LITMIR.BIZ

      FIGURE 5. Florence Lawrence on a postcard for fans, c. 1912. Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills.

      Lawrence’s persona as a western American–styled New Woman bent on hair-raising demonstrations of women’s social and physical mobility likely accounted for the different perspective Betty Melnick took from the star.⁷⁵ A cowgirl in an era in which frontier mythology influenced how so many Americans’ viewed their past, Lawrence’s exceptional equestrian skills made her the female counterpart of an already prized American hero and won the actress her first substantial role in the Edison short Daniel Boone, or Pioneer Days in America (1907).⁷⁶ Playing a Boone daughter captured by Indians, Lawrence executes a daring escape, riding bareback at breakneck speed, long blonde curls flying behind her. After joining Vitagraph the next month, her first leading role demanded similar skills. Producer J. Stuart Blackton called Lawrence “a splendid rider,” extolling her aplomb after she narrowly escaped an accident while playing a Union spy who gets chased on horseback through the woods in The Dispatch Bearer (1907).⁷⁷ The same qualities also reportedly caught Griffith’s eye. “Can you ride horses?” demanded the director at their first meeting. “I would rather ride than eat” was Lawrence’s cool reply. Dressed “like a cowgirl in the wild and wooly West” for The Girl and the Outlaw (1908), she went on to make over a dozen “Wild West Pictures” there.⁷⁸ Yet Lawrence’s roles cohered less around a particular filmic type than around the display of a dramatic range that swung from knockabout romantic comedies like the “Jonesy” film series to dramatic love stories like Resurrection (1909).⁷⁹

      “Florence Lawrence is a tomboy. She told me so herself,” began an early publicity piece that used her real-life western background to explain her self-reliance, derring-do, and political progressivism. “I have always been an actress. When I was a child I roamed all over the West leading a gypsy-like life,” she explained.⁸⁰ The claim was no mere puffery. Lawrence was born Florence Bridgwood in 1886 in Hamilton, Ontario. Her father, George, was a carriage maker; her mother, Lotta, an actress thirty-six years younger than her husband. When Lotta permanently separated from George in 1890, she became “versatile as a leading lady of her own company which produced all sorts of plays,” taking “Baby Flo” along while she toured “the West with the Lawrence Dramatic Players.”⁸¹ This persona would have prepared readers for her support of woman suffrage, because western women’s movements had already won women the vote in most of the American and Canadian West. In 1913 Lawrence attended an eastern suffrage march in Washington, D.C.⁸² Parading on horseback, she proclaimed her “politics as a suffragette,” a term associated with British women who used violent tactics to demand the vote. This “short and light and slight and sensitive” girl was “a lady of spirit withal. My Yes! An ardent suffragist. A Banner-Bearing, Street-Parading Suffragist!” marveled another report in Motion Picture Magazine.⁸³

      The repeated references in the press to Lawrence’s theatrical past and present resemblance to stage star Maude Adams again betrayed how stage conventions framed the emergence of the first movie stars. As Lawrence quickly developed a reputation as one of the screen’s greatest actresses, newspapers touted her as “the richest girl in the world” and “The Maude Adams of the Moving Picture Show,” the actress whose boyish charms led J.M. Barrie to write Peter Pan (1905).⁸⁴ By continually likening Lawrence to Adams, the press elevated the status of still-déclassé film acting and placed her first in a line of future female film stars capable of innocently pursuing boyish adventures.⁸⁵

      Moreover, her success indicated how the explosive demand for story pictures after 1908 encouraged film producers to absorb both stage actors and their customs, such as doubling in the brass.⁸⁶ Experienced at managing all aspects of staging a show, thespians became the cheapest, best-trained labor supply available to make story pictures at the new film studios. The expectation that all workers perform multiple tasks reduced the sex segregation of labor and was supported by a work culture that responded to performative rather than ascriptive modes of authority based on the “natural” hierarchies of race, class, and sex.

      Lawrence displayed how the custom licensed women’s ability to run the show after joining Lubin Studio in 1911. At Lubin she received more money and control over her work, including the hire of her personal director, husband Harry Solter. One of their first productions, The Little Rebel (1911), featured her as a furiously horseback riding, rifle-toting daughter of the Confederacy who falls for a Union solider she fails to kill.⁸⁷ Letters to her mother at this point convey a woman who imagined herself a free agent no matter her contractual obligations.⁸⁸ Indeed, a multipart interview Lawrence gave entitled “Growing Up with the Movies” has her mother, Lotta Lawrence, reporting, “When Flo was a tiny girl . . . she told the well known actor manager Daniel White that she was going to become a famous actress when she grew up,” adding that her “indomitable ambition” meant that “she would become a really famous actress.” By year’s end, Lawrence traded Lubin for IMP/Universal, where she hired Owen Moore, Pickford’s husband, as her leading man to work at Victor Film Company, an independent production unit that likely made her the first film actor to produce her own films.⁸⁹ Having attained almost total control of her work, she increasingly played actresses and other professional women such as the comically exacting headmistress of a boys’ school in Flo’s Discipline (1912).⁹⁰ Little wonder that “motion picture experts” writing in newspapers touted her success as proof that a “girl with talent, energy, and ambition” could “make a splendid income as an actress in the moving picture show.” In advising the “legion of ‘stage-struck’ girls” to train their sights on this “new business for girls,” the counsel displayed the transfer of professional aspirations once directed at the stage to the movie industry.⁹¹

      Still searching for a means to make her name known, Pickford followed Lawrence’s path from Biograph to IMP/Universal after Lawrence left the studio in 1911. Laemmle paid Pickford more for the opportunity to fan audience interest in the actress by releasing her name to Moving Picture World

Скачать книгу