Lois Weber, Film Pioneer

Lois Weber, a singer and concert pianist in her teens, maintained a lifelong love of music. In 1909 the Edison Phonograph Co. captured her clear soprano voice when she recorded a duet of “Jesus Thy Name is Love.”
Library of Congress

The Pittsburgh region has been home to many remarkable women over the years, including journalist Nellie Bly, abolitionist Jane Grey Swisshelm, and environmentalist Rachel Carson. Less known among them is Lois Weber, the first American woman film director. During cinema’s silent era in the 1910s and 1920s, she held a unique position in Hollywood. She was not only one of a small handful of women who directed films, but also was acknowledged as one of the greats of the industry — male or female. So how did a woman who set out to be a concert pianist, with an interest in missionary work, end up as one of the most renowned directors of the silent era? And how was her name unjustly erased from the annals of film history?

Born in 1879 on Federal Street in Allegheny City (now Pittsburgh’s Nort Side), Florence Lois Weber grew up in a deeply religious family that enjoyed and encouraged the arts. She was especially close to her father George, an upholsterer and decorator who worked on the celebrated Pittsburgh Opera House. He told Lois extravagant fairy tales as a child and cultivated in her a love for stories. She, in turn, composed romantic fables she shared with her father, later telling a reporter, “I don’t remember when I did not write. Certainly I’ve written and published stories ever since I could spell at all.” She also had a flair for performing, singing in the church choir, and delivering dramatic recitations at school.

An accomplished singer and concert pianist at age 16, Weber joined fellow Pittsburgher and mandolin player Valentine Abt on a tour through the eastern states. A review of their concert in Fort Wayne, Indiana, noted that “Miss Weber has a warm, rich mezzo-soprano voice, a pleasing method and an attractive personality.” She also performed around Pittsburgh, often for church functions or charitable events.

At 17 Weber volunteered as a member of Pittsburgh’s newly formed church army, an evangelical organization of the Episcopal Church similar to the Salvation Army. Run like a military outfit with captains, corporals and privates, it served as an adjunct to the Brotherhood of St. Andrew, providing hands-on missionary work.

While Lois Weber wrote scenarios, acted and directed in her films, her husband, Phillips Smalley, here circa 1913, casted, acted, and assisted with directing.
Detre Library & Archives, Heinz History Center

Drawn to perform yet initially inhibited by social and religious constraints of the time, Weber decided that the theater needed missionaries and set her sights on becoming an actress. Against family wishes, she moved to New York City to study voice, hoping for a career in opera or musical comedy. While there she continued to engage in missionary efforts, ministering in prisons, hospitals and tenements. This work gave Weber firsthand knowledge of urban social ills such as poverty, alcohol and drug abuse, abortion, and wage inequality. She later would draw on these experiences in her film work. Her attempts to evangelize and reform fellow thespians earned her the nickname “The Preacher.”

In January 1904 Weber joined the touring cast of the melodrama Why Girls Leave Home, affording her the opportunity to both act and sing. Here she met stage manager and fellow cast member Wendell Phillips Smalley (1865–1939). Phillips, as he was known, was the son of George Smalley, the well-known London correspondent for The New York Times. A graduate of Oxford and Harvard, he had practiced law in New York for several years before succumbing to a love for theater. He made his professional acting debut in 1901 with the well-known Mrs. Fiske’s troupe. Though 14 years Weber’s senior, Smalley was instantly smitten, later recounting that he proposed to Weber the day after meeting her. The feeling must have been mutual. A short three months later, in April, they married in Chicago.

The newlyweds traveled across the country with Why Girls Leave Home for over two years. Then, unable to find suitable parts in the same play, Smalley continued his stage career while Lois returned to her childhood love of writing stories. To her surprise and delight she found she was able to sell her scenarios to the film companies springing up around New York City. She soon found a job acting with Gaumont Talking Pictures, a firm engaged in early experiments to synchronize film with phonograph records. Before long Weber was using all her talents at Gaumont — writing, acting and directing. When Smalley returned from the road, he joined her. Giving up his burgeoning stage career, he plunged together with Lois into the new industry of moving pictures.

