May 24, 2021 • 61 mins
The first and for seventeen years only female filmmaker was Alice Guy. Featuring her biographer, author and historian Janelle Dietrick.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Ephemerals production of I Heart three D audio for full
exposure listen with that phones. Before George Milier shot a
rocket at the moon, before Edwin Porter staged the Great
Train Robbery, after Moybridge captured a horse's feet leaving the ground,
(00:25):
and Edison put subjects in a black box like medical specimens.
After the Lumier Brothers caught the train rolling into the station,
but before there were any theaters to show their work,
and the movie business as we know it was only
a spark in the collective imagination. Alice Kie, the first
and for seventeen years only female film director, shot her
(00:49):
first picture, a fantasy landscape with babies coming out of cabbages.
She wanted to be known as the first female film director,
and she was. The Lumier Brothers projected their first motion
picture on the Wall in and she started in. My
(01:12):
name is Janelle Dietrick, and I've been researching Alice Ki
Blache for about seven years and I've written four books
about her, now five. She did the first actual story film,
which is ridiculous in a minute to do a story.
I mean, now you are used to it. You watched
the commercials on TV and it's incredible, what a story
(01:33):
they can tell in thirty seconds or a minute. But
nobody thought you could do it, and that changed the landscape.
Alice ki Lepronier firm Cinea Still moont Well. Alice's career
has been documented before, the details of her life had
(01:56):
largely gone unchecked by historians. I think she was made
into an icon and that just flattened her out. It's
been hard for people looking through twenty century eyes or
century eyes to see her as a person. If you
say she was the first woman director and she directed
a thousand films, you're really taking her out of context,
(02:19):
because today the director is like really important that he's
got all the status films or two hours long or
you know, a series or whatever. But what she was
doing was like a minute, and she did everything, the scenes,
the costumes. Wow, how did anybody ever do that? Well?
She started in the beginning. Permit me to present to
(02:43):
you the one who has filled my life entirely, my
own Prince Chreming the cinema. He is an elderly gentleman.
As you shall see. What got me started is trying
to fill in the gaps in her memoirs. Oh, they
are so short, there's like a hundred sixty pages. They're beautiful,
(03:06):
but they're cryptic. I have often been asked why I
chose so unfeminine a career. Yet I have not chosen
this career, no doubt. My destiny was traced before my birth,
and I have merely followed a will whose name I
do not know, strange fate which I shall try to
recount for you. Writing in her eighties, Alice began her
(03:32):
retrospective with the emigration of her parents, Mariobert and emil Key.
She says in her memoirs an aunt and uncle of
her mother's had immigrated to South America, and that had
led to her parents marriage, which was arranged. And I
wanted to know why Alice's father went to Chili. There
(03:54):
were revolutions all over Europe, and one third of the
foreigners who came to the California Goldish were French. Most
people don't realize that there are towns in California. They
are called like French. Correct. The American said, yeah, we
want to go for ourselves, so they kicked the foreigners out.
My claim, I just take it out. I don't have
(04:17):
a proof that he came from France to California to Chile.
But it makes sense that he would have because that's
what people did who approached the latitude of Santiago. The
short towns become increasing. They have a host of Europeans
in the New World ended up in the luxurious Chilean
port city of Valparaiso. In Valparaiso, they had a international community.
(04:42):
There were a lot of Germans, a lot of French,
a lot of English. They all have their own hospitals
and their own newspapers. Alice's uncle had a soap factory.
He was very successful. I think they probably made candles,
to which you can imagine everybody needed candles and soap.
I think he bought in Melgi that bookstore in Valpariso
(05:03):
as part of Alice's mother's dowry. As Janelle writes, the
ninete century publisher was often editor, printer, bookseller, banker, and
marketing director. Alice's childhood would for a time be full
of books. In order that one of her children be French.
(05:29):
My numerous brothers and sisters had all been born in Chile.
My mother had valiantly endured a sea voyage of seven weeks.
That's I also accomplished my first voyage between Valporriso and Paris.
It was not to be my last. Her first four
years she was with her grandmother in Geneva or Carug actually,
(05:50):
which is a suburb of Geneva. Grown there was not
wealthy yet in her tiny home. Despite our age differences,
everyone was her joy. We gathered around her table, where
we enjoyed the cherry soup perfumed with wine and cinnamon
or cheese she lovingly served in a bowl of cream.
(06:11):
She told us legends of her native broom and sang
to us in her admirable voice, a song from her youth.
Those were very happy and idyllic for her. But then
her mother came and got her, and her mother was
(06:32):
a stranger, so it was like a stranger kidnapping in
the railroad station. My poor grandmother wept. I cried too,
and through a tantrum, but the departure signal hastened our separation.
Drunk with tears, I slept. At last, her mother, whom
(06:53):
she didn't remember or no, came and just took her
away and took her to Chili. The boat ride it
was like what six weeks, seven weeks, seven weeks, because
they had to go around the horn. There was no
Panama canaliot of this voyage. I have kept few memories,
the long gold ribbon that the moon unrolled to the horizon,
(07:16):
the phosphorescency, the fine fish, my own baptism on crossing
the equator. I think that was traumatic. It kind of
happened to her again. Two years later. She met her
father for the first time when she was fourth, But
her father brought her back to France when she's six
and puts her in the convent, so she had that
(07:39):
family separation trauma twice. I think it was something that
formed her artistically, because she had to find fantasy and
ways to tolerate that kind of trauma. I was enrolled
as a student at the Convent of the Sacred Heart
(07:59):
at v on the Swiss border. I was six years old.
After those two years of sun and gaiety, I seem
to have entered the world of the night birds. The
black clad nun who received me made me mountain to
send stairways traversed long vaulted, dark corridors. The silence was absolute,
(08:22):
the cold penetrating. The methods used were without softness. For
the smallest defenses, there were long periods of kneeling arms
crossed in an icy corridor for braver sins, a cell
and dry bread and water. It was an international school.
(08:45):
The religious community there had schools in different countries Italy, England,
and so they could just rotate the kids and they
could learn different languages. Her older sisters were there and
she knew them from her first four years prusion. But
they kept the kids apart. That's one of the ways
they raised kids. They didn't want them to form attachments
(09:06):
with each other. The parents also devoided too much attachment
to the kids because you know, half the kids died.
There were no antibiotics. The birth rate was low, and
then the survival rate was not great. Childhood was very
difficult in the nineteenth century. Enforced silence was really hard
(09:27):
on them. They just didn't tolerate noise. They let him
out to play for like half an hour. I don't
think they fed them enough. It just was very severe.
They had to sell a lot, work a lot, pray
a lot, you know, no nonsense, so I'm sure it
(09:48):
was hard for all of them. In Paris, of the
women worked in service as maids or laundresses. The other
worked in the needle trades sewing, so what they learned
at the convent was to sew. Never forget. We had
an order of workers that was considered useful skill. Then
(10:12):
if you did get married, then you still needed to sew.
The myth is that women didn't work until after the nineties.
Women always had to work, you know, they just didn't
get paid a lot and didn't have a good job.
Work them hard. Remember, the superior of all is a
sudden of all. I understand. The hard realities of the
(10:41):
convent were contrasted against the sweeping beauty of the surrounding scenery.
The disney castles were all found from around there that
sparks of child's imagination. In Switzerland, they had a lot
of myths, fairies, little gnomes in the ground, a fog
(11:01):
that would come up and be an apparition. People falling
off the cliff were pushed by a dwarf you know,
or something you know. So I think it was like
a land of stories. She thrived on the stories, as
most kids do, but more particularly her. I think they
separated from her parents. It must be magic. Her dad
(11:23):
came and got her out of the convent because he
couldn't afford it anymore. First, he moved to a less
expensive convent, and then came and got her, and they
were all in Paris together in those years. She said
they were in reduced circumstances. Though Alice would not describe
the tragedy of her father's life, she would later elaborate
on similar themes and her films. She did a screen play,
(11:48):
or what they call them scenarios back then, of a
gambler that gambled too much and had a problem. I
think it was about her father. She had said, Well,
scenarios about that. I have another drink. I think that's
one of the problems he had. And they did that
a lot in California and in Chile. Gambling was it.
(12:14):
She had three older sisters and an older brother. Her
older brother was thirteen when he died in eighty, and
her father died in and then a sister also died
in two. From a family of seven, they were down
to four. In Alice's memoir, she covers that in paragraph
(12:36):
she doesn't tell you the dates, not a lot of details.
Another man five years older than her father, became an
important figure in her life, famous engineer Alexander Gustave Eiffel.
To understand Alice, it's important to know a little about Eiffel.
(12:58):
I think she knew him before her father died. I
think he was a friend of her father's. He solved
a lot of problems in engineering. Bridges that carried the
train across rivers, and skyscrapers they say were built based
on his calculations. The Statue of Liberty was taller than
any building in New York at the time, and that's
(13:19):
a structure holding that up that he designed. So he
had a whole career of building bridges, public works. Mostly
to do public works, he had to get along with everybody.
He'd been on projects all over the world. He built
things in South America, Asia, Europe. He had to know
(13:41):
those people, socialized with those people, get along with those people,
do a good job on the last project he did.
