Lois Weber at Rex: Performing Femininity Across Media

Lois Weber at Rex: Performing Femininity Across Media Shelley Stamp

ois Weber’s 1913 film Suspense, her extraordinary re-working of the well-worn last-minute rescue scenario, remains the best-known work Lfrom her early career at Rex. As Charlie Keil remarks, it is ‘one of the most stylistically outré’ films of the entire transitional period.1 Re-making the most familiar of cinematic tropes, and playing the Griffith-esque heroine herself, Weber signals her interest in popular images of femininity circulating in commercial entertainment culture at the time. Two other, lesser-known Weber shorts released the previous year depict the production and circulation of female images in related media: Fine Feathers (1912) is set amidst the art market and in A Japanese Idyll (1912) commercial postcards feature prominently. Clearly allegorising cinema’s own enterprise, both films were made as the star system solidified – with female stars at its heart – and as Weber was becoming a celebrity in her own right. Tracing Weber’s career at Rex, we can read the filmmaker’s evolving public persona against her own cinematic meditations on popular images of femininity, foregrounding her explicit interest in how feminine ideals were constructed across multiple media forms. Increasingly positioned as a celebrity herself, Weber was evidently keenly aware of cinema’s role in produc- ing and circulating commodified images of women, both onscreen and off.2 Weber established her professional reputation at Rex in the early ‘teens. She and her husband, Phillips Smalley, joined in the company in the fall of 1910, shortly after it was formed by Edwin S. Porter. They began work on Rex’s second production (ultimately its first release) The Heroine of ’76 (1911), in which Weber played a young woman who discovers a plot to assassinate George Washington and dies saving his life.3 By February 1911 Rex had completed twenty films and began a weekly release schedule, issuing fifty-six titles that year, then moving to a twice-weekly schedule in 1912.4 Weber began writing one scenario per week and continued this prodigious output for at least another three years.5 She and Smalley acted together in most of their productions and shared

13 PERFORMING NEW MEDIA: 1895–1915 work directing. Always careful to credit his wife, Smalley told an interviewer, ‘she is as much the director and more the constructor of Rex pictures than I’.6 Later recalling the time she spent at Rex with her husband, Weber remembered, ‘we worked very, very hard’.7 As Porter’s attention began to focus elsewhere – first on the amalgamation of independent producers like Rex under the umbrella of Universal Pictures and then on the formation on Famous Players – Weber and Smalley were increasingly left in charge of day-to-day operations at the company. When Porter formally severed his ties with Rex in the fall of 1912, the couple assumed leadership of the brand.8 Early in 1913 the company relocated from New York to new facilities at Universal City in Los Angeles, where Weber, especially, began to assume a leadership role on the lot. Rex films were immediately celebrated by trade commentators. They repre- sented ‘quality of the dependable, consistent variety’, according to the New York Dramatic Mirror, which praised the company’s well-written and carefully constructed narratives centered on a small number of well-developed characters, setting them against large-scale, action-oriented productions made at other outfits.9 Critics praised the strong performances and sophisticated cinematography. Rex’s ‘characteristic style’ was increasingly associated with the Smalleys, with Weber often given primary credit even in these early days, her ‘feminine hand’ recognisable in many releases. Early in 1913 Moving Picture World’s George Blaisdell praised Weber’s ‘fertile brain’, a comment echoed later that year when the same paper declared her ‘famous through filmdom for her ability to inject psychological power into her writings’.10 The following year another critic proclaimed, ‘something substantial is always to be expected from the pen of Lois Weber’.11 Characterising individual filmmakers as expressive artists aided the industry’s larger bid to elevate cinema’s stature during these years, as Keil reminds us, a fact all the more true with female artists.12 Though first marketed by Rex as an actress and ‘picture personality’, Weber quickly shifted the spotlight to her creative role as screenwriter and filmmaker.13 The subject of interviews and profiles in trade publications like Moving Picture World and Universal Weekly, she was also written up in mass-circulation outlets like Gertrude Price’s syndicated newspaper column and Sunset magazine’s ‘Interesting Westerners’ feature.14 As Eileen Bowser has pointed out, ‘sending pictures of beautiful women to the press was a time-honored way for the newer production companies to get some publicity’, and often female players carried the banner of their respective companies.15 But Weber turned the tables on this practice, emphasizing her creative labor over glamour. She appeared particularly

