale and unrecognizable imitation. Gone was the title, in favor of the more generic Belle of the Nineties. Also out was any provocative material and witty one-liners about sex. The film was lackluster and didn’t do well with audiences.

As for her image, Paramount and the publicity team worked hard to recreate Mae West. They insisted that her performances and frank interviews were complete fiction, and tried to erase her working-class background. For her next film, Mae worked with censors to make sure it was completely clean, and the ads for Goin’ To Town stated this was a “new, streamlined Mae West,” ready to “set a new standard.” But without the ability to be herself, in all her sparkling sexual glory, audiences lost interest.

In the end, Mae West was “too much” for Hollywood. Too sexy, too bawdy, too much herself and not a carefully created Hollywood starlet. But her legend has lived on, and as Mae herself said, “You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”

Hattie McDaniel: The Oscar Winner

When Hattie McDaniel attended the 12th annual Academy Awards as a nominee, producer David O. Selznick had to call in a favor just so she could sit down. The 1940 Oscars were held at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub inside the Ambassador Hotel, which had a strict segregation policy. Hattie was allowed in, but had to sit at a table hidden in the back, far away from the rest of the cast from Gone With The Wind.

This is just one example of the many battles Hattie McDaniel had to face in Hollywood. From getting interesting roles to attending her own premiere, the value of her Oscar, and even where her family was allowed to bury her … it was not easy to be Hattie. Inside Hollywood, she had to deal with racism. Outside, she was criticized for playing stereotypes. But she had to play by the rules in order to break them. As Hattie famously said, “I would rather make seven hundred dollars a week playing a maid than being one.”

Both of Hattie’s parents were former slaves who escaped during the Civil War. They met at a “contraband camp,” filled with other slaves who had managed to break free. Her father volunteered for the Union Army, and later they married. But when they started to have children, they faced heartbreak after heartbreak, with six babies dying at birth or soon after. By the time Hattie was born, the family was living in extreme poverty, and she suffered from malnutrition as a baby. And despite her father’s service in the Army, the Government refused his pension several times. On one occasion, his claim was denied on the grounds he could not prove his exact age. “It is impossible for me to furnish a record of my birth,” he replied, “I was a slave.”

They had a hard life, but the McDaniel family was full of natural talent, so their small rented house was always filled with song and dance. Hattie’s brother Otis was a particularly skilled dancer, and was determined to change his family’s situation. He and his brother Sam, along with some friends, started performing as the Cakewalk Kids, hiring themselves out for community functions and white society dances. The Cakewalk was a dance move originally created by slaves poking fun at their white masters, but it had become a popular trend around the country.

Hattie would sometimes perform in their shows, and she drew praise for her singing and satirical skits. Often, she poked fun at the “Mammy” stereotype, but ironically, this was the very role which would make her famous later on.

When she was fifteen, Hattie took part in a drama competition. This is a moment she always pointed to as being life-altering. She performed an emotional rendition of the poem Convict Joe, a story of a husband who kills his wife during a drunken rage. As she finished, she was in tears, and the crowd erupted in applause, rising to their feet. Hattie won the Gold Medal, and said later this win gave her an indescribable feeling of happiness and the knowledge that performing was her destiny.

In the early 1930s, after a brief stint as a blues singer, Hattie moved to Los Angeles. There, she met casting agent Charles Butler, one of the few black people working behind the scenes in Hollywood. He was hired by Central Casting as “head of all Negro employment,” and his job involved going into black neighborhoods to search for African-Americans who could fill small roles in Hollywood movies.

This was a conflicting prospect for many black actors, because while Butler was able to get employment and money for the community, he was seen as working for a racist structure, which would only hire actors for the background or as stereotypes.

That’s what happened to Hattie, who was hired by Charles for $7.50 a week. She began to be cast in movies, always small, subservient roles. But with each and every part, Hattie found a way to make them her own. This was how she rebelled against the system. These characters were meant to be hidden in the background, but Hattie made sure she was seen.

Her success wasn’t always welcomed by the black community. Some actors, like Clarence Muse, recognized her talent, but organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) criticized Hattie for taking on demeaning characters and being used by Hollywood to further racism.

In the mid-1930s, Hollywood was excited by the news that producer David O. Selznick was making an epic film adaptation of Gone with the Wind. The racist tone of the book was a concern for the NAACP, but because of its size, the role of Mammy was seen as a good prospect for African-American actresses.