Weber had a series of portraits taken at the Witzel Studio in Los Angeles shortly after arriving and used this one for her postcard.
Detre Library & Archives, Heinz History Center

In the early decades of the 20th century, movies became a wildly popular leisure activity. Initially short, simple and inexpensive to produce, they provided cheap entertainment for the working class. Movie theaters changed programs daily, requiring a steady supply of new subjects.

In 1911, after brief stints with Reliance and Biograph, the Smalleys joined forces with Connellsville native Edwin S. Porter (1870–1941) at his new Rex Motion Picture Co. Porter, previously Thomas Edison’s ace cameraman, was responsible for one of the most famous early narrative films, The Great Train Robbery. For the next three years, Weber and Smalley labored nearly nonstop at Rex — Lois writing scenarios, directing and acting, while Smalley cast the films, acted, and assisted with directing. The following year, Carl Laemmle (1867–1939) merged his IMP (Independent Moving Pictures) studio with other independent film producers, including the Rex brand, to form the Universal Film Manufacturing Co. After a much-needed break of several months, the Smalleys headed west to continue filmmaking under the Rex brand for Universal in the growing film colony of Hollywood, California. Together, in a three-year period, they produced more than 150 films.

Few of the Smalleys’ Rex films survive. One that does, Suspense, provides a glimpse into Weber’s prowess as an early filmmaker. The story is simple and conventional. Its treatment is not. A wife and child are left alone in an isolated house while the husband is at work. A tramp breaks in and threatens them. While the wife is frantically on the phone alerting her husband, the tramp cuts the phone line. The husband steals a car and races to the scene with the police in hot pursuit. In a film only 11 minutes long, Weber packs an enormous amount of drama, energy and tension, employing overhead camera angles, extreme closeups, tight editing, location shots, and a novel use of split screen at a time when these narrative film techniques were just emerging. Weber was equally adept in all genres; other extant Rex films include The Rosary, a touching Civil War melodrama, and Discontent, which shows her deft touch with comedy.

Using an innovative triangular split screen technique, Weber increased the tension of the film Suspense by simultaneously showing a tramp breaking into a home, the wife’s frantic phone call to her husband, and the husband’s panicked response. Weber plays the wife and mother.
Frame enlargement from Suspense, 1913

In the early 1910s Hollywood welcomed women with open arms. Attitudes on the West Coast were more progressive than in the East, and jobs behind the camera were less defined and more fluid. Women readily found employment not only as actresses, but writers, directors, producers and editors. Carl Laemmle was especially known for hiring women in all capacities at Universal. Weber, already making a name for herself in the industry as a capable and accomplished filmmaker, quickly earned Laemmle’s confidence, becoming his most productive director. Laemmle said he would, “trust Miss Weber with any sum of money . . . to make any picture she wanted to make.” By the middle of the 1910s, audiences wanted longer, more sophisticated feature-length films, and Weber eagerly rose to the occasion with a series of memorable hits.

Her Name Above the Title

Weber told an interviewer, “In moving pictures I have found my life’s work, I find at once an outlet for my emotions and my ideals.” She saw film as her means to evangelize to a broad audience in a universal and voiceless language. Here she could continue her missionary work, not one-on-one, but reaching thousands at a time.

Weber was savvy enough to know, however, that movies were ultimately a business and needed to make money. She wouldn’t last long preaching sermons no one would watch. But Weber was also confident she had the ability to deliver progressive and provocative topics in dramatic and engaging stories. While other filmmakers turned to historical or literary works, Weber delved into the daily headlines and editorials.

