Lois Weber, or the exigency of writing Part three William D. Routt     Uploaded 1 March 2001 9335 words  Abstract | Printer version Table of contents 1 The exigency of writing 2 On writing and directing 3 Lois Weber, writer of cinema 4 Lois Weber, writing exigence 5 Lois Weber and the mirror of cinema 6 Appendix: Lois Weber's surviving films
3 Lois Weber, writer of cinema She was a writer rather than a playwright or screenwriter, and as if to emphasize this fact, her 1915 feature, Sunshine Molly, begins with a shot of hands opening a book titled Sunshine Molly by Lois Weber; all nondialogue titles consist of pages from that book; and the reels close with the title "End of Book 1," and so forth.[7] Of course it is much easier to make a case for a film maker as a true cinematic writer in Astruc's sense than it is to argue for her naivete. Lois Weber has all the proper and professional qualifications for authorship - more, in fact, than many film makers who followed her. She did indeed write most of the films she directed. The years of her greatest productivity, 1912-1921, were also years in which she routinely enjoyed the most complete control possible over the films she made.	[7] Anthony Slide, Lois Weber: the director who lost her way in history (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), 67.
By 1912 she and her husband, Phillips Smalley, were "prima facie heads of Rex" (a production company they took over from Edwin S. Porter)[8], and in 1917 they formed "Lois Weber Productions" which continued to produce her films until 1921. (The blot was the last "Lois Weber Production"). According to Weber's biographer, Anthony Slide, Weber and/or Weber and Smalley usually operated as an independent production entity on the pictures they made even when no umbrella company was credited through all the years of their association with Universal and the Bosworth Company.	[8] Slide, 46.
"I would trust Miss Weber with any sum of money that she needed to make any picture that she wanted to make. I would be sure that she would bring it back." (Carl Laemmle)[9] Lois Weber Productions were a good investment, cost-effective. The company made movies cheaply: in later years at least shooting on location even for interiors, using a small cast, working fast. Its somewhat sensational topics and titles guaranteed at least a modest box office return, and at times may have done much better than that. At Universal under Carl Laemmle Weber seems to have been mostly allowed to make the films she wanted in the way that she wanted, but there is some evidence that her independence was pretty severely constrained after the apparent box office failure of the four films that Lois Weber Productions made at Paramount between 1919 and 1921 (including The blot, which, although made for Paramount, was released independently). She rejoined Universal in 1922 and made three more films for that company, but left in 1925 after a picture she felt should have been hers by right was assigned to someone else. She only directed four films in the eight years from 1926 to 1933, which Slide reports as the nadir of her career.	[9] Carl Laemmle, qtd. in Winifred Aydelotte, "The little red schoolhouse becomes a theatre," Motion picture magazine (March 1934), rpt. in Slide, 5.
Not only does she direct a picture. Before she begins to direct, she writes her own rough scenario from the story selected. It may be her own story (she has had several successes with "originals"), or it may be a book, or a play. In any case, she comes to a more satisfactory understanding of what she wishes to make of it if she does not only the first roughcast, but the full continuity, herself. By this time she sees the picture complete, though occasionally she changes her mind and makes a few alterations. Then she writes captions, for this seems in her eyes to be part of a director's "job." When there is a chance for fun Lois Weber - who looks so soft and sweet - can be as funny, as "smart," as any of the expensive "gag men" whom all the studios keep on high salaries nowadays, to "pep up" a languid film. Though she never uses slang in conversation, and rather dislikes it personally, as she dislikes smoking, no one can use slang to better advantage on the screen than she. No one can depict the "hard boiled" modern flapper with keener touches than can this seemingly old-fashioned, gentle-mannered, soft-eyed woman, Lois Weber.[10]	[10] Alice M. Williamson, Alice in movieland (London: A. M. Philpot Ltd., 1927), 231.
In testimony like this, it is possible to discern the figure of Astruc's compleat auteur, a Hitchcock before Hitchcock: screenwriter, dialogist, wit, hip to the jive, viewing this modern age with eyes ascetic and wise. But there is another move here too. Inextricably tangled in the description of the cinematic writer is the cinematic woman: she who transforms a questionable masculine domain to something fit for a lady. Her writing and her womanliness are one. She writes woman on her films; she makes le caméra stylo into l'ouverture toute voyante, an omphalos knotting all lines of sight into her own. She can act as a man, be a man, without ceasing to be always a woman. Unselfconsciously, like so many women before and after her, she unsexes language: The real director should be absolute. He alone knows the effects he wants to produce, and he alone should have authority in the arrangement, cutting, titling or anything else which it may be found necessary to do the finished product. What other artist has his creative work interfered with by someone else?[11]	[11] Lois Weber, qtd. in Mlle. Chic, "The greatest woman director in the world" The moving picture weekly (May 1920), rpt. in Slide, 57-58.
Table of contents | Part four

| Screening the past | First release | Comments | Search