He had to be in with the people who had
the purse to get those jobs. Eifel went to Chili
in seventy two, the year before Alice was born. They
all talk in South America about bridges that Eiffel may
(14:03):
have done in Chile, and they're going like, we can't
find any of that. We really can credit him with
what he did as a bread and butter thing. I mean,
he had big bridges and big projects. But his business
he developed these portable bridges. They were like kits, so
he would ship the prefabricated parts to South America and
then people could build their own. I saw a bridge
(14:26):
that looked like one of his bridges in Chile, but
it's got this other guy's name on it. I'm going like, yeah,
but that's how they did it, you know, they got
the kit and then they put it together. He had
built forty bridges. Then in the eighties he started building
the Eiffel Tower. The Eiffel Tower was a culmination of
(14:51):
his engineering career that they called him an artist after
he built affe tower. The newspaper Le Figaro had an
office in the Eiffel Tower, so they covered him pretty regularly.
If he did something or went to something charitable, or
(15:13):
attended a funeral or whatever, they wrote it down. So
he was famous. But then he had a scandal. In
eighteen seventy nine, he was at a conference talking about
building the Panama Canal. The guy that built the Panama
Canal built the Suez Canal, and so everybody trusted him
(15:33):
to build the Panama Canal. But the Suez Canal was
sea level. Panama canal had to go over a mountain
for fifty miles. They were just going to dig through
that mountain. And everybody believed that this guy could do
it because he had done the Suez Canal. So they
all threw their money in and he couldn't do it.
It just was impossible with the equipment they had been
(15:54):
maybe they could do it now. Eiffel and French engineers
recommended another route. He had developed the locks, and they're
like giant bathtub that you fill up with water and
the boats go up one side of the Istmas and
down the other. There's like ten locks. He designed that
and they actually used his design. The French tried to
build it until the Americans picked it up in nineteen
(16:18):
o four and finished it in nineteen fourteen, and it
was completed the same day World War One started, so
there was like no celebration. The French effort failed, not
because of a flaw on design, but because the funding
fell through, with no canal and no payback on their investment.
The public was outraged. The Eiffel was only a contractor.
(16:42):
His name was at the center of the controversy and
the public just hated him. He would probably like Bernie
Mudoff or something. Back then, he wasn't so popular like
he is now in mythology. The Panama Canal scandal effectively
ended his engineering career, just as the career of the
first female filmmaker was about to begin. In her memoirs
(17:11):
and later to TV cameras, Alice described the great romance
of her life to a man she never named. In print,
Alice refers to this mysterious figure like cryptic initials. Peeb
must have been seventy years old at that epoch. I
was seventeen, but I was literally in love with him.
(17:34):
Every Thursday evening was a party from me. We passed
those evenings in Peeb's home with his two daughters. I
sat close to him, my hand and his while his
two daughters served tea or played music, and my mother
knitted or embroidered. Janelle thinks that man was efful. Piecing
(17:56):
their two biographies together is the subject of Janelle's book,
Alice and Eiffel, a New History of early Cinema and
the love story Kept Secret first century. He was married
and had five kids, and his wife died in seven
and he never remarried. He didn't have a woman in
his life for forty five years, but he was like
(18:17):
the most eligible bachelor in Europe. There was this corresponding
gap in his life, same as her. She had this
gap of no boyfriend until she was thirty three, and
she's a beautiful woman and you're gonna I don't know
about that, you know. And then he has the same gap,
like nobody knows what he was doing. He wasn't doing
the Panama Canal. He was out of his business. So
(18:39):
once I put them together, then the chore was, well,
what evidence is there that they had a relationship. It's
mostly based on her words, because she was still talking
about it when she was ninety. People expect one piece
of evidence to prove everything. They call it the smoking gun,
which is just a myth. There's no such thing. He
(18:59):
never or find a smoking gun that would be catching
somebody red handed. I like to say, each piece of
evidence has its own unique value. Never know what it's
going to be in the end. In a few months
after the death of a meal Key, a private company
was formed to combat one of the greatest threats facing
(19:20):
nineteenth century France, infant mortality. Eiffel knew everybody who founded
Mutah to Maternelle, where her mother worked right after her
father died. He wasn't one of them, He wasn't an officer,
but he knew all those people. They were his friends.
Her mother worked there for a while, but then she
(19:40):
had to quit for some reason. I think they stopped
paying her. Why else would she quit. Alice had to
learn a way to make a living. A family friend
told her mother that she should take stenography and typing.
I think that was Ifel. It was Pepe who advised
my mother to have me take typing and stenography lessons,
(20:00):
a science quite new in those days. You should have
almost no movement in your wrists and forearms, she said.
Her teacher was a stenographer from the Chamber of Deputies. Well,
he knew all them too, R F four, hey, I,
hey nine, D E J and and so forth. If
(20:23):
you take your twenty century eyes and go oh, she
was a secretary. Well now people say things like, just
as secretary, I would say, Hi, Joe, I understand you're
gonna be helping us out here. Yes, man. Secretaries were
men because they were the protege that owner of the
business is right hand. Mann was do Nelson. That's my
first John, I had a picture of stenographers and dred
(20:47):
and there's all these men and two women. That's it.
It was very prestigious. The afternoon mail just came in.
You think you can handle in? Oh yeah. World War
One came along and the men had to go to
woll Are and women pretty much took over that job.
We are still short millions of hands, we must call
upon women. And then once the job gets feminized, it
(21:09):
gets associated with women, then men don't want that job.
The same thing happened in reverse with stewardesses today joined
me on board. Women only worked on the airplanes serving cokes.
Then men start to get the job and the wages
tripled just because of the status from men doing a job.
The government's policy is that women should get the same
(21:31):
pay that men get or similar work. First secretarial job
was at a Barnish factory in March. She gets the
job at let's not go mind yet. It's called the
Comptoire General the Photography. The camera shop where Alice would
get her start, would in fact be purchased by Eiffel
(21:53):
shortly after she was hired. Eiffel knew the former owner,
who was Felix max ra Shard, and the other former owner,
who was Joseph Bellow. He knew both of them for
years before the company changed hands. In Felix Max Ras
Shard had been sued by his brother for a non
(22:16):
competition agreement that he had signed. The brothers were in
partnership of Shard Prayers, which was the scientific instruments. Felix
Max Ras Shard built a weather station on top of
the Eiffel Tower and he got a award for it
from the Region of Honor and not made his brother mad.
The other brother, Jules were Shard, sued Felix Max Ras
(22:37):
Shard for buying a camera shop. That camera shop had
already existed, and then in late the court ruled against
Felix Max Ras Shard and said, yeah, you can't have
a camera shop. Camera is a precision instrument. They ruled
against him and he appealed in the fall of took
a year and a half for that decision to come down.
(23:00):
So Felix Max for Sharon is waiting to hear if
he's gonna win his appeal or not. He approached Eiffel
and Eiffel said, get someone to manage the compto our
general to photography, and that's when leon go Mont was hired.
Alice was also hired about the same time. Leon go
Mont started March first, that's his contract, has a written contract,
(23:25):
and I think Alice started that month because the advertising
changed to be more appealing to women. You don't have
to be embarrassed to take a clumsy camera on your vacation.
You can just get this little camera and they'll sit
in with your outfit. So I think she was there March,
just within a few weeks of when Gomont was there.
(23:49):
The Court of Appeal didn't render their decision until May,
and that's when Eiffel fellow, So they're following in Biziniar
and then Godmant wanted to get in on it. They
bought the company and formed a partnership of four partners
that was called el See. Because Eiffel was still in
scandal even in December ninety four, they were thinking of
(24:11):
stripping his medals away. He had all these Legion of
Honor medals and there we should take those away from him.
He was still having to lay low. Shaman would largely
take the credit. He has some responsibility for creating his
own image as the inventor, the genius Mr Gamant. He's
(24:35):
the brilliant inventor that started everything. I think he just
nosed his way in there. He was more just a
businessman that watched everybody and made sure they did their job.
He was harsh. He was a harsh employer. If Leon
Gomant's role in the history of motion pictures has been
(24:57):
exaggerated over time, Eiffel's contributions have been chronically understated. Nobody
knew about his years at Gaumont. They figured, well, he's
just a rich guy that invested money. What they call
a silent partner. Sit down and they get you out comfortable.
They wait in a moment. Actually he was president. Please.
(25:17):
The assumption is, well, if you're rich, why would you work.
But working on motion pictures was interesting. He had always
he was taking pictures in the eighteen seventies. Back then
they were developing in themselves, and his friends were like
Jules Jansen, who did the first motion picture of an eclipse,
and then Mary who did sequential photography ten years later.
(25:40):
He was friends with him, so he was there at
the beginning. We showed them how easy the camera was
to use. I knew almost nothing of this art. I
had to familiarize myself with the sizes of plates, the
variety of papers, the chemical products, the different camera names,
the qualities focus, thanks, shutters, etcetera. Happily I learned quickly
(26:07):
it was a camera manufacturer and cameras back then, most
of you just had professionals taking pictures. But the compt
Our General to Photography was advertised as photography for amateurs,
and they gave classes every day, every day for free.
The way he explained that it doesn't seem too hard,
(26:29):
like two hours, come down and learn how to use
a camera, how to develop the film. You know, it
wasn't just click and shoot. You had to set your
shutters and load the camera, all kinds of things that
you don't have to do anymore. And it sets the
lens by itself too, so you're always ready for the
next picture instantly. And then developing the film you had
(26:49):
to buy chemicals and learn how to build a dark room.
