Image courtesy of Mary Pickford Special Collections
The History of
Women in Film in Hollywood and Idaho
BY KAREN DAY
I’d been directing independent television and documentaries for 20 years when I saw a head shot of Nell Shipman in the Idaho History Museum. The black and white photo was a studio-manufactured image, mandatorily glamorous, but unusual in that its “star” lacked the pouted lips and corkscrew curls of silent era actresses. More wholesome than stilted beauty or sultry vamp, Shipman offered an adventurous image, completed by a luxurious, Lynx fur hood and the title, “The Girl from God’s Country: Idaho’s First Filmmaker.” Two thoughts continued to haunt me for weeks after I’d seen the photo. First, I wanted one of those coats despite its scandalous, political incorrectness. Second, and more importantly, why hadn’t I ever heard of Shipman? I spent the next two years of my life searching for the answer. Eventually, the truth revealed 34
was so unjust and purposefully entombed, I felt compelled to produce and direct a feature-length documentary called The Girl from God’s Country. What possible pertinence could a turn-of-the-century woman offer in the twenty-first century? We live in the era of 3-D Pixar heroines and FBI investigations into Hollywood gender bias. Silent films were the dark ages of cinema, overacted with batting eyelashes and flailing shieks. Silent onscreen-queens like Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford smeared into black and white blurs in my memory. Therefore, I confess, it was curiosity and coat envy, rather than scholarship or artistic appreciation, that sparked my initial research. Nearly a century apart, Shipman and I both chose to relocate from California and make films in the state that still boasts the most wilderness in the lower forty-eight and only one female filmmaker. This commonality
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indicated she was a kindred spirit, a fellow cultivator of worthwhile risk. Idaho has as much landmass as Texas, but remains obscure, surrounded by five other, more famous western states and Canada. The population was 436,000 when Shipman moved here in 1922, equating to 33 square miles per person. (Current residents can only claim 8 miles.) Already a successful silent film writer, producer and movie star, Shipman boarded trains, tugboats and sleighs to travel 1,280 miles from Glendale to Priest Lake, fifteen miles south of the Canadian frozen border. Even in the wilderness, her life was a spectacle made for film. She brought along her 10-year-old son, a married lover-director, a future Academy-Award-winning cinematographer and a zoo of seventy abused, animal actors, including bobcats, bears, elk, eagles, deer and sixteen sled dogs. Shipman’s preternatural bond with wild animal