Casting was a big process, and everyone wanted a say as to who should play Mammy. Producer David O. Selznick received hundreds of letters from all different people in Hollywood, vouching for which actress they thought would make the best Mammy. One he received was from Bing Crosby, who wrote, “Being loath to go down in history as the only citizen not sticking my nose into the casting of Gone with the Wind, I would like to suggest a Mammy.” Bing said he didn’t know her name, but there was a “little lady” who he had worked with on ‘Showboat’ who “would be a cinch,” and suggested David ask the casting office for her name. He was referring to Hattie McDaniel, and David wrote back, “thanks for the suggestion, and also for not wanting to play Scarlett.” Soon Hattie was called in to test for the role of Mammy and when her audition was over, David knew he had found the one.

Prior to shooting Gone with the Wind, Hattie and Clark Gable had become friends. He was the dashing actor who had had great success a few years earlier with his film It Happened One Night. During the filming of Gone with the Wind he was a friend to the black actors on set, determined to use his power to make sure there was no discrimination or segregation. Once, he saw a row of toilets for the cast labeled “Whites” and “Coloreds” and got incredibly upset, saying if the signs were not taken down, they would need to find a new Rhett Butler.

On set, Hattie was known for entertaining the cast with jokes and songs, but as soon as the camera rolled, Hattie transformed. There’s one pivotal scene towards the end of the movie where Mammy is telling the character of Melanie about Rhett’s grief after losing his child. It’s a short scene, but extremely powerful and Hattie shows the kind of dramatic emotion that black actors almost never had the chance to play in their small roles at this time.

After that scene, the cast and crew were in awe. Olivia de Havilland had hoped to win Best Supporting Actress for her role as Melanie, but later said that at that moment, she knew it would belong to Hattie. “That scene probably won Hattie her Oscar,” she said, “and almost broke my heart too—at least at the time.”

When production had wrapped, David O. Selznick wrote a letter to thank Hattie for her work, saying, “I think you will find it is universally acclaimed as one of the finest performances of this or any other year.” The press agreed, with Variety pointing to that emotional scene, saying, “Time will set a mark on this moment in the picture as one of those inspirational bits of histrionics long remembered.” And the Los Angeles Times praised Hattie as “worthy of academy supporting awards.”

The film held its big premiere in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1939, but Hattie McDaniel and her co-star Butterfly McQueen were not allowed to attend. The city enforced the Jim Crow rule of segregation on the theater, and they even deleted her image from the program, so it only showed pictures of the white cast.

All the positive reviews for Hattie McDaniel in Gone with the Wind led to David O. Selznick pushing for a Best Supporting Actress nomination. The win was historic, with Hattie McDaniel becoming the first African-American to get an Academy Award. She was proud of her achievement and genuinely thought this win would change things. Hattie was sure this would lead to more substantial roles, but unfortunately, she was never offered the breakthrough part she hoped for. “It was as if I had done something wrong,” Hattie said in 1944.

Overall, Hattie had roles in an estimated 300 movies, but only received screen credit for about 80 of them. And 74 of those were subservient roles. She gave her Oscar to Howard University, but it was deemed “valueless” by appraisers and went missing in the early 1970s, never to be recovered.

Hattie McDaniel had another moment of success in 1947 as the voice of “Beulah” in a popular radio play. This turned into a TV show in the early 1950s, but Hattie was only able to shoot six episodes before she fell ill from cancer. When she died, Hattie’s final wish was to be buried at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, where many celebrities were laid to rest. She was denied, once again due to segregation.

There were seventy years between the Oscar wins of Hattie McDaniel and actress Mo’Nique. Mo’Nique took the stage in a blue dress and gardenias, as an homage to Hattie’s outfit from the 1940 ceremony. In her speech, Mo’Nique thanked Hattie for “enduring all that she had to, so that I would not have to.”

In her own Oscar speech, Hattie McDaniel said her greatest hope was to “always be a credit to my race and the motion picture industry.” She was supposed to be subservient, but she refused. Hollywood gave her an inch, and she made it an award-winning mile. And in doing so, she made that hope come true.

Anna May Wong: Erasure and Exoticism

For many American audiences watching movies in the 1920s, their first experience seeing an Asian-American star was through the work of Anna May Wong. She was a silent film actress who defied expectations by making the transition to talking pictures, and along the way, became a popular star in Europe.

Anna May was born Liu Tsong Wong in 1905, which translates to “frosted yellow willow.” She was a third generation Chinese-American, speaking Cantonese at home, and English at school.

