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
