Lois Weber - Infinite Women

This biography is republished from the Women Film Pioneers Project with permission. It was written by film historian Dr. Shelley Stamp, author of Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture after the Nickelodeon and Lois Weber in Early Hollywood.
Citation: Stamp, Shelley. “Lois Weber.” In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2013.

Born: 13 June 1879, United States
Died: 12 November 1939
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Florence Lois Weber, Mrs. Phillips Smalley, Lois Smalley

Lois Weber was the leading female director-screenwriter in early Hollywood. She began her career alongside her husband, Phillips Smalley, after the two had worked together in the theatre. They began working in motion pictures around 1907, often billed under the collective title “The Smalleys.” In their early years at studios like Gaumont and Reliance, they acted alongside one another on-screen and codirected scripts written by Weber. Indeed, their status as a married, middle-class couple was often used to enhance their reputation for highbrow, quality pictures. In 1912, they were placed in charge of the Rex brand at the Universal Film Manufacturing Company, where they produced one or two one-reel films each week with a stock company of actors, quickly turning the brand into one of the studio’s most sophisticated. The couple increasingly turned their attention to multireel films, completing a four-reel production of The Merchant of Venice in 1914, the first American feature directed by a woman. Later that year they moved from Universal to Hobart Bosworth Productions where they were given more freedom to make feature-length films, among them Hypocrites (1915).

By the time the couple arrived back at Universal in 1916, Weber had emerged as the dominant member of the husband and wife partnership and, indeed, as one of the top directors on the lot. She was the sole author of scripts the couple adapted for the screen, and marketing materials and reviews singled out her work on the productions. Reporters visiting the couple on set found Smalley repeatedly turning to his wife for important decisions (Stamp 2006, 124–125). During these years Weber made a series of high profile and often deeply controversial films on social issues of the day, including capital punishment in The People vs. John Doe (1916), drug abuse in Hop, the Devil’s Brew (1916), poverty and wage equity in Shoes (1916), and contraception in Where Are My Children? (1916) and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1917).

At a time when many remained wary of cinema’s cultural impact, Weber believed in the medium’s narrative and dramatic power. Among the first to produce complex feature-length narrative in the early teens, she sought to bring the same quality of artistry to the screen as flourished in other media. Her “ideal picture entertainment,” she once said, was “a well assorted shelf of books come to life” (“Lois Weber on Scripts”). But for Weber, bringing refinement to the cinema went beyond highbrow subject matter to include films of social conscience. She often talked of using motion pictures as a means of achieving political change, aspiring to produce work “that will have an influence for good on the public mind” (Photoplay 1913, 73).

Weber achieved the height of her renown during these years: her name was routinely mentioned alongside that of D. W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille as one of the top talents in Hollywood. In 1916, she was the first and only woman elected to the Motion Picture Directors Association, a solitary honor she would retain for decades. While at Universal it is also likely that she helped to foster the careers of other actresses employed at the studio, many of whom she had directed, including Cleo Madison, Lule Warrenton, and Dorothy Davenport Reid, who would become directors or producers in their own right.

Weber’s prominence was solidified in 1917 when she left Universal to form her own company, Lois Weber Productions, setting up shop on the grounds of a former residential estate in Los Angeles, where she erected a 12,000-square-foot outdoor shooting stage and converted the original home into the company’s administrative offices. Weber negotiated extremely lucrative distribution contracts with Universal, making her, for a time, the highest paid director in Hollywood according to Photoplay (York 87).

At her own production company, Weber began to move away from what she called the “heavy dinners” she had produced at Universal, side-stepping the censorship troubles she had endured in favor of more intimate productions focused on marriage and domesticity, concentrating her creative energies more than ever on the lives and experiences of women in films such as What Do Men Want? (1921), Too Wise Wives (1921), and The Blot (1921). In an attempt to transcend the factory-like mass production techniques employed at the major studios, Weber also experimented with different working methods, shooting on location as much as possible and often in narrative sequence (Weber 1917, 417).

While Weber was one of the few female screenwriters to make a sustained career out of directing, like most other female pioneers, her output slowed down considerably after 1922. The end of Weber’s marriage that same year is often cited for the abrupt shift in her career and has led some to argue that Smalley played a more central role in her filmmaking activities than had been assumed. Anthony Slide, for instance, speculates that Weber could not function “without the strong masculine presence” of her husband (1996, 131). However, it is worth noting that while Weber’s career did decline sharply following the couple’s divorce, she wrote and directed five features over the next decade: A Chapter in Her Life (1923), The Marriage Clause (1926), Sensation Seekers (1927), The Angel of Broadway (1927), and White Heat (1934). Smalley, in contrast, never again worked in any creative filmmaking capacity other than acting—and did not get much work even at that. More than likely, the downturn in Weber’s career was related to larger circumstances at play in Hollywood during the early 1920s, circumstances that compromised the fate of many independently run production companies, especially those headed by women. Plus, Weber’s focus on urban social problems, rather than amusement, and on the complexities of marriage, rather than romantic courtship, was increasingly perceived as outdated, overly didactic, and dower. “Why does Miss Weber dedicate herself, her time and her equipment to the construction of simple sermons?” one reviewer complained in 1921 (“The Screen”).

By the time Weber died in 1939, at the age of sixty, she was eulogized chiefly as a “star-maker,” a director notable only for fostering the talent of young starlets. Weber herself was “rediscovered” in the 1970s by historians like Anthony Slide, who dubbed her “the director who lost her way in history” (1996) and Richard Koszarski, who remarked that “the years have not been kind to Lois Weber” (1977). It is now time to ask what a history rewritten with Weber’s legacy in mind might look like.