They turned out great, wonderful color too. I think she
probably taught that because she said she had to learn
all about the plates and the papers and the chemicals,
so I think she probably had to teach that class.
They're probably other people doing it as well, but that
was probably one of the things she had to do,
(27:10):
which would have prepared her for them doing more with
the camera. One day in March of Augustine, Louis Lumier
stopped by the shop to see Gomont. The Gomont company
bought their chemicals or papers from Luliers, so they had
a connection there and Gomont became good friends with the Luniers.
(27:33):
They came to invite him to attend a mean of
the Street Nationale where the two brothers would present new
camera of their invention. I was present at the interview
and they invited me also, but they refused to give
us any explication of their instrument. You'll see. They said,
(27:54):
it's a surprise. They had done motion pictures, but they
were all you know, looked through a little viewer and
one person sees it DEMONI had one now was just
a disc that you roll, so it was very limited
to what you could see on the discs be like
eighteen pictures on the disc and then you just turn
it and you'd see the moving picture. But the loomire
has put it on a roll of film then projected
(28:15):
on the wall, and it just astounded everybody. March, they
showed it to their professional peers. First they had several
other showings in June, and then in December they had
the first screening for the public, and the public was
totally woud just to see people on the wall or
(28:38):
on the screen larger than life. It was astonishing at
the beginning. We're so used to it, but we're still
very thrown by images. I think images are powerful. They
had been created a little laboratory for the development and
printing of short shots parades, station's portraits of the laboratory personnel,
(29:02):
which served as demonstration films. But we're both brief and repetitious.
Daughter of an editor. I had read a good deal
and retained quite a bit. I had done amateur theatricals,
and I thought that one might do better than these
demonstration films. Gathering my courage, I timidly proposed to Gorman
that I might write one or two little scenes and
(29:25):
have a few friends performing them. Yeah, yeah, that's silly,
But go ahead if you if you like so, on
your own time. If the future development of motion pictures
had been foreseen at this time, I should never have
obtained his consent. My youth, my inexperience, my sex all
(29:46):
conspired against me. I was given an unused terrace with
an asphalt floor, which made it impossible to set up
a real scene in shaky glass ceiling overlooking a vacant law.
(30:07):
It was in this palace that I made my first efforts.
A backdrop painted by a fan painter and fantasist from
the neighborhood, made a vague decor with rows of wooden
cabbages cut out by a carpenter. Costumes rented here and
there around the Porte Saint Marcain as actors, my friends,
a screaming baby, an anxious mother leaping to and fro
(30:29):
into the camera focus, and my first film, La Fiacho
was born. I should exaggerate if I told you it
was a masterpiece, but the public bend was not jaded.
The actors were young and pleasing, and the film had
enough success that I was allowed to try again. Version
(30:53):
of La fiare scho, like so many early films, is
now lost. Historians still quibble with whether this film actually existed,
suggesting ms Key simply misremembered. Even in her posthumously published memoirs,
there is an asterisk disputing this claim. But Alice held
firm on this point, and you think she'd remember she
(31:15):
remade La fier Schou In nineteen two. Janelle has an
entire book on the subject, Lafia Shou Alice Key's Garden
of Dreams. In this business, you're just happy to find
a fragment. I would love to just have a fragment
of the first Laftio shoe, and it may be found
(31:35):
somewhere sometime. Alice described as having a honeymoon couple a farmer.
They go out to find a baby in the cabbage patch,
and they asked the farm. When the farmacists go ahead
and they look for babies and they find a baby.
(31:55):
There was no fairy in Alice's scenario. There's a lot
out of cabbage patch baby postcards from that period. There
are babies in the cabbages, but there's no fairy. Alice says,
the mother of the baby kept jumping into the field
of focus to tend the baby. So I think it
just happened that the mother became the fairy. That one
(32:19):
minute of film costs like eight days of her salary,
so you know, she wasn't like, well, let's just do
it over. It was thought for a long time that
was a copy of the one is just a single.
The fairy is picking up babies out of the cabbages,
(32:40):
and then there's another one called Sage Fem Premier Class midwife,
first class. Alice hated that title. Later on, she said,
I would never have called it that. I found it
in the newspaper when it came out in nineteen o two,
it was called a Fao shoot, but Gomant I think
uged the name because in the later catalogs that's called
(33:02):
Sam the premiere class. And the third one, honeymoon couple
goes to a baby market. It's like a garden that's
a market, and they look at seven or eight babies
and then they pick one. So that's completely different from
the first one and the second one. They're all three different,
but she called them all lafo shoe. A play does
(33:22):
a production, it's called the same thing every time, but
every time they produce a play, they make changes, new actors,
new costumes, new set. They put their own spin on it.
I think that's what she was thinking. She's just like, yeah,
they're all ufo shoe, but they're different iterations of the
(33:42):
same idea. Back then, films weren't the main feature, you know,
they were only a minute long. They were just side shirts.
You showed films in the store you pay nickel and
just see the film for a minute, or they showed
(34:03):
him at the fair, just had people in and out
seeing the same film. You know, they didn't have theaters
to show movies in. There were theaters for plays, but
there weren't theaters from movies. And it was a one
minute format, so it's like, what are you gonna do
with that? I think fo shoot was paired with a
(34:23):
play called Lommie Fritz. Lommie Fritz was called the National
novel because it was about Franceny day, France had a
(34:46):
really terrible birth rate and infant mortality rate. It's just
a romance. Older bachelor doesn't want to get married, but
he meets this young woman and they fall in love
and finally, in the end of the play they kiss
and they're engaged, or they hug and they're engaged. That's
the end of the play. That play had been playing
(35:07):
in Paris for twenty years, so it's like a classic.
It's like the Nutcracker. People would go see it from
summer to Christmas, and they played it on Christmas Day.
You're not the reference I have in a newspaper puts
them in the same paragraph lomm Me Fritz and this
(35:27):
wonderful chromo landscape of babies being pulled out of cabbages
to have it paired with a very famous play, and
it hit on a national theme. After seeing the couple
apart the whole play, and then they get together at
the end, but they don't get married, they don't have
a baby. This little film about the honeymoon couple finding
a baby in a patch. I'm sure it was just wonderful.
(35:54):
Eiffel was good friends with the administrator of the comedy
front Stays, and that's where I think they showed it it.
She was still doing office work, but when they saw
that the first film made money, they let her do
more films. She was making films from on. She was
(36:14):
in charge of production at Gramont from six She was
over at the studio more than at the office. They
were about five miles apart, and that was a long trip,
you know, enforcing buggy. She ended up moving up close
to the studio. But it was all experimental. They didn't
(36:36):
know what they were doing, which makes it so much fun.
Every Monday we discussed the week's work together. The studio
became a hive of activity, that's what we made a
series of comic films, pursuits, tumbles, clashes, acrobatics, what one
calls slapstick. They started with chase scenes with dogs loose
(37:00):
on his leash and upsets of baby carriage and everybody
chases the dog. That's kind of thing. She used some acrobats.
They do these clown like scenes where they fall and
they climb and they drop in two. The Gaumont company
(37:25):
also developed an earlier method of sync sound. The chronophone,
used a turntable and switchboard to synchronize a recorded disc
with the film strip. She started doing scenes from the
opera in different plays, just scenes with the musical number
that was recorded separately. The actor's with lip sync at
(37:47):
while they played recording. I think it was exciting. They
were just looking for new ideas all the time that
the public was so hungry for everything. Everybody wanted something
new every week, so they just had to keep producing.
And then the film technology got better. It went from
one minute to five minutes to twelve minutes, and then
(38:08):
they started doing, you know, three reels of fifteen minutes
each that was like a feature length. They were all
in competition with each other looking for a novelties to
make their work stand out. It was while working at
Goma that Alice was introduced to a certain young Englishman.
Herbert Blasch had been working for the London Goldmont branch
(38:32):
since nineteen at least in nineteen o six, he comes
to Paris. Alice's cameraman was sick and she had to
go to the south of France to do this film
called Murray, which was a Nobel Prize winning poem and opera.
Herbert Blasch a got a sign to go with her,
learned the camera and all that, so they went to
the south of France. It was romantic, the story was romantic,
(38:56):
the place was romantic. But when he went home, she's
that I've never thought i'd see him again. But then
Gomant sent her to Berlin, where he had gone to
help with clients of Gomants. There. She spent some weeks
with him there in Berlin, he asked her to marry
him there and she said, I have to think about it.
(39:20):
Every man I talked to you says that means no.
They did end up getting married about nine months later
in March, and one of her interviews somebody asked her,
so you got married because Gomant sent you to the US,
and she said no, I was married, and then he
sent us to the US two months later, three days married.
(39:46):
I left my family and my country with a heavy heart,
persuaded that I was abandoning my fine Mattie forever. We
arrived in New York at four o'clock in the morning.
The view of Liberty light in the world, the side
of skyscrapers, and the fog could not chase my sadness.
I saw all that through tears, which I tried in
vain to stop. All around me, I heard exclamations and
(40:10):
enthusiasm in a language of which I understood not one word.