In Hypocrites, Courtney Foote plays dual roles. As a medieval monk he searches for Truth and sculpts it as a statue of a nude maiden. When Truth is revealed, shocked and angered villagers turn on the monk and kill him. As a present-day minister he preaches on hypocrisy to his bored congregation. But they are only interested in appearances. Here the monk asks Truth to hold her mirror up to a man courting a young woman. Her mirror reveals his true intensions.
Frame enlargement from Hypocrites, 1915

In 1915 Weber took on the topic of hypocrisy in the church in Hypocrites. Here she may have been influenced partially by her own experience. Upon returning to Pittsburgh to help care for her ailing father, she had offered to sing in the church choir; however, she was rebuffed by the deacons and her grandmother, who suggested it would be inappropriate for someone who had been tainted by being on stage.

In Hypocrites, members of a wealthy congregation dutifully attend Sunday church services but are exposed for their love of appearance over truth. Weber drew on a well-known contemporary French painting La Vérité (The Truth) for her depiction of truth. The painting by Adolphe Faugeron portrays a nude woman holding up her mirror, or light of truth, as a crowd looks away and shields their eyes. Weber copied this literally, using a nude actress to portray Truth, who exposes the hypocrisy of church members in politics, personal relationships and society. Shocking for its time, the film suffered some criticism and censorship. But more often, reviewers lauded it. One in the Natchez Democrat of October 19, 1915, noted, “The play is a frank treatment of the sin of hypocrisy but has been handled by Miss Weber with such exquisite feeling and delicacy that it is above criticism.” At this point, the name “Lois Weber” in the opening credits guaranteed a thoughtful, artistic production.

In addition to Weber’s writing skills and technical command of filmmaking, her persona as a solid, middle-class married woman gave her gravitas. She was universally known as both Lois Weber and Mrs. Phillips Smalley. Her real-life status as a modern working woman addressing progressive subjects was tempered by descriptions and pictures of her companionably working side by side with her husband at home or on set.

Weber quickly developed a reputation for handling difficult topics in an engaging and thought-provoking manner. She plays the title role in Sunshine Molly (1915) of which only a fragment survives, and much of that is severely deteriorated. Still, Weber charms as a warm and confident woman who arrives on the oil fields of California looking for employment and quickly finds it feeding hungry roughnecks.

On the dining hall set of Sunshine Molly, Weber, with her script in hand, confers with cameraman Dal Clawson while Smalley, dressed as Bull Forrest, stands by with his hand in his pocket. In front of him is the megaphone likely used when directing. Note the fabric “ceiling” at the top of the set to diffuse the California sun.
From the Core Collection Production and Biography Files of the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

Bull Forrest, played by Smalley, takes a liking to Molly and gives her a quick pinch on the backside while she serves the afternoon meal. She responds with a swift rebuff refusing to speak with him. In the last reel, a man arrives at the oilfield claiming to reveal Molly as a former felon. She responds that she used to be a simple factory girl, but the owner’s son couldn’t keep his hands off her. When attacked, she defended her honor and stabbed him in the left shoulder. In spite of being the victim, she was the one sent to jail. The man who came to reveal her past is himself revealed as her attacker. The roughnecks run him off the property as Molly and Bull are united in a new understanding. It’s a compelling comedy/drama illuminating the ever-current subject of sexual harassment.

In the 1916 film Shoes, Weber brings out an exquisitely restrained performance by fellow Pittsburgher Mary MacLaren (1896–1985), who plays Eva Meyer, an overworked shop girl and sole supporter for her family. While her unemployed father lounges in bed reading dime novels, her harried mother tries to make ends meet on Eva’s meager wages. Each week Eva hopes to buy a desperately needed pair of shoes, but the money cannot be spared. She finally succumbs to the advances of a cabaret singer and “sells her soul for a pair of shoes.”

Weber referenced the film and main character when she told a reporter, “I did missionary work in the slums of New York and on Blackwell’s Island, especially among poor girls. I know them and their problems, and not a few of my stories have been suggested by incidents recalled from those early experiences.”

