HOLLYWOOD PIONEERS
(1873 - 1968) BORN in France in 1873 Alice Guy started her working life as a secretary to Leon Gaumont, one of cinema’s technological pioneers and early film distributors. Her association with Gaumont and the Lumière Brothers, who exhibited some of the first ever motion pictures in 1895, led her to develop an interest in this new art form. With borrowed equipment, Guy wrote, produced and directed her first film La Fée aux Choux (The Cabbage Patch Fairy) in 1896. As the years progressed her films became more and more elaborate. In 1906, Guy released her most ambitious production to date, La Vie du Christ, a 30-minute extravaganza that featured 25 sets as well as numerous exterior locations and over 300 extras. During her career in France and the USA, Guy directed over 600 films, both silent and sound, and created the largest pre-Hollywood studio in New Jersey, USA. The French government presented her with the Legion of Honour, its highest civilian honour, in 1953. In 2012, Martin Scorsese accorded her ORIGINALLY a reporter on the San Francisco Examiner, Frances Marion moved to Los Angeles and was hired as a general writing assistant by Lois Weber productions. She quickly established herself as a screenwriter and befriended actress Mary Pickford, for whom she wrote many scripts. Marion’s screenplays included the popular tearjerker Stella Dallas (1925) and Son of the Sheik (1926), the final film for screen idol Rudolph Valentino. By 1928, she was the world’s highest paid screenwriter, man or woman, making a minimum $US3000 a week. Marion is the Director’s Guild of America Lifetime Achievement Award, saying: “It is the hope and intention of the DGA that by presenting this posthumous special directorial award for lifetime achievement, the Guild can both raise awareness of an exceptional director and bring greater recognition to the role of women in film history.” Though many of her films have not survived, having been shot on obsolete formats, or lost to highly flammable nitrate stock, some snippets are available on YouTube. (1888 – 1973) recognised as one of Hollywood’s most significant film writers alongside June Mathis and Anita Loos. She was the first writer to win two Academy Awards for The Champ and The Big House. WEBER achieved both critical and commercial success as a filmmaker. She was ranked alongside D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille as one of the top filmmakers of her time and was the highest-paid director at Universal Studios. In her three decades as a filmmaker, Weber wrote and directed some 44 feature films and over 100 shorts. She is believed to be the first filmmaker ever to use a split-screen to depict side-by-side unfolding action. Besides directing, she did much of her own screenwriting and camerawork and is credited with having discovered and inspired screenwriter Frances Marion. Movie archivist and author Anthony Slide has described her as “certainly the most important female director ARZNER started her career as a stenographer for the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, which would later become Paramount. She then progressed through to script writing and editing. Her work on Rudolph Valentino’s Blood and Sand in 1922 opened the doors to more movie editing and eventually direction. Arzner directed Clara Bow’s first talkie, The Wild Party in 1929 and was instrumental in launching the careers of many actresses including Katharine Hepburn, Lucille Ball, Rosalind Russell and Sylvia Sidney. After her last film, First Comes Courage (1943), KNOWN as “America’s sweetheart” the legendary silent screen actress appeared in over 40 films for D.W. Griffith’s American Biograph company. Many of Mary Pickford’s greatest films were a collaborative effort with friend and writer-director Frances Marion. At the height of her career, Pickford was one of the richest and most famous women in the United States. In February 1919, Pickford, Griffith and film stars Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin officially formed United Artists Corporation in order to maintain greater financial and artistic control over their productions. Pickford also established the Mary Pickford Company, which produced films exclusively for distribution by United Artists. Her first movie made under the new
Women Film Pioneers Project: wfpp.cdrs.columbia.edu
(1897 – 1979) (1892 – 1979) arrangement, Pollyanna (1920), grossed over a million dollars. She was awarded the second ever Academy Award for Best Actress for her first sound-film role in Coquette (1929) and also received an honorary Academy Award in 1976.