Stuntwomen Page 2
Silent movie actresses like Helen Gibson were the first stuntwomen. They were actresses who could ride horses, drive cars, and do high dives. From about 1910 to the early 1920s, they proved that the “weaker sex” could perform surprising physical feats. During that time, the overlapping advent of movies, automobiles, and airplanes, as well as the possibility of women’s suffrage, set in motion a major cultural transformation in America and around the world. For women who, up to this time, had been restrained by limited opportunities, these brief, innovative, exuberant years must have felt liberating.
Helen Gibson in The Hazards of Helen (1916), episode 59, “A Boy at the Throttle.” (Courtesy of the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)
When motion pictures were created in the 1890s, the movie trade improvised an identity as it went along. The “flickers” were considered trashy amusements, no more respectable than the Jewish entrepreneurs who set up storefront nickelodeons (named for the five-cent price of admission) or the immigrants and urban poor—mostly women and children—who made up the audience. But movies were cheap, entertaining, and exciting. Nickelodeons spread through working-class neighborhoods, where they became ideal places to take the kids, meet friends, and escape life’s grimmer realities. It wasn’t long before movies became a very profitable business and an influential social phenomenon.
Before they worked in movies, many stuntmen had been boxers, carnival performers, cowboys, or soldiers. Their female counterparts were actresses, dancers, and singers, but most of them had no training or experience in physically demanding performance skills. At this time, Victorian constraints still dictated women’s behavior, morals, and aspirations. To “proper” society, actresses were hardly better than prostitutes. And except for women who performed tough work on ranches and farms, feats of strength were generally not associated with women. If they had been, mothers of such “mannish” daughters would have felt shame and fear that the marriage market for their daughters would dry up. Science had declared women mentally and physically weaker; they had few financial rights, were excluded from significant education (it was considered a waste) and from most professions, and were denied even the basic right to vote. “When Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated president in 1913,” journalist Eleanor Clift wrote, “a married woman was considered the property of her husband. Women couldn’t serve on juries, or in the event of divorce gain custody of their children.”2 “Proper” women were discouraged from appearing on the street without a chaperone, but of course, no one escorted the women who worked day after day in factories and shops. Escorted or not, they went to the movies to be entertained and inspired. The onscreen adventures of the female characters, particularly in “chapter plays” or serials, were propaganda of the first order. Imagine the impact on the women sitting in those cramped storefront theaters, watching brave girls named Grace or Pearl fight the odds, week after week, and succeed.
Early on, movies became a force for social change because they reflected the concerns and interests of their largely female audiences. Besides love stories, dramas, and action serials, moviegoers watched films promoting the vote for women, such as the popular What 80 Million Women Want (1913).3 Since 1848, the movement for women’s suffrage had been found, lost, and found again. As many actresses and future movie stars made their first films in 1910, the state of Washington voted for female suffrage, joining Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and Idaho. Clift called it a watershed year, noting that Washington State “paved the way for California in 1911, Oregon, Arizona and Kansas in 1912.”4 At the same time, America was on the move, and more and more Americans were taking the wheels of new, affordable automobiles—and that meant women, too. Debate raged about women’s “fitness” to drive, with some trying to connect it to their inability to master the technicalities of the ballot. Despite this, cars gave women mobility and independence and opened up the possibility of radically different lives.5 All this was encouraged by the action captured on movie screens.
