The History of Women in Film in Hollywood and Idaho

Image courtesy of Mary Pickford Special Collections

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 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 sheiks. 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 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 actors had been confirmed by the popularity of her on-screen persona. Bears, cougars, wolves, skunks–the actress considered all four-legged creatures as worthy of respect as any actor, insisting they be treated humanely by refusing to allow guns, whips or chains on her sets. Even the most dangerous animals returned the favor to Hollywood’s first animal advocate.

The more I read, the more brightly Shipman’s boldness shone. Her daring was like a dimmer switch, turning up the light on early female independence. Seeking space enough to create herself and her films on-location, not on veneered sets, this firebrand had early-on rejected interference from “suits” like Sam Goldfish (soon to be Goldwyn) who offered her a seven-year studio contract with a guarantee of stardom in velvet handcuffs.

HOLLYWOOD’S FIRST ANIMAL ADVOCATE

Image courtesy of Boise State Special Collections

Nell brought a zoo of 70 abused animal actors with her.

Independent, audacious, lover of animals and fur coats, determined to make films in dangerous locations— here was a filmmaker and a female I could relate to, albeit a century later! Imagine, Nell had started her own production company while the U.S. banned the sale of James Joyce’s, Ulysses.

At this point in my research, I felt like I’d stuck documentary gold! How utterly cool was this woman? I suddenly wished I could take her to lunch. Surely, we’d drink dirty martinis and share cake and distain for the eternal-curse of Tom Cruise blockbusters.

In 1919, Nell Shipman was female liberation in the flesh. Back to God’s Country premiered with Nell flashing the first nude in film history. Lois Webber’s film, Hypocrites, is a spectacular runner-up and Heddy Lamarr’s 1933 nude scene in Ecstasy still generates far more press.

Free from constraints, Shipman created her best work from 1918-1924. Unfortunately, neither her talent nor finances prepared her to compete as the industry transformed into a male-dominated monopoly. As The Big Five, swallowed production, distribution and theaters, Nell cleaned fish to feed her zoo and kept writing and staring in her own films: The Grubstake and Tales of the Northwind. By 1924, the animals were reduced to half-rations and Nell, to eating the animals that finally fell in twelve-foot snow drifts. Living her individualistic dream, this truly-starving artist suffered murderous locals, sub-zero winters, several near-death experiences, bankruptcy and ultimately, the loss of her lover, film company and beloved zoo.

Image courtesy of Karen Day

How tragically romantic! How radically modern! Forget Wonder Woman! Surely, Nell Shipman must be singular in her early proto-feminist heroism, animal activism, self-propelled stunts and naked audacity!

Here is where I must defer to my favorite quote in my own documentary as it resounds as one of the most surprising and horrific moments in my directing career. “How wrong you are!”

We should all say, “Thank You,” to Dr. Jane Gaines, Director of the Women Film Pioneers Project at Columbia University. The professor enthusiastically shared this declaration about half way through our interview. Since 1993, this ivy league powerhouse has dedicated her career to reassembling the invisible history of thousands—no, really — thousands, of women in all facets of the silent-film hierarchy.

Image courtesy of Boise State Special Collections

Every writer, filmmaker and crappy talk show host knows the best stories begin with a question. So: how is it that not one Hollywood history tome, not one director, female or male, references Nell Shipman and her huge posse of female film pioneers? What happened to their films? More perplexing, why did all these she-mavericks disappear around 1925?

Following these doomed trailblazers took me down a rabbit hole inhabited with flickering, female ghosts. In silence, Helen Gibson made crazy leaps onto fast moving trains, Mary Pickford formed United Artists as a full controlling partner with Fairbanks and Chaplin, while Alice Guy-Blaché directed more than 1,000 short films! I liken the experience to waking up in the Jurassic period of Hollywood, the lost era when women were carnivorous giants dominating the film industry.

More stunning were the works of minority directors that surfaced. The family trust of Zora Neale Hurston generously donated to my documentary the only surviving footage produced by the PulitzerPrize-winning author. Jaggedly spliced, the clips fit together like black and white stanzas of an unfinished poem, vivid glimpses of being African-American in the 1920’s. By the way, the hypnotic soundtrack singer is also the famed writer.

Image courtesy of Boise State Special Collections

Then along came Marion Wong. Truthfully, if I hadn’t already fallen in love with Nell Shipman, I would have refocused my entire documentary on this founder of the Mandarin Film Company in Oakland, California in 1914.

Watching her film, The Curse of Quon Gwon, was like blowing dust off missing pages of American history. It’s a love story, but a foreign story, in our own country- with exotic foot-binding shoes, dangling headdresses and Chinese villages set amidst the empty Berkeley hills. Every scene is so richly detailed with the stunning and unfamiliar, that I immediately realized Shipman had never been alone in her struggle to create independent art. Nor am I. Or you.

These pioneering provocateurs rejected creative tyranny, particularly against the male construct before women could vote. They embodied the archetypal and timeless dilemma of being born female–the choice between security and freedom, of the predictable turn and the unknown road, or as the author, Karen Von Blixen described it, “The lion hunt and bathing the baby.

As a twenty-first-century women, we owe all these rowdies a debt. Susan B. Anthony, Charlotte Perkins Gillman, Nell Shipman and thousands more wreaked havoc for change on our behalf. Our freedom is no less free, but we have the advantage of looking back on their sacrifices and bonfires. We know the price of equality and freedom demands a loss of innocence and a fight. As directors, actors, producers, writers, making good films is our job. As females, making great films is also the best way of thanking all those anarchic sisters we’ll never meet from the past and the future.