Women in Hollywood

Chapter One

Pre-Hollywood Pioneers

The story of women in the American film industry begins nearly a century ago shortly after Thomas A. Edison introduced the Kinetoscope, in 1893, as a peep show novelty; the public loved it. Edison had little idea of the industry that would follow, but he did realize that the public needed moving pictures to view in its Kinetoscopes, so he built the first movie studio in 1893 in West Orange, New Jersey, and nicknamed it the "Black Maria" because of its dark, claustrophobic structure that resembled police vans of the period, known by that name. Edison later bought the rights to an invention that would project pictures on a large surface, renamed it the Edison Vitascope, and began his filmmaking venture, the Edison Company. The first film was a one-half-minute feature entitled The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots , made in 1895, in which a male plays Mary, is led to a block, pushed onto it, then beheaded. The first Edison film to costar a woman was John Rice-May Irwin Kiss , originally created for Kinetoscopes in 1896. It was also the first film to feel the ire of censors. When projected on the big screen, the large mouths of these two romantic leads, who were appearing in a current Broadway play, provoked a deluge of letters to newspapers from moralists and reformers.

Edison failed to apply for patents, so other companies with similar aims and equipment also emerged, among them Selig, Vitagraph, Biograph, Kalem, and Essanay. And this is where the story of women in American film begins, for the many actresses who supplied these early screens with images also took a strong hand in the business. Because Edison wisely contacted the competing studios and created with them the Motion Picture Patents Company--a group that effectively destroyed competitors until 1917, when the monopoly was broken--there existed a network that inadvertently allowed women in one studio to become familiar with leaders in another studio and to more easily cross studio boundary lines.

Filmmaking before the movies began to "talk" is divided into two eras. The first, beginning in 1895, was a period of making and projecting films by trial and error, while the second can truly be called the actual silent era of film, beginning in about 1910 and continuing into the 1920s. A great deal of experimentation in film processes and development of equipment characterized these early years, as the business moved slowly toward Hollywood and what would become a strong studio system.

Women had a major role in the early days of the American film industry because no rigid role distinctions had yet been set. Both men and women learned as they went, and there were no "experts" to establish rules and regulations in the filmmaking business--whoever could achieve a desired effect or result, male or female, got the job. The availability of start-up money determined who might become a studio head, and wise and solvent women sought the advantage. Actresses such as Florence Lawrence, Clara Kimball Young, and Mary Pickford, for the most part anonymous in the early films, parlayed their familiarity with the business into the creation of their own studios. Because film making was learned through hands-on experience, and also because no one had as yet perceived of film making as a profession with any status, women found many opportunities available in directing, screenwriting, film editing, and other areas of production.

The pre-Hollywood film pioneers were based in the northeast portion of the United States, and several later Hollywood stars had their first acting experiences in New Jersey studios. The list includes Tallulah Bankhead, Theda Bara, Ethel Barrymore, Billie Burke, Dorothy Gish, Lillian Gish, Mae Marsh, Alla Nazimova, Mary Pickford, Blanche Sweet, and Norma Talmadge.

The first woman to head a movie studio in America was French-born Alice Guy Blache, also the first female director in the history of world cinema. She would be followed by other women--among them Lule Warrenton, Florence Lawrence, Dorothy Davenport, and Lois Weber--as studio heads. Blache began working as a secretary with the Gaumont Company in France in 1896, until Leon Gaumont instructed Alice to establish the filmmaking division. She produced nearly all of the films released by Gaumont over the following decade and wrote many of the scripts. After working with the company in various capacities for a decade, she married head cameraman Herbert Blache in 1907, and they were sent to the United States to set up the Gaumont Talking Pictures Company.

