Lois Weber

Biography

Before the flicker of a single film frame ever caught her eye, Lois Weber was preaching on city sidewalks; by 1905 the former Salvation Army missionary had traded open-air sermons for the glow of nickelodeons. Herbert Blaché—husband of Alice Guy, the planet’s first woman to stage a story on celluloid—handed Weber the role of her life in Hypocrites (1908), and the camera promptly fell in love with her. Three years later she stepped behind it, co-helming A Heroine of ’76 (1911) with Edwin S. Porter while doubling on-screen as the Revolutionary damsel in distress; Phillips Smalley, her frequent collaborator and on-screen George Washington, shared the megaphone. The pace turned feverish: 1914 saw her finish twenty-seven shorts, plus the American feature-length debut she co-piloted with Smalley—The Merchant of Venice—making her the first woman in the United States to steer a full-scale film. (Look sharp and you’ll spot a young Jeanie Macpherson among the Venetians.) Weber’s missionary impulse followed her into directing. Birth control, back-alley abortions, dope needles, gin bottles and red-light bargains—all became plot points in her crusading melodramas that dared audiences to look society’s ills square in the eye. By 1916 Universal Film Manufacturing, the country’s reigning dream factory, crowned her its top director and paid her more than any filmmaker on earth. The next year she hung out her own shingle: Lois Weber Productions. She would sign her name to more than a hundred pictures before changing tastes and corporate consolidation shoved her company into bankruptcy. Talkies arrived without her; only one, White Heat (1934), carried her credit before the curtain fell.