14 1 Lois Weber at Rex: Performing Femininity Across Media conscious of using her stature as a screenwriter to speak about her broader goals for the fledgling industry. In one of the earliest such profiles, a 1912 item entitled ‘Lois Weber on Scripts’, she bristled against formulaic plots that relied on happy endings and climatic sequences artificially engineered through murders, sui- cides, and elopements. ‘Don’t let us all cut out after the same pattern’, she cautioned, resisting the trend toward standardisation.16 Astrongadvocatefor scenario writers, Weber’s comments not only drew attention to this newly-iden- tified craft, giving it weight and depth, they also articulated a forceful view of quality motion pictures. When a professional group of scenario writers began to form that same year, excluding women from its initial planning meetings, Weber protested and received a published apology from Epes Winthrop Sargent in his column ‘The Photoplaywright’. ‘We are sorry now that we barred the ladies’, he wrote, declaring Weber ‘a high degree playwright’ who had ‘written a lot of clever plays’ and inviting her to subsequent meetings.17 Not only was Weber active in promoting the fledgling art of screenwriting during these years, she also fostered connections to the influential network of women’s clubs. In the summer of 1913, for instance, she addressed the Woman’s City Club of Los Angeles on ‘The Making of Picture Plays That Will Have an Influence for Good on the Public Mind’, sharing the podium with a female member of the local censorship board. Here Weber explicitly aligned her background in Christian social work with her filmmaking, noting the ‘blessing’ of working in ‘a voiceless language’, capable of speaking to so many on such a large scale.18 Clearly she was aware not only of cinema’s budding role in popular discourse, but also the importance of her own profile as activist bourgeois clubwoman working within the industry. Female filmmakers brought a unique vision to filmmaking and a unique mode of working in the industry, she suggested. She urged her audience to abandon ‘the indifferent and often-con- demning attitude held up by refined people toward motion pictures’, embracing instead the ‘artistic and educational potential’ they held.19 By using her growing renown to promote her creative work as screenwriter and filmmaker and by using her public persona to convey a feminine presence behind the scenes in Hollywood, Weber showed herself to be keenly self-conscious about how female identity might be fashioned in movieland. She took an even bolder step when she ran for Mayor of Universal City on an all-female suffrage ticket in the fall of 1913, shortly after California granted women the right to vote, but well before women could vote in most other states, attracting national press attention and not a little ridicule.20 Reports, predictably, lampooned the feminist ticket, with the Los Angeles Examiner noting that Universal City’s

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‘scenic beauty’ had been ‘perturbed’ by ‘vociferous election speeches, soap box oratory and woman suffragist campaigning’.21 Universal countered this rhetoric, suggesting that their newly elected roster of female officials were ‘ladies of culture and high ideals … some of the brainiest as well as most beautiful women in America’.22 As Mark Garrett Cooper has shown, a newly opened Universal City presented itself as a novel environment where work and play intermingled and where traditional gender roles might be reversed, a feature Weber clearly exploited in her campaign.23 As these examples demonstrate, Weber’s evolving public persona pushed on familiar tropes of femininity – first to assert an image of craft and artistry against the notion of female stardom; next to interject a feminised social conscience into commercial cinema; and finally to connect her filmmaking to a more-or-less explicit feminist politics. Alongside this persona, two of Weber’s films stand out for their reflexive examination of female representation: Fine Feathers and Japanese Idyll interrogate the reproduction, circulation and commercialization of female imagery in the art market and commercial postcards respectively, each plainly standing in for cinema itself. In Fine Feathers Weber plays Mira, a young woman working as a maid for an artist, Vaughn (played by Smalley). Vaughn becomes famous after painting two images of Mira: the first created after he glimpses her cleaning his studio at night, disheveled and sweaty from work; and a second created when Vaughn again catches her unaware, this time modeling an elegant robe he had left lying in the studio. Capturing and circulating to others scenes that only he has been fortunate to witness, Vaughn asserts his privileged, proprietary role over Mira, while at the same time turning her into an object of exchange. Enthralled by Vaughn’s images of Mira, his patron falls in love with her, sight unseen. Vaughn’s exploitation of Mira’s image is bound up in his subsequent sexual exploitation of her body, a point the film makes clear when he buys her a dress to celebrate the success of his art show. The dress, and its association with masquerade, lays bare the linked economic and sexual exploitation at the core of Vaughn’s interest in Mira. It marks the shift in their relationship from employer/employee and artist/model to lovers, for in the next scene we see Mira wearing the dress as she entertains guests in his home, assuming the mantle of the bourgeois housewife even though the couple remains unmarried. Mira’s movement through Vaughn’s apartment also articulates the different stages of their relationship. As she evolves from maid to model to lover Mira penetrates deeper into his living quarters, moving from his public teaching studio to the smaller private painting studio adjacent, then from his front parlor to (we