Weber and Smalley flank prima ballerina Anna Pavlova seated on the set of The Dumb Girl of Portici, 1916. Producer Carl Laemmle persuaded the reluctant star to appear in her only film and assigned Weber the task of directing. To accommodate Pavlova’s tour schedule, the crew from Universal filmed half of the production in Chicago and half in California.
Courtesy of Milestone Films

That same year Laemmle assigned Weber to direct the spectacle The Dumb Girl of Portici starring Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova (1881–1931) in her screen debut. A far cry from Weber’s usual subjects, this costume drama set in the 17th century and based on Daniel Auber’s opera La muette de Portici, entailed directing hundreds of extras as rioting peasants as well as a somewhat reluctant prima ballerina. The film opened with typical Hollywood hyperbole, such as the tagline “The SUPREME of all achievements of the silent drama.” Major cities like Pittsburgh and Philadelphia advertised that the film would be accompanied by a symphony orchestra interpreting Auber’s operatic score. Even smaller venues like Monongahela and Brookville advertised “appropriate” or “special” music. Edited from an original 11 reels down to nine, the film is still overlong at 112 minutes. That was the main criticism at the time. Still, it played extended runs to great acclaim.

In addition to her full-time job producing movies, Weber was engaged outside the studio as well. She ran for mayor of the newly incorporated Universal City on the all-woman suffrage ticket and served two years. She was a well-known, sought-after public speaker, often addressing women’s groups on topics such as raising the standards of motion pictures and the difficulties of navigating censorship when there were not yet national guidelines. She felt that film held limitless possibilities for use in education, whether teaching geography in grammar school, recording operations for medical classes, or providing lessons in church Sunday School settings.

Though well known as a director by 1915, Weber was featured on the cover of this issue of Moving Picture Stories and profiled inside as an actress. Universal also took out an ad at the back of the magazine calling Weber, “more than a hard-working woman of high ideals and wide experience” and touting, “In every photoplay written or produced by her there is more than a touch of genius.”
Detre Library & Archives, Heinz History Center

Though Weber had extraordinary freedom at Universal and other firms, she longed to be completely independent. In 1917 she leased an estate and converted it to her own studio — Lois Weber Productions. Over the next four years Weber completed 14 feature films focusing largely on nuanced male-female relationships as shown in the titles For Husbands Only, A Midnight Romance, To Please One Woman, Too Wise Wives, and What Do Men Want? During World War I, Weber told an interviewer, “I am through with propaganda pictures. No more film sermons, no more sociological or moral lessons for me — at least not for a while . . . We are now at war! The public needs entertainment.”

Though entertaining and financially successful, Weber’s films from this period still featured her hallmarks: exploring human relationships, posing thoughtful questions through her storylines, and allowing the audience to see themselves or others they knew in situations. Weber no longer starred in her own productions, but directed new, rising and established female stars Clair Windsor (1892–1972), Mildred Harris (1901–44) and Anita Stewart (1895–1961). Though Weber was still known and respected as a director, the emphasis in selling films had begun its inexorable shift to celebrity culture, and she became increasingly known for discovering new talent and making stars. Weber later described this four-year period as her “most productive years.” But in the early 1920s the film industry began to experience seismic shifts, and in 1921 Weber lost her studio. The loss of Lois Weber Productions, her quiet divorce from Smalley in 1922, and a nervous breakdown removed Weber from the scene for several years. When she returned, she found the film industry in serious transition.

