My favorite images of Mary Pickford are the ones where she is posing with animals. There are quite a lot of them, including a famous picture where Mary is sitting with a cat on her shoulder.
On the surface, these photos show the sweet innocence that made her famous. But I like them because I know that underneath that calm smile, Mary Pickford was a badass. Her gutsy determination pulled her family out of poverty and empowered her to become the first movie star, the highest paid actor of her time, a pioneering independent producer, and a woman who stood up for her worth before any other woman in film.
A 1924 edition of Photoplay magazine summed her up the best: “No role she can play on the screen is as great as the role she plays in the motion picture industry. Mary Pickford the actress is completely overshadowed by Mary Pickford the individual.”
Margaret Booth: The First Film Editor
Outside of the film industry, very few people knew the name of film editor Margaret Booth. But in the industry, her name was revered, and a little feared.
Margaret’s career in Hollywood spanned seven decades. She was there at the birth of editing itself, when the process involved cutting film with scissors. She worked during the transitions of silent film to sound, from black and white to color, and from studio system to New Hollywood. She was the great woman behind the great men, working with D.W. Griffith, Louis B. Mayer, and Irving Thalberg. She was also the first person to be titled Film Editor.
All of this began after a family tragedy. Margaret Booth’s older brother Elmer was an actor who worked for D.W. Griffith and supported the entire family with his salary. One tragic day in 1915, Elmer was in a car with two other actors when they were hit by a train. Elmer died instantly. At his funeral, D.W. Griffith delivered a eulogy, and approached Margaret to offer her a job as a film joiner
to help pay the family bills.
D.W. Griffith was the director who revolutionized the art of cutting film. At the start of cinema, this process didn’t exist. Movies were one continuous shot with a single camera angle, and went straight into theaters as they were. The first cut movie was Edwin S. Porter’s
The Life Of An American Fireman in 1903, which added a simple close-up so the audience could easily see the fireman’s hand pulling an alarm.
But D.W. Griffith showed that film joining could be an important storytelling device. He realized that by cutting the film between different points of view, he could tell a larger narrative and shape the story. It was also a handy way to create tension, which he often did by cutting between hero and villain during an action scene.
The job of a film joiner or negative patcher was originally an entry-level position which didn’t require any prior skills. This opened the door to Margaret, who learned how to cut films in D.W.’s studio. It was a frustrating process—joiners squinted at negatives through a magnifying glass, trying to determine where to cut with scissors and where to rejoin with tape. They couldn’t watch the film as they were working on it, so their only way to see the print in action was to pull the negative quickly between their fingers. Margaret said, “Sometimes there’d be a tiny pinpoint on the negative, and then you knew you were right, but it was very tedious work. Close-ups of Lillian Gish would go on for miles, and they’d be very similar.”
The process became easier with the arrival of the first cutting machine in 1919, which had foot pedals to run the film and a spy-hole to view it through. It looked similar to a sewing machine, and perhaps because of that (and because it was a low-level job), there were many women working as film cutters.
After a few years with D.W. Griffith, Margaret Booth got a job with another Hollywood legend, Louis B. Mayer. Also working at his studio was director John M. Stahl, whom Margaret would observe as he edited. He would shoot much more than he needed, and then leave the extra footage (quite literally) on the cutting room floor. At the end of each day, Margaret would gather up the excess film and stay overnight practicing cutting techniques. One day, John was frustrated that he couldn’t make a scene work. When he left, Margaret gave it a try, cutting it how she thought it should go.
When he saw her work, he hired her on the spot to be his personal cutting assistant.
When Louis B. Mayer’s studios merged with Samuel Goldwyn’s company and Metro Pictures, they became known as MGM. Louis hired the young executive Irving Thalberg to head production. Irving noticed Margaret’s talent and assigned her to cut MGM’s biggest movies. Irving also kept encouraging her to direct, but she wasn’t interested.
By the late 1920s and early 1930s, cutting was no longer an entry-level job. These workers were highly skilled, and integral to the success of a story. Margaret continued to hone her skills and learned new techniques with the arrival of sound. She never made a cut just for the sake of it, and she had the innate ability to know exactly where one should go, and how much should be trimmed. “Rhythm counts so much,” Margaret once said; “the pauses count so much.”
Irving Thalberg realized the title of Cutter didn’t live up to how important Margaret Booth was, so he changed her title in the credits to Film Editor. Previously, the term of Editor was only used for a position like Script Supervisor, but after this, it was adopted by the entire film industry. It was also used for the Academy Awards, who added a Best Film Editing category in 1935. Margaret Booth was nominated in 1936 for her work on Mutiny on the Bounty. A year later, Irving Thalberg passed away. Margaret stayed at MGM, and Louis B. Mayer promoted her to the highly respected role of Supervising Editor, responsible for the post-production of films. Margaret stayed in this position for thirty years, overseeing classic films like The Wizard of Oz and Ben-Hur.
Director Sidney Lumet wrote about Margaret Booth’s unique talent in his book Making Movies. He recalled a moment in the 1960s when Margaret had flown to England to watch rough cuts of three MGM films in production. She screened the movies back to back; when she met with the directors, she told Sidney, “You’re running two hours and two minutes, I want the picture under two hours.” He and his editor got to work, but found it difficult to cut down. The next morning, Margaret came in, and when he told her of his frustration, she instructed him on the exact shots to cut and by how much. “Her film memory was phenomenal,” wrote Sidney Lumet, “she named seven or eight moments, always perfect on where the shot occurred,
what took place in the shot, how its beginning or end might be trimmed—and she’d seen the picture only once.”
Margaret Booth received an Honorary Oscar in 1978 for her contribution to film, and died in 2002 at the age of 104.
Frances Marion: The Award-Winning Writer
The highest paid screenwriter in the 1920s and 1930s was Frances Marion. She was also the first person to ever win two Academy Awards in the same field, worked as a battlefront correspondent during World War I and was called “the all-time best script and storywriter the motion picture world has ever produced.”
With all of these accomplishments, it seems only appropriate that her name should be similar to that of a famous American Revolutionary war hero, although Frances Marion was not actually her original name.
Marion Benson Owens was born in 1887 in San Francisco. As a child she constantly wrote in her diary, and she had a gift for art. Both of these skills came in handy when she was employed as a young adult at the San Francisco Examiner. Her job was to report on theater productions, write stories and draw sketches to accompany them.
One day, Marion was given the assignment of interviewing and sketching Marie Dressler, an actress of the stage and screen. As she left, one of the head reporters called out to her that if she failed, she would be fired.
Marion didn’t know if this was a joke; she raced over to the theater and went to see Marie backstage. Unbeknownst to Marion, Marie was in the