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Figure 1: Mira (Lois Weber) poses for a portrait by the artist Vaughn (Phillips Smalley) after he has discovered the maid cleaning his studio one evening in Fine Feathers (Lois Weber, United States, 1912). presume) his bedroom, with the lateral trajectory of her movement mirroring the circulation of her portrait in the art world. The exchange of her image, in other words, is matched by the sexual effects on her body. That this shift in the couple’s relationship pivots on the dress is an ironic reversal of the earlier episode in which Mira had donned a costume in Vaughn’s studio in order to fantasise a more glamourous self-image, the notorious ‘fine feathers’ of the film’s title, an allusion to the ironic proverb ‘fine feathers make fine birds’. If at first Mira was playing with class masquerade, fantasising how malleable social boundaries might be; here she is masquerading as married, a fact that outrages Vaughn’s patron when he discovers she is not wearing a wedding band. Humiliated, Mira asks Vaughn to marry her and ‘legitimate’ their sexual liaison. When he refuses to do so, she leaves, casting off the dress, and in doing so rejecting the roles Vaughn has created for her as surrogate spouse and glamourous woman. Indeed, the ‘fine feathers’ Mira had longed for are false: one cannot simply pretend to be woman of privilege in order to transcend one’s class background anymore than one can perform a semblance of marital propriety to mask a carnal relationship.

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Though Vaughn does consent to marriage in the end, their liaison is forever compromised by its illegitimate performance. It is presented as nothing more than the evolution of Mira’s role from cleaning obligations in the backroom to hostessing obligations in the front room and (unspoken) sexual obligations in the bedroom. Released just six months later, A Japanese Idyll offers a similarly self-conscious meditation on the reproduction and commodification of the female image. In this case, the context is photography rather than painting, but again the story depicts a struggle for control over the circulation of a woman’s portrait. Set in Japan, the story depicts Cherry Blossom’s efforts to wrest herself from a marriage to a wealthy merchant. Without ever meeting or seeing her in person, the merchant has fallen in love with Cherry Blossom after glimpsing a portrait of her secretly taken by a western photographer and reproduced on a commercial postcard. He proposes the idea of marriage to her parents, who are delighted. Eager to get rid of the merchant, Cherry Blossom scares him away upon their first meeting by wearing western clothing borrowed from her American friend and making ‘ugly’ faces, thereby freeing herself to elope with her sweetheart. Photography and desire are foregrounded from the outset. Scenes of the wealthy merchant gazing adoringly at Cherry Blossom’s postcard are inter-cut with those of her secret liaisons with her lover in her back garden, a juxtaposition that clearly poses the merchant’s idealisation of her image against the reality of her own desire. All three men – the western photographer, the infatuated merchant and Cherry Blossom’s lover – are linked in their voyeuristic relation to her. Both the photographer and the suitor watch her, unseen, from identical vantage points, then the merchant falls in love with a photo taken from one of these same views. So even as the film ostensibly makes distinctions between each man’s interest – purely commercial on the part of the photographer, blind passion on the merchant’s part, and ‘true’ love on the suitor’s part – in fact each man objectifies Cherry Blossom in a similar manner. By capturing, then marketing, her image, the photographer commodifies an experience both he and her lover have already had. By setting the story in Japan, the film makes a further commentary on the racial dynamics of this situation.24 The western photographer exoticises Cherry Blos- som, ironically marketing this portrait of racial exoticism back to a Japanese man. It is not until the merchant sees her outside of her exoticised orientalism – when she dons western dress and makes unflattering faces – that he can shed his infatuation. Given that all Japanese characters, including Cherry Blossom, are played by white actors in ‘yellow face’, the film engages a further level of

