page_title: Lois Weber
section_title: Bosworth
hierarchical_section_title: Lois Weber / Film career / Bosworth
caption_attribution_description: English: Lois Weber in Hypocrites (1914)
context_page_description: Florence Lois Weber was an American silent film actress, screenwriter, producer, and director. She is identified in some historical references as "the most important female director the American film industry has known", and among "the most important and prolific film directors in the era of silent films". Film historian Anthony Slide has also asserted, "Along with D. W. Griffith, Weber was the American cinema's first genuine auteur, a filmmaker involved in all aspects of production and one who utilized the motion picture to put across her own ideas and philosophies".
  Weber produced a body of work which has been compared to Griffith's in both quantity and quality and brought to the screen her concerns for humanity and social justice in an estimated 200 to 400 films, of which as few as twenty have been preserved. She has been credited by IMDb with directing 135 films, writing 114, and acting in 100. Weber was "one of the first directors to come to the attention of the censors in Hollywood's early years".
  Weber has been credited with pioneering the use of the split screen technique to show simultaneous action in her 1913 film Suspense.
context_section_description: As Universal was reluctant to make feature-length films, in the summer of 1914 Weber was persuaded to move to the Bosworth company by Julia Crawford Ivers, the first woman general manager of a film studio, to take over the production duties from Hobart Bosworth on a $50,000 a year contract, making her "the best known, most respected and highest-paid" of the dozen or so women directors in Hollywood at that time.
  In 1914, Bertha Smith estimated Weber's audience at five to six million a week. In fact, by 1915 Weber was as famous as D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. de Mille. While at Bosworth, Weber and Smalley made six features and one short, The Traitor.
  "Energized by evangelistic zeal and social conscience", from early in her career Weber saw movies as "a vehicle for evangelism", and "an opportunity to preach to the masses", and to encourage her audience to be involved in progressive causes.
  In a 1914 interview Weber declared: "In moving pictures I have found my life's work. I find at once an outlet for my emotions and my ideals. I can preach to my heart's content, and with the opportunity to write the play, act the leading role, and direct the entire production, if my message fails to reach someone, I can blame only myself." As many of Weber's films focused on a moral topic, she "was often mistaken as a Christian fundamentalist, but she was more of a libertarian, opposing censorship and the death penalty and championing birth control. The need for a strong, loving and nurturing home was clearly promoted as well and if there was a single maxim that underlay each film it was that selfishness and egocentricity erode the individual and community".
  Although not a practicing Christian Scientist, Weber attended the Christian Science church regularly, according to Adela Rogers St. Johns, and, in at least two of her films, Jewel (1915) and its remake, A Chapter in Her Life (1923), Christian Science plays a prominent role. Weber's impeccable reputation and "impressive middle-class credentials" allowed her considerable artistic freedom in her presentation of controversial issues.
  In 1914, Weber made her first major feature, a controversial version of Hypocrites, a four-reel allegorical drama shot at Universal City which she wrote, directed and produced, addressing social themes and moral lessons considered daring for the time. Hypocrites included the first film full-frontal female nudity, inspired by Jules Joseph Lefebvre's 1870 allegorical painting La Vérité, with truth portrayed in the ghostly figure of the Naked Truth, literally shown by an unidentified nude woman (Margaret Edwards).
  Margaret Sinclair Edwards (born 1877, New York City – died January 14, 1929, New York City), known on the stage as "Daisy Sinclair", appeared with the theatrical companies of Edward Harrigan, Eddie Foy, and Gus Edwards, among others. Her husband, John Edwards, an invalid, died the same year she did (1929). She appeared as Marguerite Edwards in A Physical Culture Romance in 1914, and in Weber's Sunshine Molly in 1915. Although the nudity was tastefully done (it was passed by the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures after a two-month delay), it was still banned in Ohio; caused riots in New York; and James Michael Curley, the mayor of Boston, demanded that every frame displaying the naked figure of Truth be hand-painted to clothe the then unidentified actress.
  Hypocrites was released finally by Bosworth on January 15, 1915, and premiered at Manhattan's prestigious Longacre Theatre, and was "celebrated as a cultural, artistic, and moral landmark for the film industry", and "praised for its use of multiple exposures and complex film editing". While its negative cost was $18,000, it earned $119,000 in sales in the United States alone and made Weber "a household name". In a 1917 interview, Weber denied the film was indecent and defended the film: "Hypocrites is not a slap at any church or creed – it is a slap at hypocrites, and its effectiveness is shown by the outcry amongst those it hits hardest, to have the film stopped".
caption: Weber in Hypocrites (1915)
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