62 Facts About Lois Weber

Florence Lois Weber was an American silent film actress, screenwriter, producer and director.

Lois Weber is identified in some historical references as among "the most important and prolific film directors in the era of silent films".

Lois 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.

Lois Weber was "one of the first directors to come to the attention of the censors in Hollywood's early years".

Lois 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 Lois Weber was "one of the first directors to experiment with sound", making the first sound films in the United States.

Lois Weber was 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.

Lois 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.

Florence Lois Weber was born on June 13,1879, in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, the second of three children of Mary Matilda Snaman and George Weber, an upholster and decorator who had spent several years in missionary street work.

Lois Weber was the younger sister of Elizabeth Snaman Weber Jay and older sister of Ethel Weber Howland, who later appeared in two of Weber's films in 1916 and married assistant director Louis A Howland.

Lois Weber was considered a child prodigy and an excellent pianist.

Lois Weber left home and lived in poverty while working as a street-corner evangelist and social activist for two years with the evangelical Church Army Workers, an organization similar to the Salvation Army, preaching and singing hymns on street corners and singing and playing the organ in rescue missions in red-light districts in Pittsburgh and New York, until the Church Army Workers disbanded in 1900.

In June 1900, Lois Weber was almost 21 and living with her parents and two sisters at 1717 Fremont Street, Allegheny, Pennsylvania, where she was a music student.

Lois Weber toured the United States as a concert pianist until her final performance in Charleston, South Carolina, a year later.

Frustrated by the futility of one-on-one conversions, and following the advice of an uncle in Chicago, Lois Weber decided to take up acting about 1904, and moved to New York City, where she took some singing lessons.

Lois Weber later explained her motivation: "As I was convinced the theatrical profession needed a missionary, he suggested that the best way to reach them was to become one of them so I went on the stage filled with a great desire to convert my fellowman".

For five years Lois Weber was a repertory and stock actress.

In 1904, Lois Weber joined the road company of "Why Girls Leave Home", where she became "a musical comedy prima donna and melodrama heroine".

Lois Weber received "promising reviews" for her performance; for example, The Boston Globe wrote in September 1904 that she "sang two very pretty songs very effectively and won considerable applause".

Lois Weber appeared in productions of Harrison Grey Fiske, Minnie Maddern Fiske, and Raymond Hitchcock.

In 1908, Lois Weber was hired by American Gaumont Chronophones, which produced phonoscenes, initially as a singer of songs recorded for the chronophone.

Soon Lois Weber was writing scripts, and in 1908 Lois Weber began directing English language phonoscenes at the Gaumont Studio in Flushing, New York.

Lois Weber took two years off her birth date when she signed her first movie contract.

Lois Weber and Smalley had a daughter, Phoebe, who was born on October 29,1910, but died in infancy.

In March 1913, Lois Weber starred in the first English language version of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, which was produced for the New York Motion Picture Co.

That year, Lois Weber co-directed an adaptation of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice with Smalley, who played Shylock.

In 1914, Lois Weber made her first major feature, a controversial version of Hypocrites, a four-reel allegorical drama shot at Universal City which she wrote, directed and produced, addressing social themes and moral lessons considered daring for the time.

Lois Weber appeared as Marguerite Edwards in A Physical Culture Romance in 1914, and in Weber's Sunshine Molly in 1915.

Lois Weber's films tackled such controversial issues as birth control, divorce, and abortion, and while raising storms of controversy and censorship, pulled millions of dollars into Universal's coffers.

In 1916, Lois Weber directed 10 feature-length films for release by Universal, nine of which she wrote, and she became Universal Studios' highest-paid director, earning $5,000 a week.

Shoes, a "sociological" film released in June 1916 that Lois Weber directed for the Bluebird Photoplays, was based on Stella Wynne Herron's short story of the same name, which had been published in Collier's magazine earlier that year.

