Early Women Filmmakers: The Directors Early Hollywood Wrote Out of the Story

In the autumn of 1913, the residents of Universal City, the new studio town in the San Fernando Valley, held an election for mayor. The winner, after a close race and a recount, was Lois Weber, one of the studio’s busiest directors. Three years later she was reported to be Universal’s highest-paid director, earning $5,000 a week. A generation after that, her films were mostly forgotten and she had died with little public notice. Her story is the story of early women filmmakers in miniature: a period of real opportunity, followed by an almost complete disappearance from the record.

This piece is an introduction to the women who directed, produced and wrote films in the silent era and the early studio years, and to the reasons historians give for why so few followed them. Much of what we know comes from decades of recovery work by archives and scholars, including the Women Film Pioneers Project at Columbia University and film restorations by archives in the United States and France.

Alice Guy-Blaché: the first woman director

Alice Guy was born on July 1, 1873, in Saint-Mandé, just outside Paris. She was working as a secretary at a photography firm that became Gaumont when she saw an early demonstration of motion pictures and asked to try making a story film herself. Her first film, La Fée aux Choux (The Cabbage Fairy), dates from 1896, though historians disagree about the exact version and date, and the original may not survive. From 1896 to 1906 she was Gaumont’s head of production, making hundreds of short films and experimenting with synchronized sound recordings, hand-tinted color and special effects.

After marrying Herbert Blaché, she moved to the United States and in 1910 co-founded the Solax Company in Flushing, New York. In 1912 Solax opened a large studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey, which was then the center of American film production. Her American films include A Fool and His Money (1912), probably the first American film with an all-Black cast, and Falling Leaves (1912). Her comedy Matrimony’s Speed Limit (1913) was added to the National Film Registry in 2003.

Estimates of her total output vary enormously, from several hundred to more than a thousand films, depending on how her supervisory work is counted. She stopped directing around 1920, returned to France in 1922 and never made another film. France awarded her the Légion d’honneur in 1958. She died in New Jersey in 1968. The 2018 documentary Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché, which premiered at Cannes, brought her to a new audience. If you are new to this period, our silent-era section is a good place to get your bearings.

Lois Weber: the moralist with a camera

Lois Weber was born in 1879 in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania. She began as a singer and actress, and with her husband Phillips Smalley formed a writing, directing and acting team billed as “The Smalleys.” Their The Merchant of Venice (1914), now lost, is credited as the first feature-length film directed by an American woman.

Weber’s signature was the social-problem film. Hypocrites (1915) was an allegory about religious hypocrisy that caused a sensation for its use of nudity. Where Are My Children? (1916) dealt with birth control and abortion and was added to the National Film Registry in 1993. Shoes (1916), about a shop girl worn down by poverty, was one of the most booked releases of Universal’s Bluebird brand that year and was digitally restored in 2011. In 1917 she founded Lois Weber Productions, becoming the first American woman director to run her own studio. The Blot (1921), a study of genteel poverty, was considered lost until it was rediscovered in the 1970s and restored by UCLA.

Her later career was difficult, and her final silent was The Angel of Broadway (1927). She died in Hollywood on November 13, 1939. Only a small fraction of her films, by some estimates around twenty out of two hundred or more, are known to survive.

The Universal women

Weber was not alone. Under Carl Laemmle, Universal hired and promoted women directors in unusual numbers during the 1910s. One study of the studio counts eleven women credited with directing at least 170 films there between 1912 and 1919, after which the practice abruptly ended. They included Ruth Ann Baldwin, a former journalist; the actress-directors Cleo Madison and Grace Cunard, who often directed the serials and dramas she starred in; and Ida May Park. Elsewhere, Mabel Normand directed comedies at Keystone, and Mary Pickford, though not a director, became one of the most powerful producers in the business and in 1919 co-founded United Artists.

Frances Marion: the writer behind the stars

The most powerful women in early Hollywood were often writers, and the most successful of them was Frances Marion. Born in San Francisco in 1888, she wrote many of Mary Pickford’s best-loved vehicles, including Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1917), Stella Maris (1918) and Pollyanna (1920), and directed Pickford herself in The Love Light (1921). During the First World War she worked overseas as a correspondent.

Marion’s screen credits span the transition to sound, from Stella Dallas (1925) and The Wind (1928) to Anna Christie (1930) and Dinner at Eight (1933). She won Academy Awards for The Big House (1930) and The Champ (1931), making her the first writer to win two Oscars.

Dorothy Arzner: alone in the studio system

By the time sound arrived, the women directors of the 1910s had almost all gone. Dorothy Arzner, born in San Francisco in 1897, was the exception. She joined Paramount in 1919, worked her way up from the script department to editing, and cut the bullfight scenes for Blood and Sand (1922). She made her directing debut with Fashions for Women (1927), a commercial success.

Between 1927 and 1943 she directed about twenty features. The Wild Party (1929) was Clara Bow’s first talkie, and Arzner is often credited with rigging an early boom microphone during its production, though accounts of that invention vary. Her strongest films are about ambitious, independent women: Christopher Strong (1933) with Katharine Hepburn as an aviator, Craig’s Wife (1936) with Rosalind Russell, and Dance, Girl, Dance (1940), with Maureen O’Hara and Lucille Ball as dancers at opposite ends of show business.

For much of the 1930s she was the only woman directing features inside the major studios, and she was the first woman to join the Directors Guild of America. Her last feature was First Comes Courage (1943). She later made training films for the Women’s Army Corps, taught filmmaking at UCLA in the 1960s, and died in 1979. Her career deserves a place alongside the names in our guide to classic Hollywood directors.

Key early women filmmakers at a glance

Why the women disappeared

Historians generally point to several overlapping causes. As features replaced short films in the mid-1910s and production moved to large Hollywood studios financed by banks and Wall Street investors, filmmaking became big business, and the informal, improvisational culture that had let women take charge of productions gave way to rigid hierarchies. Directing was increasingly framed as a man’s job in the trade press and inside the studios. By the end of the silent era, the opportunities had narrowed to almost nothing.

The record was then lost a second time. Many of these films were not preserved, credits were incomplete, and later histories simply left the women out. Much of what is known today comes from rediscovered prints in archives, which is why each restoration matters.

After Arzner: Ida Lupino

The next major figure arrived after the Second World War. Ida Lupino, already a star actress at Warner Bros., formed an independent company, The Filmakers, and began directing. She took over Not Wanted (1949) without credit when its director fell ill, then signed films such as Outrage (1950) and The Hitch-Hiker (1953), a tense thriller often described as the first mainstream American film noir directed by a woman.