In many ways, silent films are an art form in their own right. Without words, it is the set design and costumes that let the viewer know the “where” and “when” of the story being told, while the actors need to rely on body language and facial expressions to move the narrative along. The screenings themselves, meanwhile, are not actually “silent” but accompanied by a pianist performing specially-designed scores that help provide the cohesive bond that holds it all together.
The silent film era lasted until the late 1920s and featured such esteemed actors as Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and Lillian Gish. Although largely forgotten today, two silent film giants were born on the North Side of Pittsburgh, a separate community that was once called Allegheny City. As part of its Winter Film Series in 2012 and 2013, the present-day Allegheny City Society selected a pair of silent movies that not only shined the spotlight on those former denizens but paid homage to the North Side’s heritage as well.
The film selected by the Allegheny City Society in 2013 was Cecil B. DeMille’s Manslaughter, which was screened in March of that year at the Allegheny Unitarian Universalist Church. The location was only a few blocks from the childhood home of the starring actor in the film, Thomas Meighan. Although not a household name today, Meighan was one of the silent film era’s leading men – even eclipsing the legendary Rudolph Valentino for a time – and a top box office draw during the early days of Hollywood.
From 1914 to 1927, Meighan appeared in close to fifty productions, sharing the silver screen with such notable fellow actors and actresses as Mary Pickford, Lon Chaney Sr., and Gloria Swanson. Meighan was also amongst the highest paid performers of the era, earning $5,000 a week for most of his career and going as high as $10,000 during his peak years.
Thomas Meighan was born on April 9, 1879, on Taylor Avenue in the then Allegheny City. His father was president of Pittsburgh Facing Mills, a prosperous foundry in the region. Despite the financial fortitude of his family, Meighan initially refused to attend college, only consenting to the wishes of his parents after his father put him to work shoveling coal.
Although he studied pharmacy at St. Mary’s College, Thomas Meighan soon caught the acting bug and secured a position in the Pittsburgh Stock Company, earning $35 a week. New York City eventually beckoned, however, and Meighan began a brief but successful run on Broadway before being encouraged by film producer Samuel Goldwyn to move to Hollywood.
While Meighan appeared in numerous motion pictures beginning in 1914, it wasn’t until 1919 and The Miracle Man that he truly hit stardom. One of his last silent films, meanwhile – The Racket – was nominated for Best Picture at the 1929 Academy Awards.
With the end of the silent era upon him, Thomas Meighan turned his attention to real estate and the lucrative Florida market. Although he sporadically returned to motion pictures during the early 1930s, Meighan was eventually diagnosed with cancer and died on July 8, 1936.
While Thomas Meighan was spotlighted during the Allegheny City Society’s 2013 Winter Film Series, another North Side native was featured in 2012, Lois Weber. Despite the fact that Weber was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960 – twenty-one years after her death – she is even less remembered today than Thomas Meighan despite an arguably more successful and influential career.
French filmmaker Alice Guy-Blaché is often considered the world’s first female movie director, but Lois Weber has the distinction of being the first American-born female movie director with the short A Heroine of ’76 in 1911 and full-length The Merchant of Venice in 1914. Over the course of three decades, Lois Weber directed 135 films, wrote 114 screenplays, and acted in 100 motion pictures.
Like Thomas Meighan, Lois Weber was born in Allegheny City in the year 1879. She took an interest in the piano at an early age, and was even considered a “child prodigy.” When her piano-playing days abruptly ended in 1898, Weber turned to social activism as a street corner evangelist with the Salvation Army-like Church Army Workers, living in poverty and attempting to convince prostitutes to reject their “corrupt” lifestyles.
Although “religion” itself seldom played a role in the films that Weber later created, a deep-rooted morality runs through the screenplays that she wrote and motion pictures she directed nonetheless. In fact, it was the potential to “preach” to a larger segment of the population that initially attracted Lois Weber to the film industry.
“I have unlimited faith in the future of the motion picture, because I have faith in the picture which carries with it an idea and affords a basis for the argument of questions concerned with the real life of people who go to see it,” she once explained. “If pictures are to make and maintain a position alongside the novel and the spoken drama as a medium of expression of permanent value, they must be concerned with ideas which get under the skin and affect the living and the thinking of the people who view them. In other words, they must reflect without extravagance or exaggeration the things which we call human nature, and they must have some definite foundation in morality. For certainly those are the things which endure.”
During the silent film era, Lois Weber wielded authority over her productions like few other filmmakers at the time. Many of her subject matters were controversial, dealing with the hypocrisy of society, drug addiction, marital infidelity, birth control, and capital punishment.
In the film The Hypocrites, for instance, Weber created a character named “The Naked Truth,” who was portrayed by a literally naked woman – the first depiction of full-frontal nudity in a motion picture. While such topics and film techniques led to an uproar amongst the various state censoring boards, the critics at the time praised her work and the added publicity helped to make Lois Weber’s films a financial success.
Weber was a “realist” who sought to depict “life as it was” within her works. This soon conflicted with Hollywood, however, which believed that the future of the film industry resided in “escapist” comedies and dramas that allowed the audience to leave life’s problems behind. Weber’s personal moralistic view likewise put her at odds with the greater community-at-large. The advent of sound only further alienated her from a new breed of Hollywood producers, and she was quickly forgotten shortly afterwards.
Although Thomas Meighan and Lois Weber may now be footnotes in the long history of the motion picture industry, they both played important roles within the early days of the industry nonetheless. Because of the efforts of the Allegheny City Society and its Winter Film Series, Thomas Meighan and Lois Weber are not only still remembered in their hometown but their legacy lives on for a new generation of Pittsburghers to experience as well.
Anthony Letizia