Lois Weber leased a self-contained estate, and had offices, dressing rooms, scenic and property rooms, and a 12,000 square feet shooting stage constructed.

Lois Weber consciously resisted the industry's movement toward assembly-line-style studio film making.

Lois Weber's independence allowed her to shoot her films in sequence, as she preferred.

Lois Weber made movies cheaply: in later years at least shooting on location even for interiors, using a small cast, working fast.

Mahar argues that "Lois 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'".

Shelley Stamp argues that Lois 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".

From 1917 Lois Weber was active in supporting the newly established Hollywood Studio Club, a residence for struggling would-be starlets.

In September 1918, Lois 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.

Lois Weber's arm was still causing her trouble seven months later.

In October 1920, Lois Weber purchased the studio facilities at 4634 Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles, near Sunset Boulevard, which she had been leasing for the previous three years.

In May 1921, Lois Weber anticipated the possibility of both color and "three-dimensional films".

Lois Weber used the same method of direction, too, filming in continuity.

Lois Weber used extreme close-ups and an ambiguous ending, that Richard Combs describes The Blot as "so un-Griffithian as to seem almost modernistically open-ended", while others see it as almost surreal, declaring it "the Los Olvidados of the literally down at heel middle class".

On June 24,1922, Lois Weber obtained a divorce secretly from Smalley, who was described as both alcoholic and abusive, but kept him as a friend and companion.

In November 1922, Lois Weber returned to Universal, where she directed A Chapter in Her Life, based on the 1903 novel Jewel: A Chapter in her Life by Clara Louise Burnham, and a remake of a 1915 film called Jewel, which she had directed previously with Smalley.

Lois Weber traveled to Europe again and spent time at the Colorado summer home of her friend, novelist Margaretta Tuttle, who had written the novel Feet of Clay, saying she would remain on vacation until the censors "came to their senses".

At the time of his engagement to Lois Weber, Gantz was a wealthy orange rancher and the owner of the 140-acre El Dorado Ranch in Fullerton, California.

In 1926, Lois Weber signed a new distribution deal with Universal, making her "one of the highest paid women in the business".

One of her first "comeback" movies was The Marriage Clause, which Lois Weber adapted from the short story "Technic" by Dana Burnet in The Saturday Evening Post of May 16,1925.

However, just before her wedding, Lois Weber replaced Pollard as director of Uncle Tom's Cabin, as he had been hospitalized in Manhattan with blood poisoning and a shattered jaw caused by the "maltreatment" of a tooth infection by a New York dentist.

Lois Weber ceased work on Sensation Seekers and was willing to interrupt her honeymoon to travel to Louisiana to direct the location scenes for Uncle Tom's Cabin.

At their wedding, Lois Weber reduced her age by nine years to 38 to match her new husband.

Lois Weber returned to direct Sensation Seekers, which was released on March 20,1927.

In November 1926, Lois Weber joined United Artists to direct a comedy film called Topsy and Eva based on a popular play of that name written by Catherine Chisholm Cushing, featuring the Duncan Sisters in blackface.

Lois Weber had adapted from the original novel when she was attached to the Universal version of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Lois Weber attempted to make another serious adaptation, but the studio decided that it should be a comedy rather than a drama.

In 1933, Universal offered Lois Weber another directing contract, assigning her to Edna Ferber's Glamour, but she was removed from the project abruptly and it was transferred to a reluctant William Wyler.

In November 1939, Lois Weber was admitted to Good Samaritan Hospital in critical condition, suffering from a stomach ailment that had afflicted her for years.

Lois Weber died almost two weeks later on Monday, November 13,1939, destitute, from a bleeding ulcer.

Lois Weber's death was largely overlooked, with her Variety obituary only two brief paragraphs long and a brief mention in the Los Angeles Examiner.

Lois Weber wrote a memoir, The End of the Circle, which was to have been published shortly before her death but ultimately was not, despite the efforts of her sister, Ethel Howland, and was later stolen in the 1970s.