girl was “a lady of spirit withal. My Yes! An ardent suffragist. A Banner-Bearing, Street-Parading Suffragist!” marveled another report in Motion Picture Magazine.83
The repeated references in the press to Lawrence’s theatrical past and present resemblance to stage star Maude Adams again betrayed how stage conventions framed the emergence of the first movie stars. As Lawrence quickly developed a reputation as one of the screen’s greatest actresses, newspapers touted her as “the richest girl in the world” and “The Maude Adams of the Moving Picture Show,” the actress whose boyish charms led J.M. Barrie to write Peter Pan (1905).84 By continually likening Lawrence to Adams, the press elevated the status of still-déclassé film acting and placed her first in a line of future female film stars capable of innocently pursuing boyish adventures.85
Moreover, her success indicated how the explosive demand for story pictures after 1908 encouraged film producers to absorb both stage actors and their customs, such as doubling in the brass.86 Experienced at managing all aspects of staging a show, thespians became the cheapest, best-trained labor supply available to make story pictures at the new film studios. The expectation that all workers perform multiple tasks reduced the sex segregation of labor and was supported by a work culture that responded to performative rather than ascriptive modes of authority based on the “natural” hierarchies of race, class, and sex.
Lawrence displayed how the custom licensed women’s ability to run the show after joining Lubin Studio in 1911. At Lubin she received more money and control over her work, including the hire of her personal director, husband Harry Solter. One of their first productions, The Little Rebel (1911), featured her as a furiously horseback riding, rifle-toting daughter of the Confederacy who falls for a Union solider she fails to kill.87 Letters to her mother at this point convey a woman who imagined herself a free agent no matter her contractual obligations.88 Indeed, a multipart interview Lawrence gave entitled “Growing Up with the Movies” has her mother, Lotta Lawrence, reporting, “When Flo was a tiny girl . . . she told the well known actor manager Daniel White that she was going to become a famous actress when she grew up,” adding that her “indomitable ambition” meant that “she would become a really famous actress.” By year’s end, Lawrence traded Lubin for IMP/Universal, where she hired Owen Moore, Pickford’s husband, as her leading man to work at Victor Film Company, an independent production unit that likely made her the first film actor to produce her own films.89 Having attained almost total control of her work, she increasingly played actresses and other professional women such as the comically exacting headmistress of a boys’ school in Flo’s Discipline (1912).90 Little wonder that “motion picture experts” writing in newspapers touted her success as proof that a “girl with talent, energy, and ambition” could “make a splendid income as an actress in the moving picture show.” In advising the “legion of ‘stage-struck’ girls” to train their sights on this “new business for girls,” the counsel displayed the transfer of professional aspirations once directed at the stage to the movie industry.91
Still searching for a means to make her name known, Pickford followed Lawrence’s path from Biograph to IMP/Universal after Lawrence left the studio in 1911. Laemmle paid Pickford more for the opportunity to fan audience interest in the actress by releasing her name to Moving Picture World and then distributing a series of films featured simply as “Little Mary Imps.” The films opened with the phrase “Mary Pickford, America’s Sweetheart, in . . .” but the lavish credits failed to compensate for the poor quality of the movies.92 Back at Biograph by the year’s end, Pickford appeared in two films that, together, crystallized her appeal as a new type of ingénue. The Female of the Species (1912) is typical Griffith fare: a finely constructed, grimly sentimental tale about innate human depravity redeemed by mother love. Yet Pickford’s pugnacious sprite excels at demonstrating her physical capacity to deal with obstacles. Employing the more restrained style she thought translated best on film, her character appears to inhabit a different film than her female costars, who weep and roll their eyes with jealousy and fear throughout.93 Her last film at Biograph, The New York Hat (1912), displayed her gift for leavening tales of romantic pathos with comedic touches that capitalized on and modernized the era’s enormously popular sentimental literature about girls’ struggles to come of age. Pickford’s performance and the script, the first by future star scenarist Anita Loos, convey the genuine, if comical, significance of acquiring “the New York hat.” The film deftly reveals this small piece of big-city life as a symbol of a world that valued young women’s desires for more autonomy. Settlement house reformer Jane Addams similarly interpreted the significance of working girls’ fashion choices, declaring, “Through the huge hat, with its wilderness of bedraggled feathers, the girl announces to the world that she is here, she is ready to live, to take her place in the world.”94
In 1913 Pickford returned to Broadway to play a lead in Belasco’s production of A Good Little Devil, using the move to gain greater recognition for both herself and the artistry of her craft. Although Pickford later claimed Griffith’s domineering personality and preference for “wishy-washy heroines” drove her from Biograph, she became the “NEW BELASCO STAR” in one such role.95 Demonstrating the short memory of celebrity culture, the press immediately passed Lawrence’s nicknames on to Pickford, hailing her as the “BIOGRAPH GIRL” and the “Maude Adams of the ‘Movies.’ ”96 Pickford used her new theatrical legitimacy to make the case for the superiority of film acting.97 According to Pickford, “film plays” offered greater artistic, financial, and personal rewards, thereby providing the best opportunity for ambitious working girls. “For years the ‘movies’ have been looked upon as the inevitable finish of the has been actor,” noted the New York American, “but according to Miss Pickford—no more.” “You can’t fool the camera,” she declared in one of many reports describing why “This ‘Maude Adams of the Movies’ Says Self-Reproduction on the Films Can Do More Than Any Director.”98 Such statements underscored that no Svengali controlled her talent behind the scenes. “I have had many years of technical training in the best possible schools of experience,” Pickford remarked after her Broadway debut; “it wasn’t as if I were a novice or a debutante.”99 Her press also emphasized the masculine concerns that motivated this “Daddy of the Family, Not Old Enough to Vote.”100 The “very small salary” she earned during her first stint on Broadway had led her to work at Biograph years earlier, she explained to a noted theater critic. “The larder was empty. What else could I do?” In short, the theater was “so much harder than acting for the movies.” Film work also promoted domestic harmony, since “ ‘Little Mary’ and Her Husband” now led a settled life with enough money to enjoy their leisure time.101 Yet Pickford also credited her hardscrabble theatrical start with her current success: “I am certain that I could not today at my age run the picture company that I do without the struggle” of her life on stage.102
Pickford’s Broadway stardom made her a singular commodity: a proven film attraction who carried the imprimatur of the legitimate stage.103 Film producer Adolph Zukor liked the combination. Like Laemmle, Zukor was another recent addition to the ranks of in de pen dent producers working outside Edison’s trust. The handsome, soft-spoken, and impeccably mannered Hungarian came to the United States as a poor youth, made a tidy sum as a cloak manufacturer in New York, and then invested his profits in nickelodeons.104 Not much taller than the diminutive Pickford, both immigrants wore their competitive drives lightly and concentrated as much on the long-term potential of motion pictures as on immediate gains.
After Zukor moved from exhibition to production in 1912, the name of the company he founded—Famous Players—made plain his intention to feminize films by luring women into the audience with stars. In order to “kill” what he called “the slum tradition in movies,” he focused on making longer movies that appropriated the prestige of well-known stage players in adaptations of equally distinguished plays.105 He encapsulated the aim in the dictum that he would showcase only “Famous Players
