Lois Weber

Lois Weber grew up in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, sang in the streets as a teenage evangelist, and trained as a concert pianist before the theater and then the movies claimed her. Working first with her husband Phillips Smalley, she rose fast in the 1910s to become the highest-paid director in Hollywood and, for a time, the only American woman running her own studio. She was a complete filmmaker — writing, directing, producing, editing, often acting — and she treated the new medium as a moral instrument.

Where others made chases and romances, Weber made argument-films about the hardest subjects of the day. Hypocrites (1915) used a nude allegorical figure of "the Naked Truth" to lash social sham and provoked censors across the country. Where Are My Children? (1916) took on birth control and abortion with a daring that still startles. The Blot (1921) is a quiet, painfully observant study of genteel poverty among the underpaid — a schoolteacher's family, a minister, the shame of a threadbare life. She experimented boldly, staging in Suspense a celebrated three-way split screen to build tension.

Her technique was subtle and her sympathies wide; she believed pictures could reform as well as entertain, and for a decade audiences agreed. But the industry that had prized her consolidated in the 1920s into a male-run, star-driven business with little room for a woman's independent moral cinema. Her marriage collapsed, her company folded, and the assignments dried up. She directed only a handful of talkies and died in 1939 in reduced circumstances, her funeral paid for by a friend. For decades she was a footnote; today she is recognized as one of the true authors of American film, a pioneer whose ambition and conscience the medium took generations to match again.