The Changing Tide in Hollywood

Released in 1926, five years after she lost her own studio, The Marriage Clause was still publicized as a Lois Weber Production — her name still had clout. She directed two more silent films, Sensation Seekers and The Angel of Broadway. The latter was released just three days before The Jazz Singer ushered in the sound revolution.
Detre Library & Archives, Heinz History Center

Weber had been at the height of her powers throughout the 1910s and early 1920s. She finally attained the control she desired when she opened her own studio, but she was unable to control the changing circumstances in the industry. Post-World War I film audiences became increasingly enamored with Hollywood stars and less interested in moral tales. Moreover, Wall Street began to view the ever-growing Hollywood film business as a lucrative investment. The influx of Eastern cash brought with it the industrial business model. Independent film companies would be practically replaced by enormous conglomerates where the standards of efficiency, conformity and vertical integration ruled. The new “studio system” required enormous sums of money and rigid control of the entire process to put out a consistent, standard product. Studios became film factories. Now they not only made films, they also distributed them and owned the theaters where films were shown. This model squeezed out independent filmmakers who could not compete financially and had no distribution system.

In the late 1920s Weber made four more pictures; however, in 1927 the first sound film, The Jazz Singer, sealed the fate of the silent era. Weber was not alone. Between the new studio system and the revolution of sound, many women and independent filmmakers lost their positions in the industry.

Ironically, Weber had always been known for her “voice” — early on as an actress and singer on stage and later as a filmmaker and respected spokesperson for the industry. But by the 1930s that voice had been effectively silenced. After losing her studio, Weber struggled to find employment in the industry. She made a few more films for Universal and Cecil B. DeMille, worked revising the scripts of others, scouted new talent, and helped develop projects that did not come to fruition. Weber directed only one talking picture, White Heat, in 1934. It opened to little publicity and lukewarm reviews.

She died five years later in 1939. Though her fame and fortunes had certainly dimmed, she was neither penniless nor forgotten. More than 300 people attended her funeral. But the first written histories of the film industry generally began with the sound era and Weber and many other silent film pioneers were effectively written out and soon lost in obscurity.

Her Star Rises Again

Actress Illeana Douglas, left, and film scholar Shelley Stamp, right, flank the extended family of Lois Weber at the unveiling of her historic marker in Pittsburgh, 2019.
Heinz History Center

Though nearly extinguished for decades, Weber’s star is rising again with renewed interest in her work. In recent years, scholars have rediscovered the remarkable contributions of women to early film, and Weber is beginning to regain her rightful place in history. Shelley Stamp’s recent book Lois Weber in Early Hollywood explores in depth Weber’s life and work. Shortly before its publication, curators at the Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh engaged in research on the role of western Pennsylvanians in Hollywood, stumbled onto Weber’s story, and serendipitously met Stamp at a conference. With her assistance, the History Center submitted a nomination for a Pennsylvania Historical Marker at Weber’s birthplace and planned an evening program to celebrate her life and films. On June 13, 2019, Weber’s 140th birthday, the marker was unveiled to cheers from the crowd including a large contingent of Weber’s extended family. Honored guests included Stamp and actress Illeana Douglas, a vocal advocate for women in film both past and present. Festivities continued in the evening as Stamp and Douglas held a conversation on Weber’s work preceded by a showing of the 1913 film Suspense.

Several other resources have helped to make Weber accessible again. Martin Norden edited a volume of contemporary articles on Weber for the University Press of Mississippi’s Conversations with Filmmakers series. Milestone Films has issued DVDs of three of Weber’s films — Shoes, The Dumb Girl of Portici, and The Blot. She is also featured in the Kino Lorber boxed set Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers, making much of her extant work available to the public for the first time in generations.

In a career that spanned a quarter of a century, Weber wrote, directed, produced and performed in more than 200 films. Though most are now lost, a handful survive as testimony to her power and artistry in using this new medium.

Further Reading

Beauchamp, Cari. Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. / Mahar, Karen Ward. Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. / Norden, Martin F., ed. Lois Weber: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019. / Slide, Anthony. Lois Weber: The Director Who Lost Her Way in History. Greenwood, NY: Greenwood Press, 1996. / Stamp, Shelley. Lois Weber in Early Hollywood. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015.

Lauren Uhl is a curator at the Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh. She has a lifelong interest in the history of film, especially the silent era, and has been researching the many contributions of Pennsylvanians to the movies.