2. Henry Otto (August 8, 1877 – August 3, 1952) was an American silent film actor, director, producer, and screenwriter.
Otto contributed to over 150 films throughout his career, working as an actor and a director throughout. He directed many films in 1914, in films such as When a Woman Waits, In Tune, The Archeologist, and The Redemption of a Pal working with actors such as Edward Coxen, Charlotte Burton and George Field. He retired from film in 1942.
Otto was found dead on August 4, 1952, in Los Angeles.
3. Harold A. Lockwood (April 12, 1887 – October 19, 1918) was an American silent film actor, director, and producer. He was one of the most popular matinee idols of the early film period during the 1910s.
In 1908, Lockwood joined the Selig Company. In 1910, Lockwood signed on with a stock company for David Horsley and appeared in Western shorts. He later worked for the New York Motion Picture Company, Selig Polyscope Company and Famous Players Film Company.
While at Famous Players, Lockwood was cast opposite actress May Allison in Allan Dwan's 1915 romantic film David Harum. The two would appear in over twenty-three films together during the World War I era, and became one of the first celebrated on-screen romantic duos. However, the two were never romantically involved off-screen.
On October 19, 1918, Lockwood died at the age of 31 of Spanish influenza at the Hotel Woodward in New York City. He had contracted the illness during production of Shadows of Suspicion (1919), which had some scenes completed using a double shot from behind.
4. May Allison (June 14, 1890 – March 27, 1989) was an American actress whose greatest success was achieved in the early part of the 20th century in silent films, although she also appeared on stage.
She made her Broadway debut in 1911 as "Beauty" in Walter Browne's Everywoman before settling in Hollywood, California in the early days of motion pictures. Allison's screen debut was as an ingenue in the 1915 star-making Theda Bara vehicle A Fool There Was.
When Allison was cast that same year opposite actor Harold Lockwood in the Allan Dwan directed romantic film David Harum, audiences quickly became enamored of the onscreen duo. The pair starred in approximately twenty-five highly successful features together during the World War I era and became one of the first celebrated on-screen romantic duos.
Allison and Lockwood's highly popular film romances ended, however, when in 1918 Lockwood died at the age of 31 after contracting Spanish influenza, a deadly epidemic that swept the world from 1918 through 1920, killing 50 to 100 million people globally. Allison's career then faltered markedly without her popular leading male co-star. She continued to act in films throughout the 1920s, although she never received the same amount of public acclaim as when she starred opposite Harold Lockwood. Her last film before retiring was 1927's The Telephone Girl, opposite Madge Bellamy and Warner Baxter.
Allison was secretly married to Col. William Stephenson in Santa Ana, California, in December 1919, but the marriage was annulled in February 1920. On Thanksgiving day in 1920, Allison married writer and actor Robert Ellis. Allison filed for divorce from Ellis in December 1923, citing cruelty as the reason. Her filing explained the couple had married on November 25, 1920 in Greenwich, Connecticut and were separated about November 5, 1923. On November 15, 1926, witnessed by Ivan and Adela Rogers St. Johns, she married Photoplay magazine editor James R. Quirk, a union that lasted until his death in 1932.
Allison's last marriage, to Cleveland industrialist Carl Norton Osborne, took place on March 2, 1934 and lasted until his death in 1982. In her later years, Allison spent much of her time at her vacation home in Tucker's Town, Bermuda, and was a patron of the Cleveland Orchestra.
5. Lester H. Cuneo (October 25, 1888 – November 1, 1925) was an American stage and silent film actor. He began acting in theatre while still in his teens. His name remains associated with the history of Western film.
Cuneo's stage career included work with stock theater companies in Brooklyn, Chicago, and Winnepeg.
Cuneo began a film career in 1912 with the Chicago-based Selig Polyscope Company then joined Essanay Studios in 1914. Working in early Hollywood, his popularity increased after he switched from comedic roles to the increasingly popular western film genre. However, his career was interrupted when he served with the United States Army during World War I. He served in France from 1917 to 1919 with the 33rd Division from Illinois.
At war's end, Lester Cuneo returned to film, and in the early 1920s, he started his own production company, making primarily western films. Lester Cuneo Productions.
Despondent over the breakdown of his marriage and the downhill slide of his film career, Lester Cuneo took his own life with a gunshot to the head in 1925.
6. Metro Pictures Corporation was a motion picture production company founded in early 1915 in Jacksonville, Florida. It was a forerunner of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The company produced its films in New York, Los Angeles, and sometimes at leased facilities in Fort Lee, New Jersey. It was purchased in 1919.
7. Mister 44 is a 1916 American silent comedy-drama film directed by Henry Otto and starring Harold Lockwood, May Allison, Lester Cuneo, Yona Landowska, Henry Otto, and Aileen Allen. It is based on 1916 novel of the same name by E.J. Rath. The film was released by Metro Pictures on September 11, 1916.