As Alice became more involved in the commercial as well as the creative aspects of the business, she realized that films had to be made that were specific to America and to the interests of Americans. In 1910, she and Herbert, with partner George Magie, founded the Solax Company in Flushing, New York, and they moved their operation to Fort Lee, New Jersey, in 1912. In France, Alice had acted in and directed films for the Gaumont Talking Pictures company. In the United States, she served as the production head and directed the more than 300 films produced by Solax--largely the comedies, melodramas, and adventure stories that were popular with American audiences. As Solax concentrated on feature-length films, the Blaches organized a new company to produce the longer movies, and they began to release their works through larger companies, such as Pathe Exchange and Metro Pictures. They produced films that starred actresses Bessie Love, Dolores Cassinelli, Claire Whitney, Olga Petrova, and Mary Miles Minter. When they weren't using their studios, they leased them to other production companies, most notably the Goldwyn production company. The studio dissolved when the Blaches ended their marriage. Alice Blache returned to France in 1922.

During its existence, the Gaumont Talking Pictures Company provided opportunity to director Lois Weber, who later went to Hollywood, where Universal Studios hired her in 1916 at a salary of $5,000 per week, thus making her one of the top-salaried directors of the time. She had begun her show-business career by touring in 1905 with a road company that performed the melodrama Why Girls Leave Home . Soon after beginning the tour, she married the manager of the company, Phillips Smalley, who demanded that she be a stay-at-home wife. In 1908, while her husband was on tour with another show, Lois applied for and obtained a job with the Gaumont studios, newly begun by the Blaches, where she took on a variety of tasks. She started by acting, but her writing and directing skills were in greater need. She has the distinction of being the first woman to write, direct, produce, and star in a movie, seven decades before Barbra Streisand performed a similar feat in the 1983 Yentl .

Unlike other writer-directors of the day, who stayed safely in the realm of adventure or comedy entertainment, Weber was willing to take risks; she wrote films that tackled women's problems and addressed such issues as birth control in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1917), ethnic bias in The Jew's Christmas (1913), and capital punishment in The People vs. John Doe (1916). She also has the distinction of being one of the earliest of filmmakers to confront the censor, with the 1914 film Hypocrites , in which a minister is stoned to death for displaying a statue titled "The Naked Truth." The thirty-three-year-old Weber played the statue in the movie, because no actress was willing to disrobe on screen. The film was banned by the mayor of Boston until clothes were painted onto the statue, while crowds rioted at New York theaters when it was shown. The Ohio Board of Censors, choosing to risk nothing, banned the film with no qualification. Needless to say, Hypocrites was a huge commercial success because of all the free publicity. Weber also got on the wrong side of the censors--and produced another commercial success--in her most famous film, Where Are My Children? It told the story of a young working-class girl who is seduced and impregnated by a wealthy young man, who then coerces her into an abortion, during which she dies. Philadelphia first banned Children , then censorship trials ensued in cities throughout the nation, and the film made the then-fabulous sum of $3 million in profits for Universal Studios.

Florence Lawrence became an early studio head, as well as the first popular screen actress, when she and her husband formed the Victor Film Company in 1912 in Fort Lee, New Jersey. She had acted in movies for the Biograph Company studios earlier, but few people knew her name. The names of movie actors who worked for the companies that belonged to the Motion Picture Patents Company were kept from the public so that they would not become too well known and demand higher salaries. Therefore, the leading performer of a studio would be known under the studio name, as "The Vitagraph Girl" or, in Lawrence's case, "The Biograph Girl." Lawrence left Biograph in 1910 to join an independent studio, IMP Company, which publicized her by name, thus making her a star as an individual rather than as simply a company property. In 1912, she was recruited to found the Victor Film Company. Lawrence was the star of all the films made by her company during the first year, and her regular leading man was Mary Pickford's first husband, Owen Moore. The films were short by today's standards, usually one, two, or three reels, each running about ten minutes. They included comedies, adventure stories, and melodramas. Soon after its founding, the Victor Film Company joined Universal Film Manufacturing Company, and Universal took major control of the enterprise by 1914. That same year, Lawrence suffered extensive injuries in a studio fire, requiring a two-year recuperation period. When she attempted a comeback, a physical relapse forced her into retirement. She emerged once again in 1921, but by then the industry had changed, and most of it had moved west to Hollywood. For the next seventeen years, Lawrence played bit parts and took what extra work she could get. She committed suicide in 1938.