Alison Herbert were sent to Cleveland to hawk the company's
chronophone technology. Gomant wasn't in the US yet. The US
was making movies, and Gomant was going to try to
(40:32):
sell his synchronized sound theaters in the US. They did
sell something, but that wasn't successful. Then he had Herbert
set up an office in New York. The first Godmont
office opened in New York. They're trying to sell into
strident films, but then the Edison Trust starts. Thomas Edison,
(40:59):
an aasty businessman, set up the motion Picture Patents Company
a k a. The Trust to ruthlessly sue manufacturers, distributors,
and exhibitors of films that did not license trust the
equipment and pay the MPCC fees. It seems illegal, and
it was. My husband was anti trust lawyer. I said,
(41:23):
why do they monopolize? He goes to crush the competition.
That is what they're there for, crushing the competition. Everything
they do is to crush it. All these film businesses
were startups, all the film companies. There were probably a
hundred film companies and Edison got it down to like five.
He was put out of business finally by the court
(41:43):
in n but he did so much damage before that,
creating a business environment where they couldn't work, where they
couldn't produce, where they couldn't sell their product to theaters.
Had a camera that was patented that was different than Edison's,
so he could have sold his camera to independence and
carved out his own market. Instead of doing that, he
(42:05):
tried to get in the Trust and they just dangled
him for two or three years and then they cut
him off. Janelle thinks that Alice was working during this time,
but across the board of early cinema. It's hard to
track people's filmographies. There wasn't credits and movies then, right,
And you know why, painters who had long educations learning
(42:27):
how to paint like photographs so in photography came in.
They didn't think photography was art. He said the machine
did it. You know, the camera did the work. So
they didn't give photographers credit at first. That carried over
into movies. It's like, the camera did it. You didn't
do it, You just pointed the camera. It took a
long time to give them credit. Studying this early period
(42:53):
in movie history is right with complications. The films are
often fragmented, damaged or lost, and almost entirely uncredited, sometimes misattributed.
The best insight is often from the fledgling trade journals
of the time, which printed synopsis of the newest films.
The audience wasn't expected to get it from the film.
(43:16):
They would already know the story because say they were
doing a story everybody knew, or they would publish the
story in a magazine in the month before the film
came out, so people would read the story before they
saw the film. Ironically, the day Alice left France, moving
(43:38):
picture World was started in New York. Their first issue,
it's like sixteen pages. I think in the first issue
they say, Okay, if you're in the movie business, just
send us what you got and we'll put it in.
It was really advertising. It was really the movie business
reporting on what they were doing. And so it had
a few synopsis in it, and it was just you know,
(43:59):
add and we're selling this, and we're selling that, and
we're working on this, and it just expanded until I
think in the h each issue was like a hundred
fifty pages. Janelle's book, Illuminating Moments the Films of Alice
ki Blache organizes the write ups of seven hundred and
twenty five productions. I had typed up all her synopsis
(44:23):
to her scenarios because I thought that was important. Even
if all you have is a title, you have something,
You have something to research. She did songs in movies,
she did poems, she did children's stories, novels, plays, operas,
so you have something to look at that tells you
(44:43):
something about her and her time. Many people who have
never set foot in the studio before and perhaps even
since then, believe that we used to work without scenarios.
Nothing could be more false except for the earliest films
twenty or twenty five ms. Everything was prepared in advance,
(45:03):
the story written with care, the cast decor, the costumes
repaired in detail and distributed at each shooting. Otherwise, how
could we have avoided going down and disorder? Even if
we didn't have a script, girl line that actually was
your line to Gomant studio was not being used. Alice said, well,
maybe I can use the studio and make some films.
(45:24):
So she started making films there in She had a
two year old by then. July thirty one, nineteen eleven,
Alice and Herbert went to Europe. There's a picture of
them at Eiffel's lake house in Viva, Switzerland, and they're
both there and Alice was really happy. Then Herbert comes
(45:49):
back to New York on a different ship, so that's weird.
So they were separated for like sixteen days, and then
she came back to New York. She talks to the
trade journal and says, well, I'm going to improve the
Gomant studio. Gomant owned that studio. Eiffel was part of Gomont.
(46:10):
I think she went to Eiffel to say, you know,
can you help improve the Goldmant studio in New York.
It would have been his studio, but I think he
did give her some money to invest in her own studio.
Alison Herbert founded their own company and called it so Lax,
(46:32):
the logo a son on the horizon. Less than two
years later, she had built her own studio in Fort Lee,
New Jersey. She had been through building a studio in
Paris because Gomont built a huge studio. She witnessed that
studio being built. She probably had something to do with
that too, so she knew what she wanted. So Lax
(46:56):
was the biggest fanciest studio of its time, full of
state of the art technology, a removable ceiling, multiple stages,
one made of glass, wide gardens for exterior shooting, a
laboratory on the premises, costume and set fabrication departments with
expansions being added all the time. Their films were made
on Bell and Howe cameras with Eastman Kodak film. It
(47:20):
had everything. It was like her fantasy studio. She said
it cost a hundred thousand dollars to build. She later
said that she got fifty thousand dollars, which was a
million too in profit sharing, but there was no profit
sharing at Gomant. It was a four partner partnership. They
(47:46):
didn't incorporate until janu seven, and she left in March
nineteen o seven. The truth is she only had a
hundred shares of Golmont stock, so she didn't get fifty
grand for a hundred shares. Just call it profit sharing.
You were in on it. It's yours. That's what I
think happened. Okay, here is set. It's so lacks. Alice
(48:09):
no longer had anyone to report to but herself. The
decision of what to make and the burden of how
to finance were hers alone. These are the programs that
America listens to. In her own company, she did three films.
A lot of them were the shorter version five twelve minutes,
but she had twenty or twenty five feature length films.
(48:33):
She wrote most of those two she bought some, but
why should she? She she found it easy to write,
so why should she pay someone ten dollars for a
scenario when she can just write it up herself. And
she had to rewrite everything she bought. She said, you
wouldn't recognize it after I got done with it. So
I think she wrote most of those, but she didn't
claim it. She needed that camouflage to express herself. There's
(48:57):
a funny one called Sticky Woman. She's looking stamps in
a post office. I can't tell if it's her playing
the woman who's doing this or not. I'll go out
on a limb. I definitely think it's her, But she's
looking stamps and this guy comes into the post offs
and he gets all excited about her because she's looking
her lips, and he grabs her and kisses her, and
(49:19):
they get stuck together with all the glue from the stamps.
And then somebody has to come over and cut his
mustache offs so that separate, and then she has a
mustache that relates to the convent because the nuns told
the girls that if you kiss a boy, you'll get
a super mustache. Then there's the consequences of feminism. I
(49:42):
think she's in that one too. I like the ones
that she's in. She's wearing like a bare coat and
carries a rifle. They throw the men out of the
bar and the women are all sitting there and drinking.
So that's a fun one. And there's another one where
she drops in a cabbage patch and has a baby.
That's her too, that one's called Madame has her cravings.
(50:06):
The madame, as portrayed by Alice Ki, also steals candy
from a baby, absent from a distracted diner, a herring
from a beggar, and a salesman's pipe before having her baby,
and a roadside cabbage match. It is a wacky and
wonderfully weird five minutes. So these you can see on YouTube,
(50:28):
but there is no extant film. More associated with Alice
kis Falling Leaves. The published scenario is unique among her catalog.
Falling Leaves is the only one that says Alski blush
on it that I can find. I have found any
other stories with her name on it. The star of
(50:48):
it is a little girl, and it's from the point
of view the little girl. When the cameras watching the scene,
the little girl will be behind somebody, but then she
comes out so you can see her face, so we're
all was looking at her face to see what she's thinking.
She looks like she's six. She has an older sister.
It looks like she's seventeen or eighteen, but she's coughing.
(51:11):
The doctor tells the mother that when the leaves saw
off the trees, she'll be gone. The little girl hears it,
and then she looks at the leaves and she goes like,
I can do something about this. So she gets some
string and she ties the leaves on the trees. While
(51:33):
she's tying the leaves on the trees at night, some
famous inventive doctor comes by and she says, you're a doctor,
come in and see my sister. And he has this
elixir that he's just developed. He cures her and they
get married. So you know, that's the story, but it's
(51:55):
about the little girl. I think Alice did that a lot.
She took a sad story and even a happy ending,
and that was just her way of coping. I think
she drew on her personal experience because she wrote a lot.
She had to write on demand, like every day, producing
those films at Gomant and then again at her own company.
(52:16):
You accuse writers of that, and they go like, no, no, no.
You can't tell which exact detail of the story is
from her life, but some of them are details from
her life. You find this, you find this analysis scenario
is a little six year old girl who's that, you know.
I think her whole life is about what happened to
her when she was a little girl. A lot of
(52:37):
her stories were about these problems come to the family,
but then the family and is reunited. I think that
was one of her driving creative forces because her family
was broken up. I mean, if you have a you know,
easy life, why would you produce art? What for and
(53:00):
had conspired for, Alice was not to last. A series
of ambitious films like the nine feature Dick Whittington and
his Cat lost money for the Soulax studio. The War,
the changing industry, even factors more personal could have had
their impact on the company's downfall. But at the end
of the day, what happened to Solas is anybody's gas.
(53:25):
I have my own business for a few years, and
I was amazed. You know, when you start your business,
people come in and go like, how's it going like
the first day, and you realize right away that you
have to say it's great every day, no matter how
it is, because people won't patronize you if they don't
think you're successful. So even from the first day, you
have to say it's going great, everything's great, And then
(53:48):
the littlest thing can push you over the edge. Bad weather,
an uninjured loss, sick for a week, I mean, you
can't recover. When things got tight in like nineteen the
studio is a nice asset for them. They rented it
to other film companies. Solax transformed again and became for
(54:13):
over eighteen months under the name of Popular Plays and
Players as a player for Universal World, Metro Path and others.
