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Lois Weber (1879–1939) was one of early Hollywood’s most successful screenwriter-directors. A one-time Church Army worker who preached from street corners, Weber began working in the American film industry as an actress around 1908 but quickly ascended to the positions of screenwriter and director.She wrote, directed, starred in, edited, and titled hundreds of movies during her career and is believed to be the first woman to direct a feature film. At the height of her influence, Weber used her medium to address pressing social issues such as birth control, abortion, capital punishment, poverty, and drug abuse.She gained international fame in 1915 with her controversial Hypocrites, a complex film that featured full female nudity as part of its important moral lesson. Her most famous film, Where Are My Children?, was the Universal studio’s biggest box-office hit the following year and played to enthusiastic audiences around the globe. These productions and many others contributed to her standing as a truly world-class filmmaker.Despite her many successes, Weber was pushed out of the business in the 1930s as a result of Hollywood’s institutionalized sexism. Shoved into the corners of film history, she remained a largely forgotten figure for decades. Lois Weber: Interviews restores her long-muted voice by reprinting more than sixty items in which she expressed her views on a range of filmic subjects. The volume includes interviews, articles that Weber wrote, the text of a speech she gave, and reconstructed conversations with her Hollywood coworkers. Lois Weber: Interviews provides key insights into one of our first great writer-directors, her many films, and the changing business in which she worked.

Motion picture producers and directors --- Weber, Lois,

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"Among early Hollywood's most brilliant filmmakers, Lois Weber was considered one of the era's 'three great minds' alongside D. W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille. Despite her accomplishments, Weber has been marginalized in relation to her contemporaries, who have long been recognized as fathers of American cinema. Drawing on a range of materials untapped by previous historians, Shelley Stamp offers the first comprehensive study of Weber's remarkable career as director, screenwriter, and actress. Lois Weber in Early Hollywood provides compelling evidence of the extraordinary role that women played in shaping American movie culture. Weber made films on capital punishment, contraception, poverty, and addiction, establishing early cinema's power to engage topical issues for popular audiences. Her work also grappled with the profound changes in women's lives that unsettled Americans at the beginning of the twentieth century, and her later films include sharp critiques of heterosexual marriage and consumer capitalism. Mentor to many women in the industry, Weber demanded a place at the table in early professional guilds, decrying the limited roles available for women on screen and in the 1920s protesting the growing climate of hostility toward female directors. Through her examination of Weber's career, Stamp demonstrates how female filmmakers who had played a part in early Hollywood's bid for respectability were in the end written out of that industry's history. Lois Weber in Early Hollywood is an essential addition to histories of silent cinema, early filmmaking in Los Angeles, and women's contributions to American culture."--Provided by publisher.

Film --- Weber, Lois --- Los Angeles --- Motion picture producers and directors --- Women motion picture producers and directors --- Women in the motion picture industry --- Silent films --- Producteurs et réalisateurs de cinéma --- Productrices et réalisatrices de cinéma --- Femmes dans l'industrie cinématographique --- Films muets --- Biography. --- History. --- Biographies --- Histoire --- Weber, Lois, --- Criticism and interpretation --- Biography --- Dictionaries --- United States --- History --- Los Angeles [California] --- Moving pictures, Silent --- Silent motion pictures --- Motion pictures --- Motion picture industry --- Criticism and interpretation. --- Weber, Florence Lois, --- abortion. --- addiction. --- american film industry. --- american movie culture. --- auteur theory. --- biographical. --- birth control. --- capital punishment. --- career. --- censorship. --- consumer capitalism. --- contraception. --- cultural studies. --- director. --- early cinema. --- early hollywood. --- era of silent film. --- female director. --- film studies. --- filmmaker. --- historical. --- hollywood censors. --- hollywood. --- humanity. --- lois weber. --- marriage critique. --- motion picture. --- performing arts. --- producer. --- realistic. --- screenwriter. --- silent film actress. --- silent film. --- social justice. --- split screen.