Technical personnel of the pre-Hollywood studios remain nameless, and some doubled in various capacities, especially as actors. Alice Joyce and Marguerite Courtot were both actresses with the Kalem Company, founded in 1907 in New York City, with later studios in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, and Jacksonville, Florida. In addition to its short (one- or two-reel) adventure films, the company featured the demure and ladylike Joyce and Courtot in serials bearing their names. The Alice Joyce Series ran from 1913 through 1914, while The Ventures of Marguerite appeared in 1915. Both stars were paired with handsome leading men, and their characters were forced to contend with and to triumph over the forces of evil.

The growing film industry soon began to focus on the commercial possibilities in promoting specific stars. Clara Kimball Young was a leading actress with Vitagraph Company when, in 1914, Lewis Selznick, the general manager of Universal, joined with mail order merchant Arthur Spiegel to lure her away to their new enterprise, Equitable Pictures, a Fort Lee, New Jersey-based production company cofounded by the Shubert Theatrical Company. Young became the principal star, and Equitable was bought by World Pictures the following year. Young made eleven pictures in her two years with World, including the 1915 Camille . She then left when Selznick formed the Clara Kimball Young Film Company, with her as the star. She made thirteen pictures over the following three years, all financial successes.

Many women writers for these early studios went on to write for Hollywood studios. Clair Beranger, who in 1928 married William De Mille, the producer-director brother of Cecil B. De Mille, was a writer for Edison, Kalem, Fox, Pathe, and World before going in 1922 to Hollywood, where she continued to write screenplays throughout the 1920s. Her husband depended upon her for most of his films. Bess Meredyth started with Biograph in 1911 as an actress, and by 1917, she was writing scripts and turned out over ninety features by 1919. In 1912, Anita Loos sold her first story to D. W. Griffith at the Biograph Company. She was paid fifteen dollars. Griffith filmed it in Fort Lee, New Jersey, turning it into The New York Hat . She wrote for Griffith while he remained with Biograph, then joined him when he made his move to Hollywood, where she was assigned to write scripts for Douglas Fairbanks in 1916. Thanks to Loos's witty and exuberant dialogue, Fairbanks exuded charm and personality on screen and became a success, thus increasing her value--and salary--as a screenwriter. Throughout the silent era and into the 1930s, she continued a steady stream of female-oriented films, as well as the occasional melodrama. Loos is probably best known for her novel and play Gentlemen Prefer Blondes , filmed first in 1928 with Ruth Taylor, then in 1953 with Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell.

Frances Marion, a cub reporter on her hometown paper and later a prolific Hollywood screenwriter, began her career when Lois Weber gave her a break in the fledgling Hollywood film industry in 1915. Weber trained Marion in all aspects of the production business, from editing and costuming through set design and maintenance. Her first work was supplying the extras in mob scenes with the correct responses to mouth in case deaf viewers in the silent movie house audiences were reading lips. Although such training was exhausting, it prepared her to be aware of all aspects of the production when writing, thus making her later screenplays easier to produce.

Marion left for New York in 1916 and persuaded Louis Selznick to hire her at World Pictures; the next year, she moved to the newly created Fox Film Corporation. She wrote nineteen screenplays for the two companies in 1916 and 1917, but her move back to Hollywood in 1922 sealed her success. Marion became a frequent writer for Mary Pickford, then went on to write the scripts for Stella Dallas (1925), The Son of the Sheik (1926), Anna Christie (1926), and other star vehicles. She continued to write, turning out numerous successful movies in the 1930s and winning Oscars for The Big House and The Champ .

Quite a few women worked as directors during the silent era, and they were successful both in the pre-Hollywood and the early Hollywood periods. All of the pre-Hollywood studios employed women directors, and Universal Pictures of the late 1910s had nine women in charge of direction at one time. Lois Weber, Ida May Park, Margery Wilson, and Dorothy Davenport wielded considerable directorial power and turned out numerous productions. Actresses also moved freely from in front of the camera to behind the camera with the aim of providing themselves with the type of direction that would exhibit their talents on screen to the greatest advantage. Film history has generally omitted their names, and the directorial efforts of early actresses such as Margery Wilson, Ruth Stonehouse, Kathlyn Williams, and Lucille McVey have been lost with the records of the pre-Hollywood studios. Such famous actresses as Lillian Gish, Alia Nazimova, Mabel Normand, and Dorothy Gish made it a point to direct or write their early films as a means of controlling the quality of the productions.

