[The advantage that a filmmaker has is that he--and now, and then, she--is not confined to one place and time, but is free to move about throughout history, at whim and will.]
As to my past before 1920, I have prepared for this current life well, but it is a lot of boring detail which I will leave to be exposed piecemeal as it becomes relevant to the making of my films. [For example, I invented the sound film in 1916 (based upon work done in the mid-twenties in a quite different manifestation of reality), well ahead of its appointed time, but I have chosen to delay its revelation until now, so that the research division of my company, a team of overly-paid (in order to assure their silence and thus my secrecy) scientists and technicians, would have the time to develop the process to a state of near perfection.] Now, for my first film, Mirielle's War, a story about a French girl's young life before and during WWI, I use the technology to astound the world, which has absolutely no inclination of what is about to happen.
A little girl I meet at an isolated train station in the desert on my way to California suggests my second film. She asks me if it's true that I make moving pictures, I can't remember why she asks it, someone must have told her, one of the crew, maybe, and I tell her, yes, I do. She says she's never seen one, and I can believe it, living out there in the middle of nowhere. But she's read about them. She reads a lot, she says, it's the only thing to do unless you want to run around the desert like the crazies.
She has a snake, a rattler, in a box that she shows me. When she first opens the box, I jump back, afraid, as the snake begins to rattle. I don't like being taken by surprise and so I remain most of the time cool and calm, but this is one of those rare incidents where I reveal my true and anxious inner self. I look at her intensely, examining her intent. It seems she does this on purpose. She is cool and calm, intensely abstract, and yet personable, in a way that is both distant and immediate. She is in control of her situations. Living in the desert, out in the middle of nowhere, teaches you, of necessity, to be in control, I guess. She uses the snake to catch others off-guard, to assert her authority. When she sees me regain my composure and look again into the box, demanding of myself that I be brave and face the monster, because she can, she tells me that the snake is harmless, that her grandfather removed its poison glands. I lean in a little closer. It still might strike at you, she says, and if it hits you it'll hurt for a few days (she reveals a two-pronged scar on her forearm), but it can't kill you or make you sick.
She wants me to take her to California with me. Apparently, she has asked others in our traveling party and they have referred her to me. She says she can't afford the train ticket. I ask her if she wants to be in the movies, but she says no, she wants to see the ocean. I don't dare take her with us, of course, even if it's true that her grandfather doesn't care and she has no other living relatives. I tell her I'll stop by on the way back east and I really intend to do this, but I don't. But I use some of her ideas, her stories that she recounts in brief, and her character to make a film about two guys who don't know what they're doing making films in a milieu of people who don't know much more than they do--except for a few people like D.W. Griffith.
This film, my second, is my tribute to that little desert girl. (Everyone thinks it's a tribute to D.W.) I wish, when I started making it, that she had wanted to be in the movies, because I would have cast her. I thought about her the whole time I was writing the screenplay. To play her part, I cast Marta Tilly, a young first generation American actress from New York who had then a remarkable ability to change her appearance to play any age from six to sixteen. I discovered her during one of the several traveling auditions that we staged looking for children for Mirielle's War. I didn't cast her in that picture because she had never acted before and was a bit shy and I didn't feel I had the time to work with her.
My fifth film, piano, is much like a much later remake, except that they will get the fantasy slightly wrong. It's a great compliment, I guess, that people will eventually remake my films. But they always get them slightly wrong.
In the 1990s, television, the CCC [Classic Cinema Channel], will replay and study my films.
Alice Guy, a French secretary for Gaumont, was the first narrative filmmaker and director. She persuaded Gaumont to allow her to make films, which were then only short depictions of real life subjects. He agreed, provided her work as a secretary didn't suffer. She worked until noon, then went out to make films, while the essential daylight she needed for the exposure was still available, then she returned to the office to work late into the night. She invented the close-up before D.W. Griffith, who got the credit for it. She was the first movie producer int he world and the first to woman to run a motion picture studio.
Lois Weber, one of the most important silent film directors, was born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA, only blocks from where I grew up. I never knew her. She was a suffragette, who preached her own brand of the truth. When presented with the opportunity to make films, she felt that it would be a good opportunity to advance her life's purpose. She was the first American woman to direct a film, and the first to use a triple-split screen. With a salary of $5,000.00 per week, she was Universal Studio's highest paid director in 1916.