We were rightly called suckers fish who take not only
the bait but the hook. Herbert and Alice were still
working there making films for the other companies, but they
(54:35):
were renting the studio to the other companies. I don't
know if there's a Solax film after nineteen fourteen that's
called the Slax film. But she was making films after
just they were under names of different companies. But that
studio had a fire in nineteen nineteen and then she
sold it in bankruptcy in ninete. I think Herbert had
(54:57):
come to Hollywood en for record. He ran off with
this leading lady she came in about. She worked on
a couple of films with him. Tarnished Reputations was the
last film that she's listed as director on, so was
the last for her. I don't think she liked Hollywood,
(55:17):
so that's when she decided to go back home America.
They say, always takes back anything she gives you. Completely discouraged.
I resolved to return to France with my children. Just
(55:38):
look at it from her point of view. You know,
her mother was getting older. She had a couple of
sisters left in France. They've gotten through the war. She
probably didn't see them for four years during the war.
I think she just wanted to go home, and you know,
her marriage broke up and that was hard for her,
and then she couldn't get work. So you know, who
likes that, and she's in a foreign country. Why not
(55:59):
go home? The film industry and France did not recover.
Gomant made like three films, so there was no place
for her in the film industry in France. So she
started writing until her daughter started working, and she managed.
But I don't I don't think she had a lot
of money in the rest of her life. There's not
(56:24):
a lot known about after she goes back to France.
William Fox was a friend of hers, and she worked
for Fox making film scripts into novels that could be sold.
She did that in the late thirties. By then she
was sixty something, and then she wrote her memoirs in
the nineteen forties early fifties, she got interviewed a lot.
(56:45):
In the fifties and early sixties, her daughter and son
were here in the US, so she came back here
in nineteen sixty four, and she died in the US.
In of the over one thousand films that al Ski
(57:08):
is credited with directing, most of which she wrote, produced,
and occasionally even start in, less than a quarter are
thought to survive. When she returned to America, she went
to look for her films, confident that she could find them.
She never did. Alice went to the Library of Congress
and wrote letters to film archives, but she was only
(57:30):
able to find two or three of her films. Even
in her nineties, Alice, cryptic as ever, described the love
she left behind. She wrote about it in her memoirs, which,
despite her efforts, she could not get published during her lifetime.
(57:51):
In a newspaper interview in ninety three, she let slip
the words my faithful Gustav and no one knew who
she was talking about. Uh. Interviewed by her granddaughter in
front of French TV cameras, in Alice says, I'm glad
they would have married him. Oh. Ephemeral is written and
(58:47):
assembled by and produced by Any Reese, Matt Frederick, and
Tristan McNeil. Our American Eliski was portrayed by Victoria Temple.
Janelle Dietrich is the author five books on Elie k Blache,
including the novel Mademoiselle Alice and her newest work, The
Famous Boarding School at fair Yer. Find them wherever books
(59:10):
are sold, and find us at ephemeral dot show next
(59:51):
time on Ephemeral. My grandfather, William gret Still is commonly
known as the Dean of African American composers. That's mos
sleep because he has a very long list of first
like he was the first black man to conduct a
major radio orchestra. He could get so irritated that people
were always calling him a black composer because he was like,
(01:00:13):
what do you call Copeland a Jewish composer every time
you introduce him. We need to just stop treating it
like black music. Stop only performing the Afromaerican Symphony, stop
only performing it during Black History Month, start playing the
freaking music. Support Ephemeral by recommending an episode, leaving a review,
(01:00:39):
or dropping this a line at Ephemeral Show. More podcasts
from my heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
and learn more at ephemeral dot show
Ephemerals production of I Heart three D audio for full
exposure listen with that phones. Before George Milier shot a
rocket at the moon, before Edwin Porter staged the Great
Train Robbery, after Moybridge captured a horse's feet leaving the ground,
(00:25):
and Edison put subjects in a black box like medical specimens.
After the Lumier Brothers caught the train rolling into the station,
but before there were any theaters to show their work,
and the movie business as we know it was only
a spark in the collective imagination. Alice Kie, the first
and for seventeen years only female film director, shot her
(00:49):
first picture, a fantasy landscape with babies coming out of cabbages.
She wanted to be known as the first female film director,
and she was. The Lumier Brothers projected their first motion
picture on the Wall in and she started in. My
(01:12):
name is Janelle Dietrick, and I've been researching Alice Ki
Blache for about seven years and I've written four books
about her, now five. She did the first actual story film,
which is ridiculous in a minute to do a story.
I mean, now you are used to it. You watched
the commercials on TV and it's incredible, what a story
(01:33):
they can tell in thirty seconds or a minute. But
nobody thought you could do it, and that changed the landscape.
Alice ki Lepronier firm Cinea Still moont Well. Alice's career
has been documented before, the details of her life had
(01:56):
largely gone unchecked by historians. I think she was made
into an icon and that just flattened her out. It's
been hard for people looking through twenty century eyes or
century eyes to see her as a person. If you
say she was the first woman director and she directed
a thousand films, you're really taking her out of context,
(02:19):
because today the director is like really important that he's
got all the status films or two hours long or
you know, a series or whatever. But what she was
doing was like a minute, and she did everything, the scenes,
the costumes. Wow, how did anybody ever do that? Well?
She started in the beginning. Permit me to present to
(02:43):
you the one who has filled my life entirely, my
own Prince Chreming the cinema. He is an elderly gentleman.
As you shall see. What got me started is trying
to fill in the gaps in her memoirs. Oh, they
are so short, there's like a hundred sixty pages. They're beautiful,
(03:06):
but they're cryptic. I have often been asked why I
chose so unfeminine a career. Yet I have not chosen
this career, no doubt. My destiny was traced before my birth,
and I have merely followed a will whose name I
do not know, strange fate which I shall try to
recount for you. Writing in her eighties, Alice began her
(03:32):
retrospective with the emigration of her parents, Mariobert and emil Key.
She says in her memoirs an aunt and uncle of
her mother's had immigrated to South America, and that had
led to her parents marriage, which was arranged. And I
wanted to know why Alice's father went to Chili. There
(03:54):
were revolutions all over Europe, and one third of the
foreigners who came to the California Goldish were French. Most
people don't realize that there are towns in California. They
are called like French. Correct. The American said, yeah, we
want to go for ourselves, so they kicked the foreigners out.
My claim, I just take it out. I don't have
(04:17):
a proof that he came from France to California to Chile.
But it makes sense that he would have because that's
what people did who approached the latitude of Santiago. The
short towns become increasing. They have a host of Europeans
in the New World ended up in the luxurious Chilean
port city of Valparaiso. In Valparaiso, they had a international community.
(04:42):
There were a lot of Germans, a lot of French,
a lot of English. They all have their own hospitals
and their own newspapers. Alice's uncle had a soap factory.
He was very successful. I think they probably made candles,
to which you can imagine everybody needed candles and soap.
I think he bought in Melgi that bookstore in Valpariso
(05:03):
as part of Alice's mother's dowry. As Janelle writes, the
ninete century publisher was often editor, printer, bookseller, banker, and
marketing director. Alice's childhood would for a time be full
of books. In order that one of her children be French.
(05:29):
My numerous brothers and sisters had all been born in Chile.
My mother had valiantly endured a sea voyage of seven weeks.
That's I also accomplished my first voyage between Valporriso and Paris.
It was not to be my last. Her first four
years she was with her grandmother in Geneva or Carug actually,
(05:50):
which is a suburb of Geneva. Grown there was not
wealthy yet in her tiny home. Despite our age differences,
everyone was her joy. We gathered around her table, where
we enjoyed the cherry soup perfumed with wine and cinnamon
or cheese she lovingly served in a bowl of cream.
(06:11):
She told us legends of her native broom and sang
to us in her admirable voice, a song from her youth.
Those were very happy and idyllic for her. But then
her mother came and got her, and her mother was
(06:32):
a stranger, so it was like a stranger kidnapping in
the railroad station. My poor grandmother wept. I cried too,
and through a tantrum, but the departure signal hastened our separation.
Drunk with tears, I slept. At last, her mother, whom
(06:53):
she didn't remember or no, came and just took her
away and took her to Chili. The boat ride it
was like what six weeks, seven weeks, seven weeks, because
they had to go around the horn. There was no
Panama canaliot of this voyage. I have kept few memories,
the long gold ribbon that the moon unrolled to the horizon,
(07:16):
the phosphorescency, the fine fish, my own baptism on crossing
the equator. I think that was traumatic. It kind of
happened to her again. Two years later. She met her
father for the first time when she was fourth, But
her father brought her back to France when she's six
and puts her in the convent, so she had that
(07:39):
family separation trauma twice. I think it was something that
formed her artistically, because she had to find fantasy and
ways to tolerate that kind of trauma. I was enrolled
as a student at the Convent of the Sacred Heart
(07:59):
at v on the Swiss border. I was six years old.
After those two years of sun and gaiety, I seem
to have entered the world of the night birds. The
black clad nun who received me made me mountain to
send stairways traversed long vaulted, dark corridors. The silence was absolute,
(08:22):
the cold penetrating. The methods used were without softness. For
the smallest defenses, there were long periods of kneeling arms
crossed in an icy corridor for braver sins, a cell
and dry bread and water. It was an international school.