Gene Gauntier was one early actress who found success as a screenwriter and a director after starting her career acting with the Kalem Film Company in New York in 1906. But perhaps more important for the future of the movie industry, she was the woman who first recognized and encouraged the directing talents of a young unknown named D. W. Griffith.

Within the year she was lured away by the Biograph Company, but after a short stint there, Gauntier decided to return to Kalem in 1908. By 1910, she had begun her own production company, Gene Gauntier Features Players Company, based in New York and specializing in action/adventure films.

Gauntier also holds the dubious distinction of being the person whose indiscretion resulted in a change in copyright law, related to screenwriting property rights. In 1912, the screenplay written by Gauntier for the 1907 Kalem production of Ben-Hur became the subject of a test case which eventually resulted in a court decision that films produced in the United States must be registered for copyright. Gauntier had adapted the Lew Wallace novel without seeking permission from the author's estate. Kalem lost the suit, and Gauntier entered copyright law history.

Jeanne Macpherson, who enjoyed a three-decades-long personal and professional collaboration with Cecil B. De Mille, began her career in film as an actress with the Biograph Company, then moved to the Edison Company after two years. When she moved west to Hollywood in 1914, she was given her own unit at Universal and wrote, directed, and acted in a large number of two-reel films. Her break into directing came when the negative of a film she had written was destroyed in a fire and the original director was no longer available for the remake. She successfully shepherded the film through to completion and established herself as both a leading lady and director, a dual role that led the studio to overwork her. In 1915, she joined De Mille and became his writing collaborator on such films as Male and Female (1919), The Ten Commandments (1923), and The King of Kings (1926), as well as early and trendy comedies that starred a young Gloria Swanson and that poked fun at society.

Women also found success as film editors, once movies progressed beyond the simple one-reel affairs of the very early productions. A good film editor then, as now, worked closely with the producer or director to combine individual scenes from the footage shot by the director. In some cases, a skillful editor could save a mediocre film from obscurity. Early editors were simply called cutters, because their job was not to create a vision but to eliminate excess film from the beginning or end of one reel and splice the pieces together. However, the films of D. W. Griffith demanded a great deal of the film editor, who had to blend together shifts in camera angles, chase sequences, and a variety of reaction shots. Anne Bauchens began to work early with Cecil B. De Mille, editing his monumental epics. Her value in the industry, in common with that of other film editors, was not recognized until the Academy Awards were created and the "film editing" category was added in 1934. That year she was nominated for editing De Mille's Cleopatra . Over the decades, Bauchens won the Academy Award for editing once and received two additional Academy Award nominations for her editing. In 1940, Bauchens won an Oscar for her work on De Mille's North West Mounted Police . She was later nominated in 1952 for The Greatest Show on Earth , and in 1956 for her work on The Ten Commandments .

From its beginnings, the American film industry courted female viewers, and early films included many female characters whose behavior was carefully orchestrated as part of the industry's effort to reach middle-class female viewers. Before the advent of film, public entertainment had a shady reputation, and "respectable" middle-class ladies and families rarely attended stage shows. Although the rich had always had access to private performances, affordable entertainment for the middle class was limited to either dramas presented in church or to traveling shows. However, in their effort to appeal to the gender that controlled the money (men), traveling shows tailored their material and presentation to bring in males, not women and families. Minstrel shows and traveling theater could be very bawdy, and such entertainment was considered too immoral for the delicate natures of "respectable" women.

Early filmmakers were clever enough to target a huge, untapped market of spectators with moderate financial means but a great desire to be entertained. Once the feature film had become somewhat refined and the large movie theaters were built to show this new entertainment, film entrepreneurs began to tailor their product to appeal to middle-class women. If they could bring that target audience into their theaters, their success would be ensured because women would not go to the theater alone. Families, other women, and men would be there with them, enjoying the spectacle and spending money.

