Women Who Directed Their Own Filmmaking Destinies

Four pioneer women filmmakers--directors Alice Guy, Lois Weber and Dorothy Arzner and writer Frances Marion--are the subject of AMC’s “Reel Models: The First Women of Film,’ which airs Tuesday night.

Executive produced by Barbra Streisand--who also hosts--and Cis Corman and directed and produced by Susan and Christopher Koch, the hourlong documentary features clips and interviews with various film historians, including Anthony Slide, about these trailblazing women.

France’s Guy was the first woman director and the first woman to head her own studio. She made her first film in 1896 during her spare time while working as a secretary for the Gaumont Film Co. During her 28-year career, she directed and produced hundreds of acclaimed films both in France and the United States. Most of her films, though, are lost, and Guy herself is just a faded memory.

By 1916, Weber was the highest-paid director at Universal Studios and even more famous than D.W. Griffith. Her films, in which she frequently starred, dealt with such social issues of the day as birth control, abortion and divorce. Most of her films have been lost and Weber ended up in obscurity.

Frances Marion was a two-time Oscar-winning screenwriter (“The Champ” and “The Big House”) who began her career writing for Mary Pickford and ended up as MGM’s head writer. And Arzner holds the distinction of being the only American female director working in the 1930s, directing such hits as Clara Bow’s “The Wild Party” and Katharine Hepburn in “Christopher Strong.”

Film historian Slide, who has written such books as “Early Women Directors,” “Lois Weber: The Director Who Lost Her Way in History” and “The Silent Feminists: America’s First Women Directors,” discusses the lives and contributions of these film pioneers.

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Question: There seems to be a great tragedy in the stories of Alice Guy and Lois Weber, whose filmmaking legacies are largely lost to us.

Answer: It is not just the story that’s sad; I think it’s sad that they have been neglected for years, really until the 1970s. I don’t think, in a way, they are totally rediscovered.

Q: Both Guy’s and Weber’s careers took a nose dive after they divorced their husbands.

A: Both Alice Guy and Lois Weber were very Victorian women, and so they adopted a Victorian moral stance that obviously a woman needs a husband and almost needs a husband’s approval for what they are doing. The sad thing is that both of the husbands started fooling around, and so Alice Guy and Lois Weber tried to ignore it at first, hoping that their husbands would come back to them.

It was particularly tragic with Lois Weber that though Philip Smalley [a former manager of a theater road company], her husband, contributed nothing to the films, she really needed him beside her on the set so she could turn to him and say, “Do you think this is the way to do it?” Suddenly, without him, she seemed totally lost. Maybe if he had stayed with her, her career may have included more films in the 1920s and she might even had made a transition to sound.

Q: Didn’t Weber even have a nervous breakdown?

A: After her husband divorced her, she had a complete nervous breakdown. She locked herself in the house. She dismissed the servants. There was talk of suicide. In the late 1920s, by the time her career was over, she invested in this apartment building in Los Angeles and she was basically swindled. It was not worth what she paid for it and she was forced to be the manager of the apartment [building].

Q: Why couldn’t Guy get her career back on track when she returned to France after her divorce from Herbert Blache, who worked for Gaumont in New York?

A: You just can’t [revive a career] when you are away that long--people forget you. The sad thing for both of these women in a way is that ageism played a large part in the demise of their careers. When you have somebody like Alice Guy say, “I started making films in the last century,” producers in 1920 say, “You must be so old. You must be so out of touch with the industry.” The same with Lois Weber--she had been around so long.

Q: It was amazing to learn that Guy was doing sound films at the turn of the century.

A: She was using a technique that became established in the film industry much later, where the actors record the song and then they mouth to the playback while being filmed. She was the first person to realize how to make a musical film.

Alice Guy basically made films on any topic. She made films that you wouldn’t generally associate with a woman, like a western or the life of Christ. She was open to any subject matter.

Q: Did men start to exert control over the film industry after World War I?

A: It was after World War I. At Universal in the teens, you had at least a half a dozen women working as directors. They were directing the major films at the studio and nobody really thought anything about it. But the more films became big business, the more people realized the money that was involved and the more the thinking of the time was we shouldn’t leave this to a woman--this really requires male hands.

Q: Yet films directed by women did make money.

A: Yes, but I don’t think people thought that clearly about it. So the films are making money, but if a man directed them, they could even make more money. Also, you have the guilds and unions coming in the 1920s, and guilds and unions tend to be male-dominated until fairly recent times.

Q: So how did Frances Marion and Dorothy Arzner survive?

A: Frances Marion was a writer. Certainly, in the field of writing and editing, women were still powerful [in the ‘20s and ‘30s]. Again, these are not the sort of primary jobs within the making of the films. You can get a script and you can rewrite it, so women didn’t have total control.

Dorothy Arzner had been a film editor early and she started directing in 1926. Jesse L. Lasky, as head of production at Paramount, was impressed by her work as an editor and decided to let her direct. Once Dorothy Arzner made the transition to sound and showed she could direct sound films, then there was no reason why she couldn’t continue.

Q: Have women really come a long way since then?

A: No, not really. So many of the major films being made today star males like Bruce Willis and Harrison Ford, and they obviously don’t want women directing. They want a young male director, and so it may not be blatant or obvious but there is a sort of discrimination there. There is no reason why any woman can’t go out and make “Saving Private Ryan.”

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* “Reel Models: The First Women of Film” can be seen Tuesday at 5 and 11 p.m. on AMC. Several films directed or written by the four women will screen throughout the night.