Within a year of first being in front of the camera, Helen made twenty pictures. A year later, she had a contract with Kalem Studios, where she fell in love with director J.P. McGowan. The two were married sometime between 1912 and 1915. Again, the date remains a mystery, with no marriage certificate to be found.
Both Helen and J.P. had fathers who worked in the railroad industry, and perhaps inspired by that, they began making films which starred Helen in or around (or frequently, on top of) trains. This was at the same time that first-wave feminism was growing, and Helen was eager to prove that women could be action heroes too.
At the theaters, serials were all the rage. These were long-running series featuring a main character in different adventures across multiple episodes, usually with a cliffhanger ending. These serials screened before the feature film, with each episode lasting around twenty minutes. And it was the female-led serials which gained the biggest following; audiences loved seeing lady protagonists in action scenarios. I enjoy their titles: The Perils of Pauline, The Exploits of Elaine, and The Hazards of Helen. The latter starred Helen Holmes.
Helen’s character in The Hazards of Helen. was a railroad station telegraph operator who fought crime on the side and did indeed get herself into hazardous situations. She jumped onto moving trains, wrestled men who were holding guns, leapt between burning buildings, galloped horses down rocky mountain cliffs, and saved the railroad company from financial ruin. Many of these adventures were written by Helen herself, and she also filled in as director when her husband was hospitalized after a nasty fall on set.
After almost fifty episodes, Helen and her husband left The Hazards of Helen. and Kalem Studios to set up their own company. At Signal Film Productions, they made more popular serials, such as The Girl and the Game and A Lass of the Lumberlands, featuring Helen partaking in even more exciting railroad-themed adventures.
The press had a fascination with Helen and wrote stories about her daredevil antics with breathless headlines like “Houdini Outdone by Helen Holmes!” Another article noted her strength, saying Helen liked “pretty gowns” but could “burst the sleeves of any of them by doubling her biceps.” And Moving Picture World magazine covered the excitement of “Helen Holmes Day,” for which the California State Fair had organized Helen to perform a live stunt. In front of an audience of around 250 people, she jumped from a moving train into a moving car mere seconds before the train crashed.
For some of her more dangerous scenes, Helen was doubled by a professional stuntman. But she insisted on performing as many as she could, which led to some scary moments, such as the time the brakes on her truck failed as she was speeding downhill, or when she narrowly escaped a burning train, and that other time when her eye was punctured by cactus thorns. There’s also an unconfirmed rumor that Helen’s thumb was severed when she jumped from a horse onto a moving train.
But it was a broken heart that did the most damage. When her marriage to J.P. McGowan fell apart, Helen stayed off the screen for two years. The strain of working together in remote locations and performing intense action scenes had taken their toll on the couple. Their separation was reported in the Los Angeles Times with the headline, “Helen Holmes Principal in a Domestic Smash Up!” To make matters worse, the financial company backing Signal Film Productions went bankrupt, taking their studio down with it.
Helen returned to the screen a few years later and created Helen Holmes Pictures to produce her own work. She even reunited with her estranged husband briefly, both romantically and as collaborators, but they never quite reached the success of their earlier serials.
As the 1920s wore on, the image of women changed. The modern flapper girl and the goth-like vamp were in, while the adventurous serial star was out—well, for women anyway, there were still serials starring male actors throughout the 1920s and 1930s. (And these characters inspired another decades later, in the form of Indiana Jones.) In 1936, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times noted the change for women, writing, “There are no more serial queens … the serials now prefer to let their menfolk wear the pants.”
But in her day, Helen Holmes was a hero. Along with other serial stars, Helen showed audiences what a fearless woman looked like, right at the time when women needed to be brave and fight for their rights. Even “The Duke” had a thing for her. John Wayne admitted that as a teenager, Helen Holmes was his first crush.
It’s staggering to learn that in the first three years of the Great Depression, approximately one hundred thousand jobs were lost in America each and every week. The stock market crash of 1929 had a huge impact on industries; movies were not immune, and nearly a third of all theaters shut down by 1933.
Hollywood suffered, but managed to survive by adjusting the way it made films. Feature-length sound films were costly to produce, so studios relied on banks to finance their projects. Producers had to make sure they got their investment back, and the most powerful were ambitious young men like “Boy Wonder” Irving Thalberg, who was just twenty years old when he was put in charge of production at Universal. Professor Karen Ward Mahar explains that this was when women started to disappear from Hollywood. “Banking interests came to town, and defined women as unfit to handle large numbers of people or large amounts of capital.” They preferred to deal with male executives.
In the 1930s, eight movie studios ended up with most of the power, and they produced two-thirds of all Hollywood feature films during the decade. There was the major “Big Five”, comprised of Twentieth Century Fox, MGM, Paramount Pictures, RKO, and Warner Bros, and the minor “Little Three”: Columbia Pictures, United Artists, and Universal Studios. All of these companies were run by men except United Artists, where Mary Pickford continued to work.
With this new concentration of power, the big movie studios became an oligopoly, a word I needed to look up. According to the Oxford Dictionary, it is “a state of limited competition, in which a market is shared by a small number of producers or sellers.” To put it simply, a few movie studios controlled the majority share of film revenue in America. They had their own labs to print their films, and bought theaters to exclusively play their product. They mastered the art of Vertical Integration, where they controlled every part of their own production, distribution, and exhibition. This was otherwise known as the “Studio System.”
Each studio began to have its own identity. They placed their biggest stars under contracts so they couldn’t work for anyone else, and created movies based around them. There were also specific genres for each studio—for example, Warner Bros had gangster films, Universal was the home of horror, Paramount made comedies with the Marx Brothers, and MGM had “more stars than there are in heaven.”
A constant across all of these studios was the type of people working for them. The images on the screen may have been black and white, but the actors were overwhelmingly one color. When non-Caucasian actors appeared in movies, they were relegated to the sidelines and given roles fraught with racist stereotypes. They also had to deal with segregation on film sets and lower pay. Sometimes white actors would replace them completely, playing different races with crude “blackface” makeup.
So, why would non-white actresses even want to enter a business which actively excluded them? That’s what author Nancy Wang Yuen explored in her book Reel Inequality. These actors were as Nancy said, “very realistic about their chances of success. But many of them saw it as activism in Hollywood, and I was surprised by how much they were interested in changing the system from within. Tiny, minuscule changes like costume … to invoke authenticity. Over and over again, actors of color across different groups were able to challenge the system, and saw themselves as change agents in the system.”
The few and limited opportunities for non-white actors were further restricted with the arrival of the production code, with its ruling against interracial romance. The code was a form of censorship, brought in after