Her childhood was very American and her neighborhood was a cultural mix, with hers being the only Chinese family in their local block. Their neighborhood was also a popular spot for filming movies, and young Liu loved to watch them being made. Crew members nicknamed her “C.C.C.” for “Curious Chinese Child,” because she used to hang around on each of the sets watching the filming process intently. Liu would also save her lunch money to attend the small nickelodeon theaters that had started to spring up around Los Angeles. And by age eleven, she had decided she wanted a career in the movies, and combined her English and Chinese names to call herself Anna May Wong.

At fourteen years old, Anna was playing in her neighborhood when she was approached by James Wang, a casting director whose job was to recruit Chinese actors and extras for Hollywood movies. He offered her a small part in a film called The Red Lantern, playing a young Chinese girl. Anna said later that she was “flattered, until I learned that he had just had an order for 600 Chinese actors in a hurry and hadn’t been able to find but fifty.” Still, she prepared to shine in her tiny role by using makeup as she had seen the actors do on sets. When she arrived with brightly rouged cheeks, the director told her to wash her face immediately, because she was supposed to be playing a peasant. The film was released in 1919, and Anna and her friends excitedly went to the premiere to see her big debut. But her moment on screen was too quick, and even Anna couldn’t tell which of the girls was her.

After more roles as extras, Anna was sure that acting was the profession for her. This became even more clear after she suffered through a rare illness called Saint Vitus’s Dance. The disorder causes the body to jerk uncontrollably, and the Chinese medicinal cure for it was just as painful. After surviving this ordeal, Anna decided she wanted to concentrate fully on her passion for acting. She dropped out of school and started to look for bigger roles. And she felt she had nothing to lose. “I was so young when I began,” Anna later told Motion Picture Magazine, “that I knew I still had youth if I failed, so I determined to give myself ten years to succeed as an actress.” Anna May was just sixteen years old, so her father made the rule that she should have an adult chaperone at all times.

Anna’s first big role came that very year, in Bits of Life, which is considered to be the first anthology film ever made, telling four separate stories. Though she was still just sixteen, Anna’s role was to play a mother in one of the segments, the wife of a man played by Lon Chaney, who was twenty-two years older than she was. Bits of Life was well-received, and the following year, in 1922, Anna was cast in a movie which made her the first Chinese-American film star.

Toll of the Sea was the second feature film shot using Technicolor, and the first color film that was able to be screened in regular movie theaters. The fascination of this new process made the movie a huge hit. The script was written by Frances Marion, and her brief was to create a movie which would showcase the use of color in movies. Frances said, “The story itself was of little importance compared to the widespread interest in the potential of color.” She decided on a story set in China, using a plot similar to the opera ‘Madama Butterfly’. The lead role, a Hong Kong girl named Lotus Flower was won by Anna May Wong. In the story, Lotus falls for an American man, but their interracial relationship causes scandal. When she becomes pregnant he fears it will hurt his career, so he leaves her to go back to America. Four years later he returns, now with a new American wife, and insists on taking their child back to the U.S. to have a better life. In the end, Lotus throws herself off the side of a rocky cliff.

It was quite a demanding part for a seventeen-year-old who had only been in bit roles, but Anna rose to the challenge, and along with the movie, she was a hit. The New York Times praised her skill in a review, writing, “Completely unconscious of the camera, with a fine sense of proportion and remarkable pantomimic accuracy … She should be seen again and often on the screen.” With this, Anna became a rarity in Hollywood. Asian-American actresses were not often seen on screen, and definitely weren’t given prominent, complex roles to shine in. And apart from Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa, no other Asian actor had yet broken through to become a star.

But of course, the very structure of Hollywood restricted the type of roles Anna May Wong could play. The production code in force at the time forbade non-white actresses to play serious love interests with white actors. You could hint at interracial relationships, but the attraction would then need to be punished by the death of the non-white character, lest the film send the message that mixing of cultures was ok. “No film lovers can ever marry me [on screen],” said Anna, “If they got an American actress to slant her eyes and eyebrows and wear a stiff black wig and dress in Chinese culture, it would be alright. But me? I am really Chinese. So I must always die in the movies, so that the white girl with the yellow hair may get the man.”

As author Nancy Wang Yuen explains, the production code even prevented Asian actors from starring with white actors who were playing Asian. “They couldn’t star opposite a white man, and they couldn’t even star opposite white actors who were playing Asians, because that counted as anti-miscegenation as well. There were those kind of structural codes in place that prevented them from ever even being considered. Anna May Wong did want to audition for bigger roles, but she was told that she couldn’t because they had already cast a white man as the Chinese lead.”