Plot: In the sordid shirt factory in which she works, Sadie Hicks dreams of the great outdoors. Surrounded by men of puny minds and flabby bodies, her fancy goes out to great manhood that is strong of mind and muscle. Translated in the language of the shirt factory life she knows best, she finds that she admires a man with a 44 chest. She sees a shipment of 44s all ready to be sent to Arizona, and she writes a little note and tucks it into one of the shirts. On account of a rush order, the box is sent to Canada and the shirt with Sadie's note reaches John Stoddard, a wealthy civil engineer, who prefers the life of the woods to the polite society enjoyed by his family and friends. Good-naturedly, he answers Sadie's note, telling her to let him know if he can help her at any time. Sadie receives the letter on the same day she is discharged from the factory for repulsing the advances of Ferguson, the foreman. She at once telegraphs Stoddard that she is on the way, and takes the next train for his Canadian Camp. He receives the message too late to wire her not to come. Stoddard goes to the station to meet her, intending to put her on a southbound train immediately, but he misses her, as she has left the train at a station nearer his camp than the post-office station. Stoddard finds her, and they start in a canoe for an island hotel where he expects to place her until he can send her away again. But a storm comes up, the canoe is swamped and Stoddard and Sadie are obliged to swim to the nearest stretch of shore. It is a small deserted island, and the two have to spend a day and a night there. The noblest qualities of both are shown, and they fall in love with each other. They construct a raft on which they embark, but it has been flimsily put together on account of lack of materials, and Sadie and Stoddard are capsized again. This time they are rescued by Stoddard's Indian guide, Eagle Eye, who takes them to the camp. They find Larry Livingston at the camp. He is the brother of Estelle Livingston, the society girl whom Mrs. Stoddard wishes her son to marry. He tells them that Mrs. Stoddard and Estelle, who are stopping at the hotel, will be at the camp presently. Sadie feels diffident about meeting these fashionable women, and hides in the woods. Here Larry Livingston finds her. He tells her that if she really loves John Stoddard, it is her duty to give him up to a woman of his own station in life, that it would be only degradation for him to marry beneath him. Sadie persuades Eagle Eye to show her the way to the railroad station. Leaving a note of farewell for Stoddard, she goes to the city and finds work in a restaurant, studying hard in her leisure hours to make herself worthy of the man she loves, and capable of meeting his mother. Stoddard is tireless in his search for her, and at last discovers her. He convinces her that Larry was mistaken, and the two clasp hands in mutual understanding.
Cast:
8. Mary Aileen Conquest-Allen (December 22, 1888 – September 4, 1950) was an American diver who competed in the 1920 Summer Olympics. She was born on Prince Edward Island, Canada.
In 1913, Allen was one of the founding members of an all-woman swimming club at the Bimini Baths in Los Angeles, California, which was formed in response to strict dress codes imposed by other clubs. She was later elected captain of the club.
Allen appeared in silent films. Her most notable role was Mrs. Westfall in the 1916 Metro Pictures release Mister 44. During World War I, she sold war bonds as a representative of Keystone Studios.
In 1920, she finished fourth in the 3 metre springboard event.
During the 1928 Summer Olympics, Allen served as the coach for the United States women's track and field team. She coached the United States women's swim team during the 1932 Summer Olympics.
9. Florence Lois Weber (June 13, 1879 – November 13, 1939) was an American silent film director, screenwriter, producer and actress. She is identified in some historical references as among "the most important and prolific film directors in the era of silent films". Film historian Anthony Slide has also asserted, "Along with D. W. Griffith, Weber was the American cinema's first genuine auteur, a filmmaker involved in all aspects of production and one who utilized the motion picture to put across her own ideas and philosophies".
Weber produced a body of work which has been compared to Griffith's in both quantity and quality and brought to the screen her concerns for humanity and social justice in an estimated 200 to 400 films, of which as few as twenty have been preserved. She has been credited by IMDb with directing 135 films, writing 114, and acting in 100. Weber was "one of the first directors to come to the attention of the censors in Hollywood's early years".
Weber has been credited with pioneering the use of the split screen technique to show simultaneous action in her 1913 film Suspense. In collaboration with her first husband, Phillips Smalley, in 1913 Weber was "one of the first directors to experiment with sound", making the first sound films in the United States. She was also the first American woman to direct a full-length feature film when she and Smalley directed The Merchant of Venice in 1914, and in 1917 the first American woman director to own her own film studio.
During the war years, Weber "achieved tremendous success by combining a canny commercial sense with a rare vision of cinema as a moral tool". At her zenith, "few men, before or since, have retained such absolute control over the films they have directed—and certainly no women directors have achieved the all-embracing, powerful status once held by Lois Weber". By 1920, Weber was considered the "premier woman director of the screen and author and producer of the biggest money making features in the history of the film business".
Among Weber's notable films are: the controversial Hypocrites, which featured the first non-pornography full-frontal female nude scene, in 1915; the 1916 film Where Are My Children?, which discussed abortion and birth control and was added to the National Film Registry in 1993; her adaptation of Edgar Rice Burrough's Tarzan of the Apes novel for the very first Tarzan of the Apes film, in 1918; The Blot (1921) is also generally considered one of her finest works.
Weber is credited with discovering, mentoring, or making stars of several women actors, including Mary MacLaren, Mildred Harris, Claire Windsor, Esther Ralston, Billie Dove, Ella Hall, Cleo Ridgely, and Anita Stewart, and with discovering and inspiring screenwriter Frances Marion. For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Weber was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on February 8, 1960.
