Marion was one of many women under Weber’s wing. Weber helped found the Girls’ Studio club, also known as the home of Young Ladies Who Make Moving pictures in Hollywood, where she served on the board, gave talks and arranged tours. In 1918, she realized how frequently female extras were exploited on the casting couch and began advocating unionization. (It was a forward-thinking cause; the Screen Extras Guild wasn’t chartered until 1946.) She served on the advisory board of a correspondence school for aspiring screenwriters whose student body was overwhelmingly female, and took a protective interest in the flood of naïve young women arriving daily to look for movie work in Los Angeles.
In 1913, well before women’s suffrage, she served for a year as mayor of Universal City. When she occasionally purchased screenplays, she bought from women writers, and when she adapted material from newspapers and magazines, the journalists were women as well. She endlessly hosted lunches and dinners in recognition of other women’s accomplishments.
When Weber is called a “star finder,” the story often cited is her discovery of Claire Windsor. The tale goes like this: Weber’s lead for her first film with paramount fell through at the last minute, and in an effort to avoid production delays she cast about for a replacement on the Paramount campus. Ola Cronk, spotted in line at the cafeteria, seemed promising. Cronk was 27, a single mother, and had no acting experience. She’d decided to go to Hollywood after being named “empress” of an Orientalist festival in Seattle called Jappyland, and was working as an extra.
Weber changed Ola’s name to Claire Windsor, which vaguely exuded British silk stocking, and invented a sympathetic backstory of an opera career. She orchestrated sightings of Windsor with the most eligible bachelor in town, Charlie Chaplin, and may have had a hand in a media coup that involved faking Windsor’s disappearance and near-death rescue in the Hollywood hills. (“Lost Starlet!” screamed newspaper headlines.) All this happened during the eighteen months that Weber and Windsor made five films together; by 1922, the transformation was complete. Windsor was a bona fide star.
An alternate telling of Windsor’s stardom would emphasize the films that she and Weber made together. All were domestic dramas that focused on marriage. The action is psychological, tracing the shifting perspectives of female characters. In What’s Worth While? (1921), for instance, Windsor plays a wife who is embarrassed by her husband’s rough ways. He travels abroad and acquires some culture, but when he returns she is dismayed to realize that she liked him better before. In another film, Windsor plays a young woman so determined to be the perfect wife that her obsessive housekeeping leaves her husband lonely.
The plots are subtle, the stakes modest and the actresses’ roles meaty. Perhaps the key to Windsor’s success was not Weber’s bionic ability to pick out a starlet in the cafeteria line, but to hold her actresses to high expectations. It’s said that when a woman caught Weber’s eye, she wouldn’t ask, “Are you an actress?” but rather, “Are you looking for work?” The women she worked with remained devoted; she seems to have been the best kind of boss.
There is a reason this starlet story has eclipsed the substance of Windsor’s work with Weber. While women reviewers heaped praise on the marriage films, men did the opposite. The reviews were so obviously gendered that Weber incorporated the dissonance into a special advertising campaign, setting quotes by male and female critics side by side. It was a way of winking at her audience: I’m making films about relationships. Men don’t like them, but you will.
Weber’s mentoring, her lucrative contracts, her brilliant career all reversed course in the early twenties. In an interview in 1927, the lodestar of women in Hollywood had changed her tune. “Don’t try it!” she ominously advised. “You’ll never get away with it.”
Weber’s career spanned a historical shift that since has been termed Hollywood’s “masculinization.” The conditions that favored women gave way to conditions that disfavored women. Studio employment became more stratified and networks of small independent studios merged into large conglomerates. The heterogeneity of early experiments solidified into the patterns of a “Hollywood film.” The cost of making a typical movie quadrupled after 1915, and gambling with high financial stakes didn’t seem suitable for women. Neither was women’s moralizing influence still necessary. By 1928, 65 million Americans, half the country’s population, were going to the movies every week. Universal went from eleven women directors to zero, and stayed that way for sixty years. When Weber told young women “don’t try it,” her intention, writes historian Shelley Stamp, was to save women the anguish of trying to succeed in a system that guaranteed their failure.
The diminishment of Weber’s career began when Paramount refused to release What Do Men Want? in 1921. The film is about a woman made pregnant by her lover; when he refuses to support her and the unborn child, she commits suicide. The story line was provocative enough, but there were also scenes that directly addressed sexism. A man ogles a woman on the street, and Weber uses double exposures—the same technique as in Hypocrites—to show him mentally undressing the woman, one piece of clothing at a time. (When her producer judged this “lewd,” she replied, “But men do it . . . i have seen them do it numberless times!”)
In another scene, a paramour graphically describes his “system” for entrapping woman. When paramount took a pass on What Do Men Want? Weber was upset but not altogether surprised. Riffing on the title, she told an interviewer, “What men want is flattery. What they need is to be told the truth about themselves.”
When Weber told young women “don’t try it,” her intention was to save women the anguish of trying to succeed in a system that guaranteed their failure.Paramount’s pass anticipated larger changes afoot. Hollywood was beginning to fret about the possibility of federal censorship, electing in 1930 to preempt government regulation with the self-imposed Hays Code. (The code forbade subjects like drug trafficking and prostitution, and prohibited actresses from appearing in “compromising situations,” which effectively excluded women from both serious and comedic roles.) The Hays Code wasn’t formalized until 1934, but even in the early twenties, content began to trend lighter; Weber spoke of cinema becoming “frothy.”