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Figure 2: Cherry Blossom’s image circulates amongst male hands on a commercial postcard in A Japanese Idyll (Lois Weber, United States, 1912). performativity. There is nothing ‘real’ at all about the eroticised, orientalised female image that circulates on the postcard. In a film about secrecy, exhibitionism and voyeurism, both diegetic space and screen space become crucial vectors. There are three principal spaces at Cherry Blossom’s home: the back garden when she meets her lover, the interior room where the family greets guests, and the rear porch that straddles these two spaces, separated from the house only by a shoji screen. Cherry Blossom is the only character who navigates all three realms, lending her a certain control and knowledge that other characters lack. The shoji screen, in particular, becomes a crucial prop that Cherry Blossom employs to control space: she uses it to conceal her trysts, at one point even canoodling with her sweetheart while the parents broker a deal with the merchant on the other side of the screen. Later she sneaks through the screen to meet her lover and elope. Ultimately, A Japanese Idyll is about relative hierarchies of seeing and knowledge. Cherry Blossom is objectified, without her knowledge, by both the photographer who snaps her picture unaware and the merchant who falls madly in love with the image. In both cases, seeing without being seen oneself confers a certain amount of power onto the voyeur. But Cherry Blossom succeeds in reversing this dynamic, first by taking charge of her own representation in such a manner that she scares off her would-be husband; then by successfully concealing her love affair from her parents and allowing herself to elope. In both cases she is able to control who sees what, when. Although the ending does not produce as radical a critique of marriage and domesticity as Weber achieves in Fine Feathers, A Japanese Idyll pursues an even more self-conscious exploration of the particularly cinematic representations of femininity through its use of racialised performance, diegetic screens, and its elaborate play on seeing and being seen.

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These two films, made during a time when Weber was herself the object of increasing public fascination, reveal her to be very self conscious about the production and circulation of images of women in the art market and mass-produced postcards, clear stand-ins for American movie culture. Weber herself also appears to have been very self conscious about her own image as a woman at work in early Hollywood, sidestepping her initial branding as an actress in favour of asserting her creative role as scenarist and filmmaker, using her association with feminine propriety to insist on films of social conscience and purpose, then finally claiming the legitimacy of female leadership in Hollywood. As Mayor of Universal City, Weber took on an increasingly prominent role not only at the studio, but as the face of feminine uplift in Hollywood. Her public comments on the industry, and on screenwriting in particular, suggest, however, that she was much more than the matronly do-gooder some thought her to be at the time. If we look again at the screenwriting methods Weber espoused in interviews, we see that when she disparaged simple happy endings in favour of more complicated plots, she was not just rejecting pat filmmaking formulas; she was calling for a wholesale re-thinking of the trope of heterosexual romance that, even then, governed cinematic narratives. When Weber advocated nuanced character development over action and spectacle, she was not just rejecting the trend towards sensationalism; she was demanding that we re-think roles typi- cally assigned to men and women on screen. The films Weber produced at Rex, while continually noted for their exceptional cinematography, well-crafted staging, nuanced performances and original sto- rylines, were also advancing quite radical critiques of gender roles, patriarchal institutions, and mass culture itself. They are evidence of the commanding role that Weber envisioned for the medium just as it began to assume its status as the nation’s premiere commercial entertainment – a capacity to reimagine feminine ideals both on- and off-screen.