The roles she was offered consisted of racist stereotypes. They were either the subservient Asian slave girl, the exotic siren or the villainous “Dragon Lady.” In this way, Anna May Wong’s career reflects what many Asian-American actors still have to go through today. Be exoticized, play “Oriental” stereotypes, or don’t exist at all. Orientalism is a racist way of seeing a variety of cultures from The East as one—from Japanese to Arabic to African and Chinese—all labeled exotic, mystic, uncivilized and often, barbaric. Asian actors also have to deal with the practice of whitewashing in Hollywood, where roles meant for actors of color are played by white actors. This still happens now, and back in Anna May Wong’s day, it was even more common, with white actors donning “yellowface” to play Asian characters. So white people could play whatever role they wanted, but everyone else had to take the scraps.

To counter this, Anna tried to make good use of every opportunity given to her. Hollywood heavyweight Douglas Fairbanks had spotted her in Toll of the Sea, and sought her out to star next to him in 1924s The Thief of Baghdad. In the swashbuckling film, Anna played a scheming slave, and the movie made over two million dollars at the box office. Audiences loved her, but Anna’s career didn’t please everyone. The Chinese government had tried to shut down The Thief of Baghdad, saying Anna’s role was too erotic, and her parents constantly repeated the old Chinese proverb to her, saying, “a good man will not be a soldier and a good girl will not be an actress.” Anna’s parents were also sad that she was still single, but Anna found it hard, with Chinese-American men preferring Chinese women who were more “traditional,” and American men preferring American women. Tabloid magazines also reported on her single status, with headlines like “Oriental Beauty Compelled to Choose Between Heritage of Race and Her Preference for an American Husband.”

Over the next few years Anna had roles playing a variety of “exotic” nationalities. She was an Eskimo in ‘The Alaskan’ and the Indian princess Tiger Lily in ‘Peter Pan’. But her parts continued to be of the small, supporting variety. By 1928, Anna May Wong was fed up with the roles given to her by Hollywood, and the extra pressures placed on her, so she decided to move to Europe, following in the footsteps of African-American actors Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson. “I was so tired of the parts I had to play,” said Anna. “Why is it that the screen Chinese is nearly always the villain of the piece, and so cruel, a murderous, treacherous snake in the grass. We are not like that. We have our own virtues. We have our rigid code of behavior, of honor. Why do they never show these on the screen? Why should

we always scheme, rob, kill? I got so weary of it all.”

She found big success in Europe, where she made films in English, French and German, surprising audiences by speaking multiple languages. Her speaking voice was honed through speech lessons at Cambridge University, for which she spent a lot of her own money. This was a worthwhile investment, with talking pictures becoming increasingly popular around the world. She had a beautiful speaking voice, and her American accent was a shock for people not used to seeing Asian-Americans on screen. Fellow actress Katharine DeMille said Anna had “the world’s most beautiful figure and face … and when she opens her mouth out comes Los Angeles Chinatown sing-sing girl and every syllable is a fresh shock.”

Anna spent two years in Europe, but was so homesick, she returned to Hollywood in 1930. And nothing had changed. Her first role back was in the crime drama Daughter of the Dragon, where she played another dragon lady, a Princess living next door to the villain, Dr. Fu Manchu, who wants to take over the world. Fu Manchu was a character created by author Sax Rohmer, and one of the worst examples of how Hollywood portrayed Asian characters as “evil.” Seeing villainous Asian characters and anti-Asian images on screen furthered the racist idea of “yellow peril”—the thought that the people of East Asia proposed a danger to the Western world. Fu Manchu was called “the yellow peril incarnate in one man,” and was solely focused on bringing down Western civilization. The character appeared in a series of books, five movies and a radio serial. In the films, Fu Manchu was played by Swedish-American actor Warner Oland, who made a career of portraying characters in “yellowface” makeup. As well as Fu Manchu, Warner portrayed the detective Charlie Chan in sixteen movies.

Despite her starring role in Daughter of the Dragon and an increased profile after her work in Europe, Anna May Wong received half the amount of pay that her co-stars Warner Oland and Sessue Hayakawa were paid. But a better role came for her in 1932, next to Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express, directed by the legendary Josef von Sternberg. The film was a big success at the box office, and received Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Director, winning one for Best Black and White Cinematography.