(08:45):
The religious community there had schools in different countries Italy, England,
and so they could just rotate the kids and they
could learn different languages. Her older sisters were there and
she knew them from her first four years prusion. But
they kept the kids apart. That's one of the ways
they raised kids. They didn't want them to form attachments
(09:06):
with each other. The parents also devoided too much attachment
to the kids because you know, half the kids died.
There were no antibiotics. The birth rate was low, and
then the survival rate was not great. Childhood was very
difficult in the nineteenth century. Enforced silence was really hard
(09:27):
on them. They just didn't tolerate noise. They let him
out to play for like half an hour. I don't
think they fed them enough. It just was very severe.
They had to sell a lot, work a lot, pray
a lot, you know, no nonsense, so I'm sure it
(09:48):
was hard for all of them. In Paris, of the
women worked in service as maids or laundresses. The other
worked in the needle trades sewing, so what they learned
at the convent was to sew. Never forget. We had
an order of workers that was considered useful skill. Then
(10:12):
if you did get married, then you still needed to sew.
The myth is that women didn't work until after the nineties.
Women always had to work, you know, they just didn't
get paid a lot and didn't have a good job.
Work them hard. Remember, the superior of all is a
sudden of all. I understand. The hard realities of the
(10:41):
convent were contrasted against the sweeping beauty of the surrounding scenery.
The disney castles were all found from around there that
sparks of child's imagination. In Switzerland, they had a lot
of myths, fairies, little gnomes in the ground, a fog
(11:01):
that would come up and be an apparition. People falling
off the cliff were pushed by a dwarf you know,
or something you know. So I think it was like
a land of stories. She thrived on the stories, as
most kids do, but more particularly her. I think they
separated from her parents. It must be magic. Her dad
(11:23):
came and got her out of the convent because he
couldn't afford it anymore. First, he moved to a less
expensive convent, and then came and got her, and they
were all in Paris together in those years. She said
they were in reduced circumstances. Though Alice would not describe
the tragedy of her father's life, she would later elaborate
on similar themes and her films. She did a screen play,
(11:48):
or what they call them scenarios back then, of a
gambler that gambled too much and had a problem. I
think it was about her father. She had said, Well,
scenarios about that. I have another drink. I think that's
one of the problems he had. And they did that
a lot in California and in Chile. Gambling was it.
(12:14):
She had three older sisters and an older brother. Her
older brother was thirteen when he died in eighty, and
her father died in and then a sister also died
in two. From a family of seven, they were down
to four. In Alice's memoir, she covers that in paragraph
(12:36):
she doesn't tell you the dates, not a lot of details.
Another man five years older than her father, became an
important figure in her life, famous engineer Alexander Gustave Eiffel.
To understand Alice, it's important to know a little about Eiffel.
(12:58):
I think she knew him before her father died. I
think he was a friend of her father's. He solved
a lot of problems in engineering. Bridges that carried the
train across rivers, and skyscrapers they say were built based
on his calculations. The Statue of Liberty was taller than
any building in New York at the time, and that's
(13:19):
a structure holding that up that he designed. So he
had a whole career of building bridges, public works. Mostly
to do public works, he had to get along with everybody.
He'd been on projects all over the world. He built
things in South America, Asia, Europe. He had to know
(13:41):
those people, socialized with those people, get along with those people,
do a good job on the last project he did.
He had to be in with the people who had
the purse to get those jobs. Eifel went to Chili
in seventy two, the year before Alice was born. They
all talk in South America about bridges that Eiffel may
(14:03):
have done in Chile, and they're going like, we can't
find any of that. We really can credit him with
what he did as a bread and butter thing. I mean,
he had big bridges and big projects. But his business
he developed these portable bridges. They were like kits, so
he would ship the prefabricated parts to South America and
then people could build their own. I saw a bridge
(14:26):
that looked like one of his bridges in Chile, but
it's got this other guy's name on it. I'm going like, yeah,
but that's how they did it, you know, they got
the kit and then they put it together. He had
built forty bridges. Then in the eighties he started building
the Eiffel Tower. The Eiffel Tower was a culmination of
(14:51):
his engineering career that they called him an artist after
he built affe tower. The newspaper Le Figaro had an
office in the Eiffel Tower, so they covered him pretty regularly.
If he did something or went to something charitable, or
(15:13):
attended a funeral or whatever, they wrote it down. So
he was famous. But then he had a scandal. In
eighteen seventy nine, he was at a conference talking about
building the Panama Canal. The guy that built the Panama
Canal built the Suez Canal, and so everybody trusted him
(15:33):
to build the Panama Canal. But the Suez Canal was
sea level. Panama canal had to go over a mountain
for fifty miles. They were just going to dig through
that mountain. And everybody believed that this guy could do
it because he had done the Suez Canal. So they
all threw their money in and he couldn't do it.
It just was impossible with the equipment they had been
(15:54):
maybe they could do it now. Eiffel and French engineers
recommended another route. He had developed the locks, and they're
like giant bathtub that you fill up with water and
the boats go up one side of the Istmas and
down the other. There's like ten locks. He designed that
and they actually used his design. The French tried to
build it until the Americans picked it up in nineteen
(16:18):
o four and finished it in nineteen fourteen, and it
was completed the same day World War One started, so
there was like no celebration. The French effort failed, not
because of a flaw on design, but because the funding
fell through, with no canal and no payback on their investment.
The public was outraged. The Eiffel was only a contractor.
(16:42):
His name was at the center of the controversy and
the public just hated him. He would probably like Bernie
Mudoff or something. Back then, he wasn't so popular like
he is now in mythology. The Panama Canal scandal effectively
ended his engineering career, just as the career of the
first female filmmaker was about to begin. In her memoirs
(17:11):
and later to TV cameras, Alice described the great romance
of her life to a man she never named. In print,
Alice refers to this mysterious figure like cryptic initials. Peeb
must have been seventy years old at that epoch. I
was seventeen, but I was literally in love with him.
(17:34):
Every Thursday evening was a party from me. We passed
those evenings in Peeb's home with his two daughters. I
sat close to him, my hand and his while his
two daughters served tea or played music, and my mother
knitted or embroidered. Janelle thinks that man was efful. Piecing
(17:56):
their two biographies together is the subject of Janelle's book,
Alice and Eiffel, a New History of early Cinema and
the love story Kept Secret first century. He was married
and had five kids, and his wife died in seven
and he never remarried. He didn't have a woman in
his life for forty five years, but he was like
(18:17):
the most eligible bachelor in Europe. There was this corresponding
gap in his life, same as her. She had this
gap of no boyfriend until she was thirty three, and
she's a beautiful woman and you're gonna I don't know
about that, you know. And then he has the same gap,
like nobody knows what he was doing. He wasn't doing
the Panama Canal. He was out of his business. So
(18:39):
once I put them together, then the chore was, well,
what evidence is there that they had a relationship. It's
mostly based on her words, because she was still talking
about it when she was ninety. People expect one piece
of evidence to prove everything. They call it the smoking gun,
which is just a myth. There's no such thing. He
(18:59):
never or find a smoking gun that would be catching
somebody red handed. I like to say, each piece of
evidence has its own unique value. Never know what it's
going to be in the end. In a few months
after the death of a meal Key, a private company
was formed to combat one of the greatest threats facing
(19:20):
nineteenth century France, infant mortality. Eiffel knew everybody who founded
Mutah to Maternelle, where her mother worked right after her
father died. He wasn't one of them, He wasn't an officer,
but he knew all those people. They were his friends.
Her mother worked there for a while, but then she
(19:40):
had to quit for some reason. I think they stopped
paying her. Why else would she quit. Alice had to
learn a way to make a living. A family friend
told her mother that she should take stenography and typing.
I think that was Ifel. It was Pepe who advised
my mother to have me take typing and stenography lessons,
(20:00):
a science quite new in those days. You should have
almost no movement in your wrists and forearms, she said.
Her teacher was a stenographer from the Chamber of Deputies. Well,
he knew all them too, R F four, hey, I,
hey nine, D E J and and so forth. If
(20:23):
you take your twenty century eyes and go oh, she
was a secretary. Well now people say things like, just
as secretary, I would say, Hi, Joe, I understand you're
gonna be helping us out here. Yes, man. Secretaries were
men because they were the protege that owner of the
business is right hand. Mann was do Nelson. That's my
first John, I had a picture of stenographers and dred
(20:47):
and there's all these men and two women. That's it.
It was very prestigious. The afternoon mail just came in.
You think you can handle in? Oh yeah. World War
One came along and the men had to go to
woll Are and women pretty much took over that job.
We are still short millions of hands, we must call
upon women. And then once the job gets feminized, it
(21:09):
gets associated with women, then men don't want that job.
The same thing happened in reverse with stewardesses today joined
me on board. Women only worked on the airplanes serving cokes.
Then men start to get the job and the wages
tripled just because of the status from men doing a job.
The government's policy is that women should get the same
(21:31):
pay that men get or similar work. First secretarial job
was at a Barnish factory in March. She gets the
job at let's not go mind yet. It's called the
Comptoire General the Photography. The camera shop where Alice would
get her start, would in fact be purchased by Eiffel
(21:53):
shortly after she was hired. Eiffel knew the former owner,
who was Felix max ra Shard, and the other former owner,
who was Joseph Bellow. He knew both of them for
years before the company changed hands. In Felix Max Ras
Shard had been sued by his brother for a non
(22:16):
competition agreement that he had signed. The brothers were in
partnership of Shard Prayers, which was the scientific instruments. Felix
Max Ras Shard built a weather station on top of
the Eiffel Tower and he got a award for it
from the Region of Honor and not made his brother mad.
