By Marielle Gage, Certified Archivist
Classic cinema is impossible to imagine without women. Mae Murray, Audrey Hepburn, Greta Garbo, Ginger Rogers, and dozens of other leading ladies were essential players in the fantasies unfolding in front of the camera lens. Behind the scenes, however, the story is generally assumed to be more masculine. And not for no reason – Hollywood and other centers of commercial cinema have often been fairly accused of being boy’s clubs.
But in reality, women have always been deeply involved in filmmaking, as directors, producers, costume directors, scriptwriters, editors, and any other conceivable role in the industry. Below are examples of just a few of the women who helped make cinema the universal artform it is today.
Alice Guy – The Director
Alice Guy fell into cinema largely by accident. She was secretary to Léon Gaumont — an inventor and entrepreneur who made camera equipment — and went with him to the seminal Lumière Brothers’ demonstration of their Cimématographe on 22 March 1895 in Paris. Gaumont, intrigued, began to produce film cameras for sale, but it was Guy who saw the storytelling potential in the new medium.
Alice Guy-Blaché portrait picture, 1896
While early films had been street shots or other real-life scenes (two of the Lumière Brother’s early works were titled “Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory” and “Fishing For Goldfish”), Guy’s first work was The Cabbage Fairy, a literalization of an old French wives’ tale that children grew in the ground like cabbages. The original film is now lost, though a 1900 remake survives. Still, with its narrative elements – distinct characters with personalities and goals, a narrative, and a structure – it is the first true “story” told on film. Given its fantastical elements, it can also lay claim to being the first fantasy film. All that in under a minute!
The Cabbage Fairy was just the beginning for Guy. She soon became head of production for Gaumont’s burgeoning film company. There she remained for the next ten years, producing an outstanding portfolio of work, both in scale and quality. Over the course of her twenty-six-year career, she would make around 1000 films, 22 of which were feature-length films (or, long enough to be considered the “principal” entertainment for a night out at the moving pictures). She pioneered techniques still used today, such as close-ups, and skillfully utilized the medium’s ability to comment on social issues, with many of her works showing a feminist perspective.
After a few very successful years of filmmaking, Guy married Herbert Blaché and moved to America in 1907. She continued to direct from her new studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey, including the first film with an all-black cast: the 1912 comedy A Fool and His Money, which told the story of a young, suddenly wealthy black man who quickly becomes engaged to a rich black woman who had earlier scorned his attentions. Though the main character gambles away his fortune by the end, the depiction of African Americans as wealthy was a stark contrast to the stereotypical presentations of black people in contemporary works such as D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915).
Unfortunately, Guy’s career came to a premature end in 1922, after she divorced her husband and returned to France. Although she lived until 1968, she never made another film, and her legacy was quickly overwritten and largely forgotten. While her achievements remain overshadowed by her male contemporaries, the quality and inventiveness of her films speak for themselves. Now in the public domain, many are available for viewing on the Internet Archive or YouTube.
Margaret Booth – The Editor
Like Alice Guy, Margaret Booth fell into cinema by accident. Unfortunately, in her case, the accident was far more literal: shortly before her high school graduation, her elder brother Elmer died in a car crash. Elmer had been a Broadway performer, and then an actor for D. W. Griffith. Following Elmer’s death, the director offered Margaret a job to help her support her family in her brother’s place. That job was the time-consuming, challenging, and often tedious role of “cutting” a film together – cutting up the negatives of a day’s shooting and reassembling them into the order and structure a director wanted. In the early days, there weren’t even marks or numbers on the negative strips to assist in matching them together.
At the time, the job was considered technical, not creative, and cutters weren’t credited with their films. But cutters played a deceptively vital role, not only in physically compiling the film, but in its creative execution: they would watch the film, first metaphorically as they pieced it together, and then often literally in test screenings, making edits along the way to produce a coherent mood, flow, and pace.
Booth joined Griffith’s team in 1915 and remained there until he closed his Los Angeles studio. She briefly joined Paramount, before being hired by Louis B. Mayer’s studio in 1919, where she developed a close professional partnership with John Stahl. Her “cutting” had, like other uncredited women’s, merged into editing the film, sometimes even correcting a director about which shot would be best. Famously, Stahl, who still mostly edited his own films, replaced one of his scenes with the alternate Booth had created with outtakes left on the cutting room floor. Producer Irving Thalberg began calling her, and then other cutters, a “film editor”, and valued her insights greatly, even sitting next to her during screenings and dissecting the film together.
Poster for the American film Mutiny on the Bounty (1935).
By this point, “talkies” were beginning to replace silent films, adding in new complications for cutters – both matching the audio to the visual and, often more frustratingly, dealing with the new, mostly-male audio “experts” who were keen to throw their weight around the movie studios. Booth survived and even thrived in the new environment. Mayer’s studio merged with Metro-Goldwyn to become MGM in 1924, and Booth had the opportunity to work with a more diverse field of producers, screenwriters, and directors. Booth’s IMDB page reads like a “MGM’s greatest hits list”: Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), Camille, (1936), The Wizard of Oz (1939), Gigi (1958), and Ben-Hur (1959) all went through her critical review, as did many, many other films. In 1923, she became MGM’s supervising editor, a role in which she remained until 1969. Afterwards, she continued to freelance editing films, her very last being 1982’s Annie.