In order to appeal to female audiences, the filmmakers demanded that their screenplays reflect the nature and concerns of society. In the early years of film, the virginal heroine who reflected the moral values of small-town America was symbolic of the way in which society had determined that middle-class women were expected to think of themselves, and that was how middle-class men preferred their mothers, wives, and daughters to act.

Serial heroines captured the attention of viewers, and filmmakers created their story installments to keep people returning to the theater to learn what would happen next. The first commercially successful serial was The Perils of Pauline , a twenty-part serial produced by the Pathe Company in 1914. Employing dangerous stunts, outdoor sites, and cliff-hanger endings to each installment, this serial created a model that was heavily imitated. The "Queen of the Serials," Pearl White, was placed in a series of life- and virtue-threatening situations. Unlike earlier heroines of melodrama who swooned, wept, and pleaded with the villain, their eyes large and tearful and hands clasped in supplication, Pauline was intelligent, shrewd, and tough, and she always managed to emerge from each episode with her virtue--and everything else--intact.

Pearl White began acting in traveling stock companies at age six, then left to become the secretary at a small film company where in 1910 she was given a lead role in The Life of Buffalo Bill . She later worked for the Pathe Company which placed her first in the "Pauline" serial, then in later serials such as The Exploits of Elaine in 1915, Pearl of the Army (1916), and The Fatal Ring (1917), all with White as a plucky and daring heroine. When she grew tired of the serials, she left Pathe for Fox, where she made several films, with none of her earlier success. Few other actresses achieved such fame in the serials, but Ruth Roland made a respectable number of Western serials in which she played the tomboy cowgirl. She frequently wrote the scripts as well.

Mary Pickford, with her demure, ruffled dresses, lacy anklets, Mary Jane shoes, and long sausage curls, was another of the early film heroines. She parlayed her image as "America's Sweetheart" not only into a good income but also into substantial power behind the scenes. Pickford began life as Gladys Smith in Ontario, Canada, and started acting in a traveling theater company at the age of five. When she was thirteen, she appeared on Broadway in David Belasco's The Warrens of Virginia , and changed her name to Mary Pickford. Three years later, in 1909, she began a film career at the Biograph Company under the direction of D. W. Griffith with Her First Biscuits . In 1912, Pickford made The New York Hat for Biograph, a movie based on Anita Loos's first filmed screenplay. The story focuses on a young woman's dreams of escaping her shabby existence, and of her longing for the stylish hat--the latest fashion from New York City--that she sees in a store window. Overcome with sympathy, the young minister in town buys her the hat, and the town gossips begin to whisper of a scandal. To save both of their reputations, the minister exhibits a letter that the girl's mother had written as she was dying, asking that he take care of her daughter. The movie culminates in the minister's proposal of marriage and the girl's acceptance.

As she moved from Biograph to IMP Studios, then to the Famous Players company in 1912, Pickford shrewdly negotiated salary increases until, by 1915, she was earning $10,000 weekly. Pickford played a variety of roles in her early films, including an Indian maiden, a young bride, and a coy coquette. Among the last films made in her pre-Hollywood days were Madame Butterfly (1915), The Pride of the Clan (1917), and The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917). By 1919, Pickford was in Hollywood where, with Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W Griffith, she formed United Artists film studios.

Blanche Sweet succeeded Mary Pickford as D. W. Griffith's leading actress at Biograph, and she made her debut in 1911 as an independent-minded telegraph operator who outwits bandits in The Lonedale Operator . Unlike the coy, simpering little-girl characters played by Pickford, Sweet's characters have both brains and energy. In the movie, Sweet manages to fend off her attacker and telegraph her fiance, a railroad engineer, for help. As he speeds his engine toward the station, Sweet gains the advantage over her attacker by tricking him into believing that her wrench is a pistol. Her startled fiance enters the station to find Sweet keeping the man at bay with the disguised wrench. She plays similarly assertive roles in The Battle (1911) and Judith of Bethulia (1913), pushing her cowardly fiance into a fight in the former, film and, in the latter, playing the Jewish heroine who seduces and assassinates the brutal Assyrian leader Holofernes in order to save her people from destruction.