Notes 1. Charlie Keil, Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style, and Filmmaking, 1907–1913 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 196. 2. In their essays for this volume, Leslie Midkiff DeBauche and Ivo Blom provide two other compelling examples. Whether Lois Weber, Mary Pickford or Lyda Borelli, complex negotiations surroundingfemalestardom duringthiseraturned on thereproduction and circulationof women’s images in commercial culture. 3. New York Dramatic Mirror (22 February 1911): 32; and Moving Picture World (25 February 1911): 373. Moving Picture World will hereafter be abbreviated as MPW. 4. George Blaisdell, “Phillips Smalley Talks”, MPW (24 January 1914): 399; “Rex Company Success”, MPW (27 January 1912): 269; H.F. Hoffman, “The Rex Director”, MPW (24 February

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1912): 674; “The First Birthday of Rex”, MPW (24 February 1912): 671; and Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 459–465. 5. “Miss Weber Has Record of One Script A Week for Three Years”, Universal Weekly (14 February 1914): 17; and “Lois Weber’s Remarkable Record”, MPW (21 February 1914): 975. 6. Mabel Condon, “Sans Grease Paint and Wig”, Motography (24 January 1914): 58. 7. L.H. Johnson, “A Lady General of the Picture Army”, Photoplay (June 1915): 42. 8. “E.S. Porter Resigns from Universal”, MPW (2 November 1912): 44; and Musser, Before the Nickelodeon, 463–465. 9. “Rex Company Success”, New York Dramatic Mirror (23 August 1911): 20. 10. George Blaisdell, “At the Sign of the Flaming Arcs”, MPW (5 April 1913): 59; and “Shadows of Life”, MPW (4 October 1913): 51. 11. MPW (13 June 1914): 1541. 12. Keil, Early American Cinema, 126. 13. MPW (22 April 1911): 916; MPW (29 April 1911): 940; and “Players’ Personalities”, Photoplay (October 1912): 86. 14. See for example: Gertrude M. Price, “Should All Plays End Happily? Woman Movie Director Says ‘No’. ‘Yes’ is Dictum of Managers”, New Orleans Statesman (26 September 1913): n.p., env. 2518, Robinson Locke Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (hereafter RLC); “Lois Weber – Mrs. Phillips Smalley”, Universal Weekly (4 October 1913): 8; and Bertha H. Smith, “A Perpetual Leading Lady”, Sunset 32, no. 3 (March 1914): 634–636. 15. Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915 (New York: Scribner, 1990), 117. 16. “Lois Weber on Scripts”, MPW (19 October 1912): 241. 17. Epes Winthrop Sargent, “The Photoplaywright”, MPW (7 September 1912): 972. For more on this episode, see Torey Liepa, “Figures of Silent Speech: Silent Film Dialogue and the American Vernacular, 1909–16” (Ph.D. Dissertation, New York University, 2008), 194–195. 18. “High Standard of Pictures is Urged”, Exhibitors’ Times (9 August 1913): 7, 19–20, 22; and George Blaisdell, “At the Sign of the Flaming Arcs”, MPW (9 August 1913): 640. 19. “High Standard of Pictures is Urged”, 19. 20. “‘Movie’ Actress Runs for Mayor of Infant Town”, Los Angeles Examiner (12 May 1913), n.p., Los Angeles Examiner Clipping Files, Special Collections, University of Southern California; “Miss Weber Heads Slate of Movie Actresses That Oppose Men at Election”, n.d., n.p., env. 2518, RLC; “In Woman’s Realm”, New York Telegraph (10 June 1913), n.p., env. 2518, RLC; and Photoplay (September 1913): 73. Weber initially lost the election to studio manager A.M. Kennedy, but was elected to replace him as Mayor when he resigned from the studio later that summer. 21. “‘Movie’ Actress Runs for Mayor of Infant Town”, n.p. 22. “Where Work is Play and Play is Work”, Universal Weekly (27 December 1913): 5. 23. Mark Garrett Cooper, Universal Women: Filmmaking and Institutional Change in Early Hollywood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 45–89. 24. As Gregory Waller demonstrates, a significant number of American-made films ‘put Japan on view’ during these years. See Waller, “Japan on American Screens, 1908–1915”, in Richard Abel, Giorgio Bertellini and Rob King (eds), Early Cinema and the ‘National’ (New Barnet: John Libbey, 2008), 137–150.