"Exit Flapper, Enter Woman," or Lois Weber in Jazz Age Hollywood

Most accounts of Lois Weber's career chronicle nothing but loss and failure in the 1920s following her great success in Hollywood a decade earlier. Rehearsed in so many iterations, both scholarly and popular, the story goes something like this: "Weber's marriage broke up, she lost her company and she had a nervous break down."¹ Thereafter "she seemed to lose her focus and energy, and her career as a filmmaker essentially ended."² "Her life completely fell apart,"³ her "career went to pieces,"⁴ and she was "never able to regain her career momentum."⁵ Some sources will admit that Weber "returned to directing briefly in the late 20s,"⁶ releasing "one or two minor program features,"⁷ but, as Anthony Slide put it, "without the strong masculine presence of [husband] Phillips Smalley at her side, she could not continue directing."⁸ Remarkably consistent across multiple recitations, this wretched narrative suggests, first of all, a synchronicity between personal tragedy and professional failure so profound as to erase all other effects of the monumental changes that rocked Hays-era Hollywood, changes that had a disproportionate effect on women and independents; and, second, a complete erasure of the work that Weber did, in fact, produce during this period and the leadership roles she continued to assume as a highly visible woman in the industry.

Given this sorry chronicle of events, it is no wonder that Weber's late career has remained virtually unexamined in what little scholarship exists on the filmmaker's work.⁹ Without downplaying the very real consequences wrought by Hollywood's transition during this period, it is possible to suggest a more nuanced reading of Weber's position in the evolving industry, one that allows for the prospect of resisting Hollywood's forward march toward, on the one hand, "respectability" as it was being recast during the Hays era; and, on the other hand, "glamour" as it was being increasingly employed to relegate women to the status of decorative objects. By reexamining this period, we can see that Weber was not only active in Hollywood during the 1920s, but that she actively resisted what was happening to women such as herself who had pioneered creative and leadership roles in the industry throughout the previous decade—now more apt to be exploited as tokens of respectability behind the scenes—and to a newer generation of female performers—often reduced to decorative accessories onscreen. Looking again at Weber's late career also allows us to see that her accomplishments were neither "lost" nor "forgotten," to use the terms employed by Anthony Slide and Richard Koszarski, the two historians most responsible for reviving Weber's reputation.¹⁰ Far from being "lost," Weber's achievements were recast during the latter phase of her career in a manner consistent with the Hays era's evolving narrative about its own history and women's place in the industry. Lois Weber was effectively written out of history at the same moment that she was written in.

Figure 1.

Lois Weber on the set of The Angel of Broadway (1927) with cinematographer Arthur Miller. Courtesy British Film Institute.

A New Production Climate

To begin, then, it is important to assert that Weber did, in fact, maintain a relatively active filmmaking career in the 1920s not only in relation to her exhusband and former collaborator Phillips Smalley (who never again worked in any position of creative control following the couple's divorce in 1922), but also in relation to many of the other filmmakers with whom she rose to prominence in the 1910s—figures like D. W. Griffith, Rex Ingram, and Marshall Neilan. She did so in a climate of increased vertical integration and studio conglomeration, renewed moral scrutiny on films and filmmakers, and what Karen Ward Mahar describes as the industry's "re-masculinization," a period when many filmmaking tasks were isolated and associated with single-sex practitioners. Directing, Mahar argues, was almost exclusively gendered masculine after the early 1920s.¹¹ Weber not only defied the "masculinization...