The other brother, Jules were Shard, sued Felix Max Ras
(22:37):
Shard for buying a camera shop. That camera shop had
already existed, and then in late the court ruled against
Felix Max Ras Shard and said, yeah, you can't have
a camera shop. Camera is a precision instrument. They ruled
against him and he appealed in the fall of took
a year and a half for that decision to come down.
(23:00):
So Felix Max for Sharon is waiting to hear if
he's gonna win his appeal or not. He approached Eiffel
and Eiffel said, get someone to manage the compto our
general to photography, and that's when leon go Mont was hired.
Alice was also hired about the same time. Leon go
Mont started March first, that's his contract, has a written contract,
(23:25):
and I think Alice started that month because the advertising
changed to be more appealing to women. You don't have
to be embarrassed to take a clumsy camera on your vacation.
You can just get this little camera and they'll sit
in with your outfit. So I think she was there March,
just within a few weeks of when Gomont was there.
(23:49):
The Court of Appeal didn't render their decision until May,
and that's when Eiffel fellow, So they're following in Biziniar
and then Godmant wanted to get in on it. They
bought the company and formed a partnership of four partners
that was called el See. Because Eiffel was still in
scandal even in December ninety four, they were thinking of
(24:11):
stripping his medals away. He had all these Legion of
Honor medals and there we should take those away from him.
He was still having to lay low. Shaman would largely
take the credit. He has some responsibility for creating his
own image as the inventor, the genius Mr Gamant. He's
(24:35):
the brilliant inventor that started everything. I think he just
nosed his way in there. He was more just a
businessman that watched everybody and made sure they did their job.
He was harsh. He was a harsh employer. If Leon
Gomant's role in the history of motion pictures has been
(24:57):
exaggerated over time, Eiffel's contributions have been chronically understated. Nobody
knew about his years at Gaumont. They figured, well, he's
just a rich guy that invested money. What they call
a silent partner. Sit down and they get you out comfortable.
They wait in a moment. Actually he was president. Please.
(25:17):
The assumption is, well, if you're rich, why would you work.
But working on motion pictures was interesting. He had always
he was taking pictures in the eighteen seventies. Back then
they were developing in themselves, and his friends were like
Jules Jansen, who did the first motion picture of an eclipse,
and then Mary who did sequential photography ten years later.
(25:40):
He was friends with him, so he was there at
the beginning. We showed them how easy the camera was
to use. I knew almost nothing of this art. I
had to familiarize myself with the sizes of plates, the
variety of papers, the chemical products, the different camera names,
the qualities focus, thanks, shutters, etcetera. Happily I learned quickly
(26:07):
it was a camera manufacturer and cameras back then, most
of you just had professionals taking pictures. But the compt
Our General to Photography was advertised as photography for amateurs,
and they gave classes every day, every day for free.
The way he explained that it doesn't seem too hard,
(26:29):
like two hours, come down and learn how to use
a camera, how to develop the film. You know, it
wasn't just click and shoot. You had to set your
shutters and load the camera, all kinds of things that
you don't have to do anymore. And it sets the
lens by itself too, so you're always ready for the
next picture instantly. And then developing the film you had
(26:49):
to buy chemicals and learn how to build a dark room.
They turned out great, wonderful color too. I think she
probably taught that because she said she had to learn
all about the plates and the papers and the chemicals,
so I think she probably had to teach that class.
They're probably other people doing it as well, but that
was probably one of the things she had to do,
(27:10):
which would have prepared her for them doing more with
the camera. One day in March of Augustine, Louis Lumier
stopped by the shop to see Gomont. The Gomont company
bought their chemicals or papers from Luliers, so they had
a connection there and Gomont became good friends with the Luniers.
(27:33):
They came to invite him to attend a mean of
the Street Nationale where the two brothers would present new
camera of their invention. I was present at the interview
and they invited me also, but they refused to give
us any explication of their instrument. You'll see. They said,
(27:54):
it's a surprise. They had done motion pictures, but they
were all you know, looked through a little viewer and
one person sees it DEMONI had one now was just
a disc that you roll, so it was very limited
to what you could see on the discs be like
eighteen pictures on the disc and then you just turn
it and you'd see the moving picture. But the loomire
has put it on a roll of film then projected
(28:15):
on the wall, and it just astounded everybody. March, they
showed it to their professional peers. First they had several
other showings in June, and then in December they had
the first screening for the public, and the public was
totally woud just to see people on the wall or
(28:38):
on the screen larger than life. It was astonishing at
the beginning. We're so used to it, but we're still
very thrown by images. I think images are powerful. They
had been created a little laboratory for the development and
printing of short shots parades, station's portraits of the laboratory personnel,
(29:02):
which served as demonstration films. But we're both brief and repetitious.
Daughter of an editor. I had read a good deal
and retained quite a bit. I had done amateur theatricals,
and I thought that one might do better than these
demonstration films. Gathering my courage, I timidly proposed to Gorman
that I might write one or two little scenes and
(29:25):
have a few friends performing them. Yeah, yeah, that's silly,
But go ahead if you if you like so, on
your own time. If the future development of motion pictures
had been foreseen at this time, I should never have
obtained his consent. My youth, my inexperience, my sex all
(29:46):
conspired against me. I was given an unused terrace with
an asphalt floor, which made it impossible to set up
a real scene in shaky glass ceiling overlooking a vacant law.
(30:07):
It was in this palace that I made my first efforts.
A backdrop painted by a fan painter and fantasist from
the neighborhood, made a vague decor with rows of wooden
cabbages cut out by a carpenter. Costumes rented here and
there around the Porte Saint Marcain as actors, my friends,
a screaming baby, an anxious mother leaping to and fro
(30:29):
into the camera focus, and my first film, La Fiacho
was born. I should exaggerate if I told you it
was a masterpiece, but the public bend was not jaded.
The actors were young and pleasing, and the film had
enough success that I was allowed to try again. Version
(30:53):
of La fiare scho, like so many early films, is
now lost. Historians still quibble with whether this film actually existed,
suggesting ms Key simply misremembered. Even in her posthumously published memoirs,
there is an asterisk disputing this claim. But Alice held
firm on this point, and you think she'd remember she
(31:15):
remade La fier Schou In nineteen two. Janelle has an
entire book on the subject, Lafia Shou Alice Key's Garden
of Dreams. In this business, you're just happy to find
a fragment. I would love to just have a fragment
of the first Laftio shoe, and it may be found
(31:35):
somewhere sometime. Alice described as having a honeymoon couple a farmer.
They go out to find a baby in the cabbage patch,
and they asked the farm. When the farmacists go ahead
and they look for babies and they find a baby.
(31:55):
There was no fairy in Alice's scenario. There's a lot
out of cabbage patch baby postcards from that period. There
are babies in the cabbages, but there's no fairy. Alice says,
the mother of the baby kept jumping into the field
of focus to tend the baby. So I think it
just happened that the mother became the fairy. That one
(32:19):
minute of film costs like eight days of her salary,
so you know, she wasn't like, well, let's just do
it over. It was thought for a long time that
was a copy of the one is just a single.
The fairy is picking up babies out of the cabbages,
(32:40):
and then there's another one called Sage Fem Premier Class midwife,
first class. Alice hated that title. Later on, she said,
I would never have called it that. I found it
in the newspaper when it came out in nineteen o two,
it was called a Fao shoot, but Gomant I think
uged the name because in the later catalogs that's called
(33:02):
Sam the premiere class. And the third one, honeymoon couple
goes to a baby market. It's like a garden that's
a market, and they look at seven or eight babies
and then they pick one. So that's completely different from
the first one and the second one. They're all three different,
but she called them all lafo shoe. A play does
(33:22):
a production, it's called the same thing every time, but
every time they produce a play, they make changes, new actors,
new costumes, new set. They put their own spin on it.
I think that's what she was thinking. She's just like, yeah,
they're all ufo shoe, but they're different iterations of the
(33:42):
same idea. Back then, films weren't the main feature, you know,
they were only a minute long. They were just side shirts.
You showed films in the store you pay nickel and
just see the film for a minute, or they showed
(34:03):
him at the fair, just had people in and out
seeing the same film. You know, they didn't have theaters
to show movies in. There were theaters for plays, but
there weren't theaters from movies. And it was a one
minute format, so it's like, what are you gonna do
with that? I think fo shoot was paired with a
(34:23):
play called Lommie Fritz. Lommie Fritz was called the National
novel because it was about Franceny day, France had a
(34:46):
really terrible birth rate and infant mortality rate. It's just
a romance. Older bachelor doesn't want to get married, but
he meets this young woman and they fall in love
and finally, in the end of the play they kiss
and they're engaged, or they hug and they're engaged. That's
the end of the play. That play had been playing
(35:07):
in Paris for twenty years, so it's like a classic.
It's like the Nutcracker. People would go see it from
summer to Christmas, and they played it on Christmas Day.