Lois Weber Productions: In June 1917 Weber became the first American female director to establish and run her own movie studio when she formed her own production company, Lois Weber Productions, with the financial assistance of Universal. She leased a self-contained estate, and had offices, dressing rooms, scenic and property rooms, and a 12,000 square feet (1,100 m2) shooting stage constructed. Smalley was made studio manager, and the Smalleys made their home on the studio lot at 1550 N. Sierra Bonita Avenue.
According to film historian Shelley Stamp, while Weber and Smalley were often co-credited as directors, it was "the wife who clearly had the artistic vision to drive the business partnership forward". By this time, Weber's "idealized collaborative marriage" with Smalley had begun to show signs of deterioration, which was accelerated by the increased focus of critics and journalists on Weber as the dominant filmmaker, at the expense of Smalley, after 1916, and Weber increasingly took credit for her contributions after 1917. However, as early as 1913, some saw Weber as the "fertile brain" in the partnership, with Smalley seen as an indolent womanizer "who chased every woman on the lot", which resulted in arguments and shouting matches.
Weber consciously resisted the industry's movement toward assembly-line-style studio film making. "By concentrating on only one production at a time, and mobilizing her entire workforce around that effort, Weber aimed for quality film making rather than efficient bookkeeping". Weber's independence allowed her to shoot her films in sequence, as she preferred (rather than out of order to suit production schedules). William D. Routt indicates that "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."
Karen Mahar attributes the success of Weber's films of the 1910s to their representation of "the generational conflict of the era" between the traditional view of women and that of the freedoms of the emerging "New Woman and the emergent consumer culture". Mahar argues that "Weber's life was an expression of this generational divide: she was a stage performer and a Church Army Worker, a filmmaker and a middle-class matron, a childless advocate of birth control who 'radiates domesticity'". While Weber was clearly a New Woman by virtue of her career, she was also publicly identified as the wife and collaborator of her first husband.
Shelley Stamp argues that Weber's "image was instrumental in defining both her particular place in film-making practices, and women's roles within early Hollywood generally", and that her "wifely, bourgeois persona, relatively conservative and staid, mirrored the film industry's idealized conception of its new customers: white, married, middle-class women perceived to be arbiters of taste in their communities". While Weber's beliefs reflected modern values, as did her career as a filmmaker that was atypical for women of her era, she had "internalized much of what the Victorians deemed proper behavior for women", and there are "strong elements of the Victorian code of womanhood in her films". The Smalleys exemplified and promoted the Victorian ideal of marriage as companionship and a partnership.
From 1917 Weber was active in supporting the newly established Hollywood Studio Club, a residence for struggling would-be starlets. After the United States entered World War I, Weber served on the board of the Motion Picture War Service Association, headed by D. W. Griffith and including Mack Sennett, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, William S. Hart, Cecil B. DeMille, and William Desmond Taylor. The Association raised funds for the construction of a thousand-bed hospital.
In 1918, the Fox Film Corporation hired Weber to direct Queen of the Seas, in which Annette Kellerman swam and dove naked. However, she was replaced eventually by John G. Adolfi. In September 1918, Weber broke her left arm in two places when she slipped on the floor and fell in Barker Brothers, a downtown Los Angeles furniture store, forcing her to be hospitalized in the California Hospital. Weber's arm was still causing her trouble seven months later.
Legacy: The Buffalo Dreams Fantastic Film Festival gives out the Lois Weber Award in her honor since 2017.
A one-woman play, Tea with Lois, is based on Weber's talks at the Hollywood Studio Club. Written, produced and directed by Susan Kurtz, it was recorded and shown at the 53rd Cinecon Film Festival in 2017.
The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission installed a Lois Weber historical marker in front of the Carnegie Free Library of Allegheny.
Executive produced and hosted by Elizabeth Banks, directed by Svetlana Cvetko, Yours Sincerely, Lois Weber, a 6-minute documentary, which won best documentary at the 2017 LA Shorts International Film Festival, told through the fictionalized character of a young magazine photographer who hopes to impress Weber, examines Lois Weber's career, for I’ll Take You There, a Hollywood-themed novel by Wally Lamb, first released as an iOS app for Metabook.
On April 13, 2022 the American Film Institute announced a new initiative concerning short films from the silent and early sound film eras: the project was named "Behind the Veil" after a lost 1914 film by Weber.
10. Wendell Phillips Smalley (August 7, 1865 – May 2, 1939) was an American silent film director and actor.
Smalley began his career in vaudeville and acted in more than 200 films between 1910 and his death in 1939. He began directing in 1911 and made more than 300 films by 1921.
Smalley was married to actress, writer, director, and producer Lois Weber from April 29, 1904, to 1922. They met in 1904 when Weber was acting in a theater where Smalley was stage manager. In 1908 Smalley and Weber began working for the U.S. division of Gaumont Film Company, where Smalley was an actor, and later a director. He is sometimes listed as a co-director with Lois Weber, and the extent of his contribution to her work is unresolved.