In 1914, Sweet moved to the Lasky Company, where she made nineteen films, including several that dealt with controversial topics. In The Secret Sin (1915), she plays poverty-stricken twin sisters whose lives are made a living hell by sweatshop labor and drug addiction, while in Public Opinion (1916), she is a nurse who is accused falsely of murder and tried in the media before she can get a fair trial in court. Sweet continued to make films with Lasky until 1918, when she formed a partnership with director Marshall Neilan to coproduce their own films, which were distributed by Pathe, First National, and MGM.

Comedy actress Mabel Normand also directed her own films. She started at the Biograph Company in 1910, where first D. W, Griffith and then Mack Sennett guided her early career. Her early roles were created to exploit her comedic talents, and in rapid succession she appeared in The Diving Girl (1911), Mabel's Adventures (1911), Mabel's Heroes (1912), and Mabel's Awful Mistakes (1912). Normand left Biograph and went to Sennett's Keystone Studios in 1912, where she not only acted but also directed a number of her own films. In 1915 and 1916, she starred in several comedies with the extremely popular Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, then left to sign with the Samuel Goldwyn Company. In 1922, Normand's career was in ruins when she became a suspect in the murder of her lover, William Desmond Taylor. The bad publicity killed her career, and her wild living destroyed her body. She died of pneumonia, complicated by tuberculosis, at the age of thirty-six.

Lillian Gish and her sister, Dorothy, also began their careers in pre-Hollywood films, and they owe their start to Mary Pickford, whom they knew from their child acting days in stock companies. Pickford convinced D. W. Griffith to employ the teenage Gish sisters for his movies, and Lillian appeared in An Unseen Enemy , a two-reel film made by the Biograph Company in 1912. She joined Griffith when he went to Hollywood and appeared in twenty films; Griffith cast her in the epic Birth of a Nation (1915). Her success impressed him so much that he made her the star of his most important films until 1922, when a salary dispute ended their relationship. Once she had signed with MGM, Gish made La Boheme (1926), The Scarlet Letter (1926), and other films, but her looks worked against her as the Jazz Age intruded and made the feminine ideal outmoded. She made a few more film appearances in the 1920s through the 1940s, but none was successful. Instead, she turned to the stage, where she created numerous successful roles in the decades following her exit from film. She returned at intervals to act in such films as Robert Altman's A Wedding (1978) and The Whales of August (1987).

Other silent screen stars began their careers in pre-Hollywood film companies on the east coast. Norma Talmadge was born in Brooklyn, and she started her acting career by posing for photographic slides that were used to illustrate the songs on nickelodeon screens. She later worked as an extra at the Vitagraph film studios in Flatbush, then left for Hollywood `to make films with D. W. Griffith. In Hollywood, Talmadge met movie mogul Joseph Schenck, whom she married in 1917 and who worked to turn her into a star. She exuded little of the distinctive personality of her contemporaries, (she is unknown to movie fans today), yet Talmadge is really representative of stars in this era because her career spans the silent years and ends when the sound films begin. She was beautiful and wore stunning clothes in her very emotional roles that were characterized by romance, suffering, and a faraway look of sadness that the camera caught in close-up shots of her pained face. In essence, she personified on-screen elegance with her ability to wear clothes and her carefully arranged hair. Although most of her films were instantly forgettable, several roles became central to the growth of film in the silent era. She made New Moon in 1919, followed by Smilin' Through in 1922. Secrets (1924) and Kiki (1926) were well received, but she earned real praise for Camille (1927) and DuBarry, Woman of Passion (1930). Although her films were box office successes, few have survived the years, and Talmadge remains one of the least-known of the successful players on the silent screen.

