(via cinnamn-girl)
When I was a kid, I bumped into these things, I don’t know about magic, I always called it the shining.
DOCTOR SLEEP dir. Mike Flanagan
(via filmgifs)
Lois Weber (June 13, 1879 – November 13, 1939)
Weber was an American silent film actress, screenwriter, producer, and director.
Weber was a child prodigy and began her career as a concert pianist and later transitioned to acting. After marrying her husband she began to write film scenarios. By 1910 she and her husband, Wendell Phillips Smalley, decided to try to make careers in the then nascent film industry.
In 1913 they co-directed the short film Suspense, which featured the first split-screen shot in American film and for which Weber is sometimes credited as the inventor of the split screen.
Weber was the first American woman to direct a feature length film with the 1914 film adaptation of The Merchant of Venice. That same year she left Universal studios for Bosworth studios, which was run by the first woman to run a film production studio Julia Crawford Ivers. Ivers ensured that Weber was the highest paid woman director working in Hollywood at the time.
For Bosworth she directed the film The Hypocrites which was the first film to feature full frontal female nudity which caused riots in New York, was banned in Ohio, and made Weber a household name.
After her stint at Bosworth, Weber returned to Universal where she became a blockbuster director, churning out popular films. She left the studio in 1917 to form her own production company.
By 1921 however her studio had collapsed and her career was over. Though Weber would predict the invention of colour movies, and 3-d technology she would not be able to participate in their creation. She would go on to direct only 6 more feature films from 1923 to 1934. In total she is credited as a director or co-director on 42 feature films and 96 shorts.
“I like to direct because I believe a woman, more or less intuitively, brings out many of the emotions that are rarely expressed on the screen.”
Lois Weber, one of cinema’s first woman auteurs and a prolific and pioneering director with hundreds of movies to her name, was born on this day in 1879.
Mädchen in Uniform (Leontine Sagan & Carl Froelich, 1931)
Never Goin’ Back dir. Augustine Frizzell (2018)