Although during her active career she received only one Oscar nomination (for 1935’s Mutiny on the Bounty) in 1978, at the 50th Academy Awards, she was presented an Academy Honorary Award for “exceptional contributions to the art of film editing in the motion picture industry.” After a wildly influential career, Booth passed away in 2002.
Frances Marion – The Screenwriter
Creative genius, of course, can be found in any genre of the written word. But while poets, novelists, even essayists maintain complete control over their works until published and released to the critics, playwrights and screenwriters lose exclusive custody even before the creative exercise is complete. It takes a special sort not only to accept the input of directors, producers, and actors, but even to thrive in that collaborative environment. Frances Marion was known throughout her career for her incredible relationships with luminaries such as Mary Pickford and Irving Thalberg, but also for her noted ability to write to the strengths of her main leading actors.
First glimpse of Mary Pickford and her scenario writer who has turned director, on location, making a scene for a forthcoming United Artists feature.
Marion began her career in 1914 working as an actress and assistant for Lois Weber, another woman whom film buffs should know (she pioneered the split screen technique, alongside other myriads of contributions to cinema that earned her a Walk of Fame star in 1960). Marion became friends with Mary Pickford and soon came to work at the same studio as the star, acting alongside her and writing original scripts that played to Pickford’s strengths. In 1917, Famous Players-Lasky (Pickford’s studio) signed Marion to a $50,000/year contract to write films for their famous actress. That year alone she wrote The Poor Little Rich Girl, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and The Little Princess for Pickford. In the end, at least thirteen of Pickford’s starring roles were in films written by Marion.
Pickford was Marion’s first great collaboration, but she wasn’t the last. Marion’s films included stars such as Vincent Price, Lillian Gish, Shirley Temple, Marlene Dietrich, Alice Brady, Lionel Barrymore, Marion Davies, Bing Crosby, Marie Dressler, and Greta Garbo (1936’s Camille, edited by Margaret Booth, was Marion’s screenplay). Having screenplays with stars may not be unique in Hollywood, but retrospective looks back at this golden age of Hollywood have given Marion credit for helping to define the careers of several of these actors.
Marion’s skill was acknowledged even in 1930’s Hollywood. She was the first writer to win two Academy Awards (The Big House, 1931 and The Champ, 1932). Even so, she left Hollywood by 1946, wealthy enough to live comfortably to write at a slower pace (she continued to produce novels and stage plays). She published her memoirs, Off with Their Heads: A Serio-Comic Tale of Hollywood, in 1972, and passed away a year later.
Edith Head – The Designer
Any lover of fantasy or historical film knows how essential costume design is to the worldbuilding of film. Little could be more jarring to immersion than Queen Elizabeth I in a Claire’s necklace, or a dragon queen’s tankard having the Starbucks logo. Even in “realistic” contemporary films, a keen eye noticing that the shop girl is wearing $1000 heels is bemusing, at the very least. But a good costume department not only prevents such discordant notes from disrupting the film’s harmony, it also adds richness and complexity to the subtle flourishes they weave onscreen.
Posing with her eight Academy Award statuettes, Edith Head still holds a record in the Costume Design category.
One of the earliest maestros of film design was Edith Head. She began her cinema career as a costume designer for Paramount Pictures in 1924, with her very first project being the 1925 silent film The Wanderer. She continued to design at Paramount for 43 years and then worked at Universal Pictures until her death in 1981. Over the course of that career, she would be nominated for 35 Academy Awards and won eight, making her the fifth most awarded person in Academy history and currently the woman with the most Oscar wins.
If you’ve watched a film made between 1925 and 1980, you have almost certainly seen Head’s designs on the screen. She designed the costumes for Hedy Lamar’s 1950 Samson and Delilah and 1951’s A Place in the Sun (she won Academy Awards for both). She got Oscar nods for her work in Cecile B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), Audrey Hepburn’s Roman Holiday (1953), and Sabrina (1954), earning the golden statue for both her Hepburn collaborations. She designed for DeMille again for The Ten Commandments (1956), for John Wayne’s film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962), and dressed Sean Connery in The Man Who Would be King (1975). She dressed Mae West, Clark Gable, Dorothy Lamar, Betty Davis, Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor, Natalie Wood, Steve Martin, and so, so many more.
Her most famous partnership, however, was with legendary director Alfred Hitchcock. She designed for him for the first time in 1946 for Notorious. She would go on to collaborate with him for more than thirty years, including for such films as Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), The Birds (1963), Torn Curtain (1966), and Family Plot (1976).
While Edith Head passed away in 1981, her influence still lives on. Beyond her awards and her walk of fame star, she – and her short black hair and prominent glasses – have been immortalized in the fan-favorite character of Edna Mode in Pixar’s Incredibles series. Though personally, I rather doubt Head ever referred to her own previous work as a “hobo suit”, her passion for design, innovation, and above all, the look, is fittingly on display in her pixilated tribute.
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If you’re looking for more blogs about amazing historical women, check out Marielle’s other blogs on our site!
For more information about these and other Women in Early Cinema, check out these links below:
- “The Women Film Pioneers Project” – https://wfpp.columbia.edu/
- “Edited By: Women Film Editors” – https://womenfilmeditors.princeton.edu/
- “Women They Talk About: Discovering America’s Female Film Pioneers” – https://aficatalog.afi.com/wtta