Racing, crashing, and overturning cars became essential to movie production, and major stars like petite Mary Pickford set the pace. Who wouldn’t be impressed by “America’s Sweetheart” leaning into a curve as she hit fifty miles an hour or Helen Gibson hunched over on her speeding motorcycle? A surprising number of silent movie actresses were fully engaged in the action. Historian William Drew described the stars’ close relationship to cars, down to the models they preferred and how fast they drove. “After all,” he noted, “it was the actresses, not the actors, who were shattering Victorian ideals of gender roles through their yen for driving fast cars. Indeed, driving became a virtual prerequisite for actresses in action-filled films produced when car chases in those pre–back projection days could not be faked in a studio.”6
Actress Helen Holmes wanted to race cars competitively, but that career wasn’t open to women. So she took her motoring skills to movie star Mabel Normand and comedy producer Mack Sennett at their Keystone Company in Edendale, California, near Hollywood.7 There, she was welcomed with open arms. The filmmaking mayhem at Keystone was good training for Helen’s later stunts, including driving her car at top speed off a dock at San Pedro harbor and making a thirty-foot jump onto a barge for an episode of The Railroad Raiders. Fearless, she succeeded on the fourth try, and the press hailed the stunt as a “hair-raising ride.”8 Helen’s driving skills would become part of all her serials.
Despite Holmes’s daring, women’s contributions to silent movies were largely unappreciated and ignored for decades. Then, film historian Anthony Slide’s archival research rescued women from oblivion and completely altered our understanding of their influence on the movies.9 For instance, the movie industry hired many people excluded by other businesses, such as women, immigrants, and Jews. In the burgeoning film studios, women’s jobs ranged from the bottom of the ladder to the top—plaster molders, set designers, film editors, writers, directors, even producers and production executives. “The simple fact that all the major serial stars of the silent era were female demonstrates the prominence of women at this time,” Slide wrote, “as opposed to the sound period when serial stars were men, and women were reduced to simpering and generally incompetent supporting roles.” Before sound, “of the 500 top silent screen performers, including both stars and below-the-title leading players, some 287 were women.”10
Helen Holmes ready to roll in episode 9, “A Leap for Life,” The Railroad Raiders (1917). (Courtesy of the Robert S. Birchard Collection)
Another forgotten pioneer was Nell Shipman.11 She was “a remarkable woman” who became “a dramatic actress, scriptwriter, novelist, and film director.”12 Shipman sold the rights to her book Under the Crescent to Universal in 1915, wrote the screenplay, and kicked off her career. Two years later, she wrote and starred in the successful Back to God’s Country (1917). She was the first to shoot her films entirely on location in the wilderness (including the wildlife there), and her resourceful heroines often rescued the men in her films.
At a time when few actors owned production companies, a number of women began to form them. Some men helped finance these companies, but to a great extent, silent movie stardom was the realm of women. According to Slide, more than twenty female stars formed and controlled their own independent production companies from 1912 to 1920. In addition to serial stars, they included preeminent directors such as Alice Guy Blaché, who developed the narrative film in the 1890s and was the first to set up her own production company in 1910, and Lois Weber, who formed her company in 1917 and was as famous in her time as D. W. Griffith. “Power was in the name, and the name was woman,” Slide concluded.13
Lobby card for The Girl and the Game (1915), written and produced by Helen Holmes and her partner J. P. McGowan. (Courtesy of the Robert S. Birchard Collection)
American movie production was centered mostly in the East, around New York, until a few producers fled to Southern California in 1910. There, they found “every variety of natural scenery from the Sahara Desert