It was a backhanded compliment: emphasizing Weber’s gender worked in tandem with designating her films the equivalent of chick flicks.One of the most popular films of 1921 was Passion, starring Pola Negri. Based on the life of Louis XV’s mistress, Madame DuBarry, the film shows the smoldering Negri as a seductress who so enjoys her amorous games that she cries out at her execution: “one moment more! Life is so sweet!” The theme of Passio—emancipation through pleasure—was suited to the 1920s flapper, who blithely cast off the mantle of moral authority that Weber had so sincerely worn.
Weber didn’t instantly lose her standing, but it became increasingly precarious. She was often described in terms that stressed her deviance from the norm, as the only woman with stamina and brains enough for directing. “Lois Weber is an exception,” said Cecil B. DeMille. “Most other women would crumple under the strain.” It was a backhanded compliment: emphasizing Weber’s gender worked in tandem with designating her films the equivalent of chick flicks. Her audience was demarcated in smaller strokes, as when a new release was reviewed as suitable for “matinee children and women.” Sometimes the criticism leveled at Weber was only thinly veiled misogyny, as in complaints about “dull-brained weeping women” and their “stupid infatuations.”
Sometime in the mid-twenties, Weber is said to have spent three years barricaded in her house, trying to starve herself to death. She might have been mourning her career, or her recent divorce, or both; a gossipy Hollywood columnist who seems to have spoken with her said, “She lost faith in herself, and so she lost interest in herself.” I remembered that a character in one of Weber’s films also goes on a hunger strike. I couldn’t recall which, but then I found it: The Hand That Rocked the Cradle, based on Margaret Sanger’s life, from 1917. the film’s original title was “Is a Woman a Person?” As if daring the audience to answer the question, Weber ends the film with a pointed intertitle: “What do you think?”
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When Weber died of a bleeding ulcer in 1939, she left behind an unpublished autobiography, The End of the Circle, and the few 35-mm prints she’d retained of her work. Her sister donated the prints to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; the manuscript, she reported later, was stolen. The Academy ignored the reels until the 70s, at which point it was discovered that five of the original eight films had disintegrated. Disintegration of a nitrate film begins with the gelatin base turning amber and brittle, and then sticky. eventually, the silver image corrodes and the reels smell like dirty laundry. If no one intervenes, the film crumbles into a toxic brown powder.
Weber’s oeuvre is not exceptional in this respect. Frank Thompson’s book, Lost Films, argues that between 80 and 90 percent of films made before 1930 are permanently missing. Cinephiles have long mourned orson Welles’s original cut of The Magnificent Ambersons and recoiled at the French Army melting four hundred of Georges Méliès’ prints for silver and celluloid. But if the legacy of Welles and Méliès has survived these losses, even been reinforced by them, Weber’s remains uncertain.
In 2008, there were just two copies of Shoes in existence, both nitrate prints stored in a north holland bunker owned by the EYE Film Institute Netherlands. Bacteria had eaten away at so much of the film emulsion that the image flickered with white dots, rendering some scenes illegible. Digital restoration would have been impossible except that in the thirties Universal had used Shoes to cut a new film, a comedic parody titled Unshod Maiden. Universal edited Weber’s footage to a quicker tempo and gave it a flippant voice-over.
“She needed new booties for her tootsies,” the remake begins. to Weber, Unshod Maiden must have felt like a slap in the face, but the exception a hundred years later it proved a gift. A copy at the Library of Congress was in good enough condition for EYE’s archivists to splice in scenes and mend the original film. Shoes survived only because it was mocked. Milestone Films includes Unshod Maiden on the Shoes DVD, and rightly so; it exposes the vengeance behind the forgetting.
Still from Shoes, 1916
In thinking about Weber, I’ve returned a dozen times to one critic writing in response to Shoes. He agrees with the critical consensus that the film’s realism is excessive, but unlike other reviewers, he references two particular scenes: “Miss Weber has gone a step too far,” he writes, “in showing a close-up of [Eva] extracting splinters from the sole of her foot. She has gone too far in showing the girl scraping mud from her feet with a pair of scissors. There is such a thing as being too realistic.”
The particular offense of extracting a sliver and scraping mud is obscure to me, though the critic seems to think it obvious. My reaction was the opposite. I was spellbound by Eva’s clumsy way with the scissors, and grateful that Weber had reminded me how mud is both labile and stubborn. Perhaps the critic was turned off by the smallness of the gestures, or their link with poverty and dirt, or their corporeality, but these were precisely the associations that spoke to me.
Bazin once argued that characters who seem “overwhelmingly real” are difficult to ignore because of such moments, moments that ask viewers to “leap the hurdle of their humanity.” Indeed, I found myself yoked to Eva, weighted by the shame of her poverty and the shame of her solution. Lois Weber’s proselytizing, I realized, had made me a convert.
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From The Point Issue 18. Used with permission of The Point.
