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male or female, with a style as distinctive as Griffith’s.³⁹ Another stage actress turned movie-writer-producer-director, Weber’s persona stressed her respectability by focusing on her past as a former Salvation Army worker, and on her present as a married middle-class matron. This star image allowed Weber to exploit assumptions about respectable women’s inherent moral superiority that smoothed her making films about volatile topics like abortion and birth control. Little wonder that Weber’s co-worker at Universal, director Ida May Park, boasted in Careers for Women, a well-received 1920 vocational guide aimed at high school and college graduates, that there was “no finer calling for a woman” than directing movies.⁴⁰ Another interview detailed Weber’s career trajectory: her start at Gaumont Film Studio in 1908 with her husband Phillips Smalley; their eventual move to the Rex Company to work with director Edwin Porter, who was said to bequest the production company to their “capable hands” upon his departure. When Rex became a Universal subsidiary in 1912, the couple became co–production heads, but it was Weber who built a national reputation as a filmmaker. “It’s all up to Lois Weber,” Parsons reported the director confiding; “I am blamed or praised whichever way the picture turns out. Phillips would efface himself entirely and make me director in chief.” Parsons left no doubt about who was in charge, noting that Smalley “came to [Weber] for advice upon every question that presented itself.” By the time a “distressed masculine voice” from the wardrobe department interrupted the interview, the kinds of gender inversions that flourished on motion picture sets were plain.⁴¹

      Parsons was able to call Weber “the most famous woman director and photo playwright” at Universal, because eleven women directed more than 170 films from the studio’s 1912 inception through 1919. The May 1913 opening of Universal City, the company’s West Coast headquarters, displayed how publicizing the studio as a tourist attraction involved promoting it as a place that encouraged gender play. “Where Work Is Play and Play Is Work: Universal City, California, the Only Incorporated Moving Picture Town in the World, and Its Unique Features. ‘Movie’ Actresses Control Its Politics,” declared the Universal Weekly in December 1913. “Linking work and play,” historian Mark Garrett Cooper writes, “the corporate mythos of Universal City valued women who publically played with authoritative parts.” A mock election staged by Universal City displayed one outcome when a group of actresses formed what the Weekly called “a ‘Suffragette’ ticket.” Reports across the country claimed the suffragette ticket developed because actresses “from the East” were “keenly enthusiastic about exercising their rights of suffrage, recently conferred by the California State Legislature.”⁴²

      Women’s political participation in California was one of the many disorienting features that confronted Easterners. One of the first reports about the “big, bustling Western” ranches-cum-studios featured a dazed reporter’s catalog of their Kaleidoscopic contents, including “a Japanese pagoda,” “a Dutch village with windmills,” “the ruins of a Scotch castle,” “a New York tenement district,” and “the largest private collection” of “jungle animals” “in the world.”⁴³ Universal City’s election of actress Laura Oakley as its new police chief and of Lois Weber as its mayor suited a landscape defined by its flair for gender ambiguity. The new Universal City that opened in 1915 supported these performances by including a day-care center and a school for workers’ children. Universal City’s administrators, called “some of the brainiest as well as the most beautiful women in America,” likely understood the necessity of such measures in capitalizing on this self-consciously meritocratic environment’s promise to support women’s physical and occupational mobility.⁴⁴

      Even reporting that purported to temper the enthusiasm of hopefuls about heading to Los Angeles refused to discourage their investment in the success of movie personalities. “HOW ONE ‘EXTRA GIRL’ CLIMBED TO STARDOM” was the one tale in the “How to Become a Motion Picture Actress” column that sounded a pessimistic note, yet Parsons called it a story to “cheer the heart of every anxious to be photo-player.”⁴⁵ A more accurate title for the interview with the former Chicago journalist Ruth Stonehouse would have been “HOW ONE ‘EXTRA GIRL’ SHOT TO STARDOM,” since Parsons reported that she progressed from an extra girl with no experience to one of “Essanay’s brightest stars” in eight short months. Despite her allegedly rapid ascent, Stonehouse confessed that she “felt like telling every girl to stay at home,” warning those she called “the movie mad” that “the profession is crowded now . . . it will be survival of the fittest.” Yet, Parsons interjected, “haven’t you something to say to the poor girls whom you so cruelly condemn to stay at home? ‘Tell them that a “pull” does not go in this business,’ ” she responded, “that unless they have the ‘goods to deliver’ to stay at home.” Thus, even as Stonehouse warned readers that only the most deserving, industrious individuals could hope to triumph, the flavor of the piece encouraged young women to cast themselves into the fray. And indeed, after Stonehouse traded work as a leading lady at Essanay in Chicago for Universal City, she went on to direct herself in many movies, including a successful ten-episode series about a willful orphan named Mary Ann.⁴⁶ Photoplay later echoed Parsons’s strategy, warning that the industry’s rapid growth and consolidation meant writers would have “to be increasingly discouraging to the feminine youth of the land.” Yet it also called fans’ yearnings “to see themselves as they see their favorite stars . . . a very laudable ambition. In passing we might credit the screen with administering a knockout to the old fashioned pre-film days. . . . It is a golden lighted road to fame and fortune that had a dim counterpart yesterday in the way to stage success.” The article concluded, “Every one of them has the chance to be a Mary Pickford or a Norma Talmadge.”⁴⁷ As in all good adventure stories modeled on the dream of social mobility, obstacles met and conquered sweetened eventual success.

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