to the Khyber Pass”—mountains, deserts, ocean beaches—and constant sunshine. Bustling Los Angeles, a religious and conservative little town, offered a supply of cheap labor as the “nation’s leading open-shop nonunion city.”14 The rural suburb of Hollywood had acres of inexpensive land, and it wasn’t long before the movies moved in. The locals viewed outsiders with suspicion, and they saw actors as undesirables with no moral compass. Soon, film production had turned Los Angeles into one big movie set, with horses, cars, and wagons careening up and down the once-quiet streets. Citizens complained loudly, but by the end of World War I, West Coast moviemakers were cranking out 80 percent of the world’s movies, and Hollywood became synonymous with the art and business of motion pictures.15 A famous English critic, H. Sheridan Bickers, described the spectacle: “An attack in the street, a fracas with a policeman outside a saloon, the hurried moving of traffic to make way for a fire-alarm with an engine-load of wildly gesticulating souls in torment and uniform—all mean ‘merely the movies. . . .’ America’s great Carnival City on the Pacific is full of thrill-ums and ‘fil-ums.’ . . . The camera will get you in his grind somehow—somewhere—sometime.”16
Across the country, in tiny towns and big cities, thousands of adventurous young women sat in darkened theaters, yearning to join the action onscreen, but “if Venus rose from the sea again tomorrow right outside the casting director’s window he wouldn’t give her anything but an extra part in a production,” Frances Denton wrote for Photoplay. “Getting into the movies nowadays . . . isn’t much different from getting into a laundry. You go and apply for work. If you look like you can deliver, you get a chance to prove it—nothing more.” To make it in the movies (or “to movie,” as it was called), a would-be actress had to ride, swim, and dance; supply her own wardrobe and makeup; drive a car, preferably recklessly; and do any fool thing asked of her—such as leaping out a third-story window and praying the guys holding the rug below would catch her. The pay, Denton reported, was $7.50 to $15 a day.17 Women lined up outside Hollywood casting offices, dreaming of wealth and fame. But as former vaudeville child star Esther Ralston found out, the movie factory wasn’t all sunglasses and swimming pools. The application form asked the usual questions: Can you ride, swim, dance? Do you own a tuxedo? To each she wrote “no” until another girl told her, “You’ll never get anywhere in pictures saying no.” Ralston couldn’t swim and “had never seen a horse, but she answered yes, yes, yes, and found herself on horseback, hanging on to the animal by his mane and her teeth.”18
Performing in silent films could be as dangerous as it was glamorous. The movies were turned out fast, and there were no safety guidelines. Stunts were experiments in action—someone thought up a car crash and had no idea if it would work until someone else actually tried it. The hazards were real. Film historian Kevin Brownlow described it best: “Stunting in the silent days meant walking on tigers’ tails. It was an occupation with few veterans.”19 For example, in 1916 actress Mary MacLaren appeared in a film for Universal that required her “to drive an automobile backward down an incline at the rate of twenty-five miles an hour, which she did, losing control and going over an embankment.” MacLaren sued the studio and named her mother as a codefendant, seeking “to break a contract that forced her to undertake dangerous stunts while placing her salary under her mother’s control.”20
In What Happened to Mary, serial star Mary Fuller did a scene that was “so absurd . . . nobody should have bothered to chance her life on it.” Mary was playing a mermaid, so her legs were encased in a tail. She was posed on a rock jutting out from shore, thirty feet above the pounding surf, with a bunch of lilies on her chest when she noticed that the tide was coming in fast. “I called out in alarm to my director and cameraman,” she recalled, but they were some distance behind her. “The cameraman was fascinated with the picture and continued to turn the cranks,” Mary said. Her heavy mermaid tail made it impossible for her to get up and run. Spray, then waves, washed over her and swept away the lilies. “I began to move but not towards the shore. My direction was out to sea. I was gasping with fear.” At the last minute, the men looked up from their artistic preoccupations, fished her out, and carried her back to shore. The sea took the camera.21
A report on injuries among thirty-seven movie companies from 1918 to 1919 stated, “Temporary injuries amounted to 1,052. Permanent ones totaled eighteen. There were three fatal injuries.” The report called this “a surprisingly low rate of accidents, considering the risk.” But more than a thousand injuries a year does not reflect a safe or trouble-free profession.22 The industry’s attitude was exemplified by Pathé (dubbed “The House of the Serials”), where Louis Gasnier advised his writers, “Put the girl in danger.”23 They fulfilled that mission with vigor.
