Universal Studios
Hollywood, today, is vastly different from the Hollywood film industry that encouraged women to participate in all facets o
f film . Before WW1, women migrated to work in the Los Angeles film industry and made a significant contribution to the establishment of early Hollywood in many ways.
Universal Studios moved to the West Coast in 1912. It had an inclusive and profitable system, employing thirty female directors and forty-five female screenwriters on a full-time basis.
Business was booming for founder, Carl Laemmle, who didn’t have enough directors under contract to make the number of films he needed – looked around the lot – and gave women the chance to design, write, direct, produce, to participate. It was a savvy move that paid off; he only paid them half of what he paid the men.
‘One may not name a single vocation in either the artistic or business side of its progress in which women are not conspicuously engaged’, wrote Robert Grau in 1915 for Motion Picture Supplement.
Women wrote photoplays, directed, designed wardrobes and sets, edited, and produced films. Notable women include Lois Weber, who produced and directed 100 films and Frances Marion, who wrote over 130 scripts for Universal.
Elena Nicolauo refers to a career guide for women that was published in 1920, and edited by activist, Catherine Filene. Careers for Women was divided by chapters into occupations deemed suitable. Of the film industry, director and writer, Ida May Park, declared that women were naturally predisposed due to their advanced emotional and imaginative faculties. Park was actually one of 11 female directors at Universal Studios between 1912 and 1919 who, altogether, made an astonishing 170 films.
It was said that if you were female, Universal was Shangri-La.
As cinema became a more lucrative entity, and the independent studios were swallowed up by the big 5, women lost their positions of power. All that was left for women was the rarest role of all – star. It was the power to sell a movie. Recognising this power as a potential threat, producers and directors invented the studio system, with its exploitative and discriminatory clauses, to keep women where they wanted them, in front of the camera, and firmly in submission.
Lotus Thompson: Silent Film Star 
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