Dorothy Arzner was the only female studio director after 1929. By this time the men were convinced that filmmaking was not the novelty they thought it would remain. They saw the money and they wrested the business away from the women, who were a major influence in the early days of filmmaking. Dorothy often dressed similarly to men, and her hard-set face no doubt made her a hit among the men, who considered her a worthy competitor. She invented the boom mike from a fishing rod for Paramount's first talkie, The Wild Party, in 1929.
In one of those mysteries that can never be understood by the rational mind, he was fifty-four when he began his theatrical career in 1900 and fifty-four when he died in 1954. [Virginia Woolf wrote about him in Orlando, but she changed his name and denied that it was he who was her model, that it would have been a physical impossibility.]
In the train on the way home from the West Coast, Rose and Jason sit side by side in an almost empty car. Rose, seeming more cautious than is at all necessary, given the lack of anyone within hearing distance, leans toward Jason and whispers, "Do you want to know a secret?"
FADE TO:
While Jacobs, Jason, and Roberts conduct their business, the women go off on a day out sightseeing. They visit a restaurant with a patio overlooking the docks, where they have lunch, sip wine, and talk women talk, which the two girls engage in in a subtle tongue-in-cheek manner to appease the married woman with them. But suddenly not having anything to do after they had been pre-occupied (the two girls, that is) with the business of the trip, they let their guards down and have a few white wines too many. During the course of their conversation, Jacobs' wife, obviously becoming inebriated, broaches the subject of the girls' sexuality. At first, she is cautious. Despite the alcohol's influence, she realizes the delicate nature of the subject matter.
They look at her, not really daring to believe what she is about to say, but intuiting it. After a pause, Gwen asks "What?"
Rose, the more timid of the two, looks away, but Gwen seems amused, yet startled that Mrs. Jacobs dares to mention it.
Through a series of half sentences, Mrs. Jacobs (who is hardly any older than the two girls are, but who gives off that unconscious air of cultural superior maturity that young Jewish women find so easy) manages to put the girls, at least Gwen, totally at ease, the fact that they have been drinking also playing not so small a part.
Gwen stares at her with genuine interest. After a thoughtful pause, Mrs. Jacobs suddenly bursts out "The parts don't fit." as she puts her two index fingers side by side and rubs them lengthwise against each other. They laugh together again.
CUT TO the girls' room at the hotel. A bottle of wine is open and nearly empty on a table by the window. Mrs. Jacobs sits in a chair nearby holding an empty wineglass in her hand. The girls are undressing by the bed. Mrs. Jacobs's eyes are fixed on them, as if she doesn't want to watch, but has to, to be polite since she'd agreed to this exhibition.
Her words are cut off as Gwen, who had grabbed her up with an arm around her waist, pulls her to her and engulfs her mouth with her lips. They fall onto the bed. Gwen scrambles to remove their remaining clothes. They do everything Gwen can think of, things they would usually never bother doing, just so that Mrs. Jacobs can be entertained, or educated. Mrs. Jacobs can't move her eyes away from them. She stares uncontrollably, her breathing deepening obviously. She looks as if she'd been running through the city for blocks and blocks to get here and has just arrived. Eventually, she stands with a great deal of difficulty, swaying back and forth a bit. She takes a tentative step toward the bed as she begins to remove her clothing.
CUT TO the next day in the lobby of the hotel. The three women meet for lunch, arriving from opposite directions, Rose and Gwen from near the entrance, Mrs. Jacobs from the stairs. They greet each other, but Mrs. Jacobs will not look directly at either of them. As they walk into the dining room, Mrs. Jacobs leads the way. Gwen elbows Rose as they follow along, nodding at Mrs. Jacobs's back, but Rose pushes her arm away and scowls.
The lady smiles at her, but weakly and without direct eye contact.
CUT TO the train car. Rose and Jason sit quietly side by side. Jason look straight ahead with a wry smile on his face. Rose watches his expression closely.
All of this happened a very long time ago and I only know about it because I talked to a lot of people, and some of them it happened to, but most of them were people who talked to people it happened to, or they talked to people who talked to people. One of those people was Mary Rose Evans. I got a lot of information from her, because she was in a position to know almost everything. She was born in 1890 and first met Jason in 1910, when she was hired as his secretary. She died in 1990 at the age of 100.