Serials had two main formats: the cliffhanger or holdover, which ended at a pivotal moment in the action—a ploy designed to woo the audience back to the theater every week—and the chapter serial, each installment of which was a complete story that could be shown in any order. The weekly serials delivered rivers of cheap thrills. Though wildly popular and profitable, they were low-budget factory-line products with little prestige in a studio’s production lineup. Most of the leading serials of this period starred women: The Adventures of Kathlyn, The Hazards of Helen, The Perils of Pauline, The Red Circle, and The Purple Mask. Their gutsy heroines dodged danger every week, and whether they escaped traps set for themselves or saved others in peril, their actions redefined what women could do. They did the “gags”—vaudeville slang for “stunts”—and the term came to be associated with risk, action, and promotion.
Long before there were movies, newspapers described clowning around on a ship as a stunt.24 In the 1880s the term “stunt girls” was applied to women engaged in sensational journalism.25 Referring to a literary promotion, author Samuel Butler explained in an 1878 letter, “It was a stunt for advertising the books.”26 The movie studios’ first foray into mass-market cross-promotion was itself a stunt to emphasize the serial’s risk-and action-filled story and promote it with breathless advertising and over-the-top marketing schemes.27 Most serials appeared both onscreen and in newspaper installments, a potent promotional campaign that began with the Edison Company’s What Happened to Mary (1912). The weekly serial played in theaters, and McClure Publishing issued “chapters” of it in Ladies World magazine. Author Shelley Stamp described the vigorous interlocking marketing maneuvers: “Newspapers reached ‘a class of people who are interested in the pictures,’” and magazines encouraged “movie fans to read newspaper installments, then see it at the theatre.”28 This turned out to be a successful scheme that made unknown actresses into stars.
Another early marketing device was to fuse serial star and story, giving the lead character the actress’s real name to encourage the audience to believe in her adventures. Of course, the star didn’t chase bandits in real life, but this contrivance revealed the first canon of moviemaking—forget reality; fire up profits. The success of What Happened to Mary and its sequel Who Will Marry Mary? spurred “Colonel” William N. Selig to produce The Adventures of Kathlyn (1913). His company, Selig Polyscope, was based in Chicago, but the new serial was produced at his Los Angeles studio. As the onscreen episodes were released, the Chicago Tribune issued print installments. The LA studio became known as the “Selig zoo” because of the wild animals he kept caged there. They added exotic drama to his films, and Selig made money renting them to other producers.
Serial star Kathlyn Williams had worked at Biograph for D. W. Griffith before moving to Selig’s studio in 1910. She played dozens of roles, including Cherry in the first movie version of The Spoilers.29 Williams was described as a “golden-haired” beauty, genteel, dignified, and “fearless”—a fascinating combination that was perfect for her frequent tussles with beasts from Selig’s zoo. When she wasn’t facing down tigers, Kathlyn wrote and directed movies of her own, proudly stating, “Women can direct just as well as men,” and they “often had a keene
r artistic sense and more of an eye for detail.”30
Most of the early movie stars—Kathlyn Williams, Mary Fuller, Pearl White, Ruth Roland, Grace Cunard, Ann Little, Helen Holmes—had been on the stage or with theatrical companies before circumstances forced them to take movie work—considered a big step down for stage performers. Some, like Ruth Roland, grew up in middle-class families; others, like Pearl White, escaped cruel childhoods for the uneven rewards of stock companies. They were skilled riders, swimmers, or acrobats who were willing to do almost anything. Some had good business sense and invested their money (Roland); others spent it (Gibson). All suffered injuries that affected some of them for years and may have shortened their lives (White and Roland).31
In their prime, these serial queens belonged to a special society: they were brave, they performed stunts, and they were wizards behind the wheel of a car. Grace Cunard fit right into the club.32 She was a force—she drove like a maniac. “No speed is great enough to please me,” she declared.33 Although Pathé Studios was the leading purveyor of the serial genre, Universal avidly competed for gold with its own stable of athletic over-achievers. One example was the partnership of Grace and writer-director Francis Ford, the older brother of director John Ford.34 Universal contracted them to cowrite Lucille Love, Girl of Mystery (1914), which expanded into the studio’s first serial and starred Grace and Francis. Grace wrote the scripts for many films and eleven serials, and the partners took turns directing.