A more exotic product of the early film industry is Alia Nazimova, billed only as "Nazimova," who was born in the Crimea in Russia and began her career as a stage star. In 1916, after years of stage work, she filmed her first movie, War Brides , at Ideal Studios in Hudson Heights, New Jersey, for which she was paid $1,000 per day for thirty days. She returned to the stage for two more years, then headed west to Metro Studios in Hollywood and made Revelation (1918), Toys of Fate (1918), and Eye for Eye (1918) as well as a range of other soap operas that were topped by her tear-filled Camille in 1921. She was unable to maintain a thriving career in the Hollywood silent films and played occasional bit parts in later sound films, such as Blood and Sand (1941) and The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1944).

At the same time that the sweet and simpering heroine drew the approval of audiences, viewers also welcomed the sexy star who would heat up the screen--within the moral limits of the time, of course. The flip side of the virginal heroine was the "vamp," the exotic and wicked seductress who cast irresistible spells over men with her sexually aggressive behavior and intriguing, relatively unclothed body. Nazimova had made hesitant moves in this direction, but Theda Bara took the role to its limits as the movies' first female sex symbol. Born Theodosia Goodman in Cincinnati, Ohio, she slithered across pre-1920s screens in forty movies between 1916 and 1919 as "The Vamp," short for "vampire." The first twenty-two films were made in New Jersey studios. Still a movie extra at the age of twenty-six in 1916, she happened to be in the right place at the right time when movie-maker Frank J. Powell decided to film the play A Fool There Was . He decided that an unknown should be cast as the evil seductress of the film, and he planned a media blitz to excite future filmgoers. Powell first changed Goodman's name to Theda Bara, then manufactured a mysterious past for her, claiming that she was the daughter of an Egyptian ruler and that her name was an anagram of the words `Arab death." Publicity stunts were arranged in which the heavily made-up Bara assumed an evil persona and was rumored to perform unspeakable acts in black-draped hotel suites in which Eastern incenses burned constantly. As press releases "leaked" stories of macabre and unearthly behavior to the media, the public devoured every sinister detail. Viewers flocked to the film, famous for its line "... kiss me, my fool!" making it so successful that it provided the start-up money to establish the Fox Film Corporation in New Jersey.

On-screen, Bara exuded an evil sensuality that rendered men helpless, and she did so in a series of suggestively titled movies, among them Sin (1915), The She-Devil (1919), and The Siren's Song (1919). By 1919, there were so many imitation "vamps" on the screen that the concept became high camp. In these movies, virtue was rewarded, but seductive, sexually aggressive behavior represented a danger for both "the vamp" and the men who succumbed to her. Halfway through her career, Fox Film Corporation moved with Bara to Hollywood. Two years later, Bara was no longer a box-office attraction. She retired in 1926 with her husband, director Charles Brabin, and substantial investments, to become a Hollywood hostess who threw great dinner parties, but she never again acted.

Tallulah Bankhead and Ethel Barrymore had their start in the pre-Hollywood film studios, and both went on to careers in the later sound films. Bankhead, a society beauty and the daughter of a speaker of the House of Representatives, had her first role in Thirty a Week , a 1918 film made by Samuel Goldwyn in a leased studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Barrymore, as a member of the prominent stage dynasty, brought respectability to screen acting when she made movies for both the Famous Players film studios and Metro Pictures. Among these early films were The Nightingale (1914), The Awakening of Helen Ritchie (1916), and The Divorcee (1919).

Although the names of many of the pre-Hollywood women pioneers are no longer known, others went on to star in, direct, write, and place their personal imprint on the silent films that followed as women joined in inventing Hollywood. As the film industry expanded and became a full-fledged, multi-million-dollar business, the roles of both men and women became more strictly defined and limited. Women who were already in the industry learned that the increasing complexity of the business required that they choose between struggling to retain their decision-making positions and assuming new roles as screen stars. No longer could they act and maintain creative control over their performances by directing, editing, and the like. Those who were new to the industry were even denied that choice as they were steered toward the screen to fill an industry's hunger for new faces. The stories of both groups of women, the pre-silent pioneers and those who followed, constitute the history of Hollywood in the decades since.