You're not the reference I have in a newspaper puts
them in the same paragraph lomm Me Fritz and this
(35:27):
wonderful chromo landscape of babies being pulled out of cabbages
to have it paired with a very famous play, and
it hit on a national theme. After seeing the couple
apart the whole play, and then they get together at
the end, but they don't get married, they don't have
a baby. This little film about the honeymoon couple finding
a baby in a patch. I'm sure it was just wonderful.
(35:54):
Eiffel was good friends with the administrator of the comedy
front Stays, and that's where I think they showed it it.
She was still doing office work, but when they saw
that the first film made money, they let her do
more films. She was making films from on. She was
(36:14):
in charge of production at Gramont from six She was
over at the studio more than at the office. They
were about five miles apart, and that was a long trip,
you know, enforcing buggy. She ended up moving up close
to the studio. But it was all experimental. They didn't
(36:36):
know what they were doing, which makes it so much fun.
Every Monday we discussed the week's work together. The studio
became a hive of activity, that's what we made a
series of comic films, pursuits, tumbles, clashes, acrobatics, what one
calls slapstick. They started with chase scenes with dogs loose
(37:00):
on his leash and upsets of baby carriage and everybody
chases the dog. That's kind of thing. She used some acrobats.
They do these clown like scenes where they fall and
they climb and they drop in two. The Gaumont company
(37:25):
also developed an earlier method of sync sound. The chronophone,
used a turntable and switchboard to synchronize a recorded disc
with the film strip. She started doing scenes from the
opera in different plays, just scenes with the musical number
that was recorded separately. The actor's with lip sync at
(37:47):
while they played recording. I think it was exciting. They
were just looking for new ideas all the time that
the public was so hungry for everything. Everybody wanted something
new every week, so they just had to keep producing.
And then the film technology got better. It went from
one minute to five minutes to twelve minutes, and then
(38:08):
they started doing, you know, three reels of fifteen minutes
each that was like a feature length. They were all
in competition with each other looking for a novelties to
make their work stand out. It was while working at
Goma that Alice was introduced to a certain young Englishman.
Herbert Blasch had been working for the London Goldmont branch
(38:32):
since nineteen at least in nineteen o six, he comes
to Paris. Alice's cameraman was sick and she had to
go to the south of France to do this film
called Murray, which was a Nobel Prize winning poem and opera.
Herbert Blasch a got a sign to go with her,
learned the camera and all that, so they went to
the south of France. It was romantic, the story was romantic,
(38:56):
the place was romantic. But when he went home, she's
that I've never thought i'd see him again. But then
Gomant sent her to Berlin, where he had gone to
help with clients of Gomants. There. She spent some weeks
with him there in Berlin, he asked her to marry
him there and she said, I have to think about it.
(39:20):
Every man I talked to you says that means no.
They did end up getting married about nine months later
in March, and one of her interviews somebody asked her,
so you got married because Gomant sent you to the US,
and she said no, I was married, and then he
sent us to the US two months later, three days married.
(39:46):
I left my family and my country with a heavy heart,
persuaded that I was abandoning my fine Mattie forever. We
arrived in New York at four o'clock in the morning.
The view of Liberty light in the world, the side
of skyscrapers, and the fog could not chase my sadness.
I saw all that through tears, which I tried in
vain to stop. All around me, I heard exclamations and
(40:10):
enthusiasm in a language of which I understood not one word.
Alison Herbert were sent to Cleveland to hawk the company's
chronophone technology. Gomant wasn't in the US yet. The US
was making movies, and Gomant was going to try to
(40:32):
sell his synchronized sound theaters in the US. They did
sell something, but that wasn't successful. Then he had Herbert
set up an office in New York. The first Godmont
office opened in New York. They're trying to sell into
strident films, but then the Edison Trust starts. Thomas Edison,
(40:59):
an aasty businessman, set up the motion Picture Patents Company
a k a. The Trust to ruthlessly sue manufacturers, distributors,
and exhibitors of films that did not license trust the
equipment and pay the MPCC fees. It seems illegal, and
it was. My husband was anti trust lawyer. I said,
(41:23):
why do they monopolize? He goes to crush the competition.
That is what they're there for, crushing the competition. Everything
they do is to crush it. All these film businesses
were startups, all the film companies. There were probably a
hundred film companies and Edison got it down to like five.
He was put out of business finally by the court
(41:43):
in n but he did so much damage before that,
creating a business environment where they couldn't work, where they
couldn't produce, where they couldn't sell their product to theaters.
Had a camera that was patented that was different than Edison's,
so he could have sold his camera to independence and
carved out his own market. Instead of doing that, he
(42:05):
tried to get in the Trust and they just dangled
him for two or three years and then they cut
him off. Janelle thinks that Alice was working during this time,
but across the board of early cinema. It's hard to
track people's filmographies. There wasn't credits and movies then, right,
And you know why, painters who had long educations learning
(42:27):
how to paint like photographs so in photography came in.
They didn't think photography was art. He said the machine
did it. You know, the camera did the work. So
they didn't give photographers credit at first. That carried over
into movies. It's like, the camera did it. You didn't
do it, You just pointed the camera. It took a
long time to give them credit. Studying this early period
(42:53):
in movie history is right with complications. The films are
often fragmented, damaged or lost, and almost entirely uncredited, sometimes misattributed.
The best insight is often from the fledgling trade journals
of the time, which printed synopsis of the newest films.
The audience wasn't expected to get it from the film.
(43:16):
They would already know the story because say they were
doing a story everybody knew, or they would publish the
story in a magazine in the month before the film
came out, so people would read the story before they
saw the film. Ironically, the day Alice left France, moving
(43:38):
picture World was started in New York. Their first issue,
it's like sixteen pages. I think in the first issue
they say, Okay, if you're in the movie business, just
send us what you got and we'll put it in.
It was really advertising. It was really the movie business
reporting on what they were doing. And so it had
a few synopsis in it, and it was just you know,
(43:59):
add and we're selling this, and we're selling that, and
we're working on this, and it just expanded until I
think in the h each issue was like a hundred
fifty pages. Janelle's book, Illuminating Moments the Films of Alice
ki Blache organizes the write ups of seven hundred and
twenty five productions. I had typed up all her synopsis
(44:23):
to her scenarios because I thought that was important. Even
if all you have is a title, you have something,
You have something to research. She did songs in movies,
she did poems, she did children's stories, novels, plays, operas,
so you have something to look at that tells you
(44:43):
something about her and her time. Many people who have
never set foot in the studio before and perhaps even
since then, believe that we used to work without scenarios.
Nothing could be more false except for the earliest films
twenty or twenty five ms. Everything was prepared in advance,
(45:03):
the story written with care, the cast decor, the costumes
repaired in detail and distributed at each shooting. Otherwise, how
could we have avoided going down and disorder? Even if
we didn't have a script, girl line that actually was
your line to Gomant studio was not being used. Alice said, well,
maybe I can use the studio and make some films.
(45:24):
So she started making films there in She had a
two year old by then. July thirty one, nineteen eleven,
Alice and Herbert went to Europe. There's a picture of
them at Eiffel's lake house in Viva, Switzerland, and they're
both there and Alice was really happy. Then Herbert comes
(45:49):
back to New York on a different ship, so that's weird.
So they were separated for like sixteen days, and then
she came back to New York. She talks to the
trade journal and says, well, I'm going to improve the
Gomant studio. Gomant owned that studio. Eiffel was part of Gomont.
(46:10):
I think she went to Eiffel to say, you know,
can you help improve the Goldmant studio in New York.
It would have been his studio, but I think he
did give her some money to invest in her own studio.
Alison Herbert founded their own company and called it so Lax,
(46:32):
the logo a son on the horizon. Less than two
years later, she had built her own studio in Fort Lee,
New Jersey. She had been through building a studio in
Paris because Gomont built a huge studio. She witnessed that
studio being built. She probably had something to do with
that too, so she knew what she wanted. So Lax
(46:56):
was the biggest fanciest studio of its time, full of
state of the art technology, a removable ceiling, multiple stages,
one made of glass, wide gardens for exterior shooting, a
laboratory on the premises, costume and set fabrication departments with
expansions being added all the time. Their films were made
on Bell and Howe cameras with Eastman Kodak film. It
(47:20):
had everything. It was like her fantasy studio. She said
it cost a hundred thousand dollars to build. She later
said that she got fifty thousand dollars, which was a
million too in profit sharing, but there was no profit
sharing at Gomant. It was a four partner partnership. They
(47:46):
didn't incorporate until janu seven, and she left in March
nineteen o seven. The truth is she only had a
hundred shares of Golmont stock, so she didn't get fifty
grand for a hundred shares. Just call it profit sharing.
You were in on it. It's yours. That's what I
think happened. Okay, here is set. It's so lacks. Alice
(48:09):
no longer had anyone to report to but herself. The
decision of what to make and the burden of how
to finance were hers alone. These are the programs that
America listens to. In her own company, she did three films.
A lot of them were the shorter version five twelve minutes,
but she had twenty or twenty five feature length films.
(48:33):
She wrote most of those two she bought some, but
why should she? She she found it easy to write,
so why should she pay someone ten dollars for a
scenario when she can just write it up herself. And
she had to rewrite everything she bought. She said, you
wouldn't recognize it after I got done with it. So
I think she wrote most of those, but she didn't
claim it. She needed that camouflage to express herself. There's
(48:57):
a funny one called Sticky Woman. She's looking stamps in
a post office. I can't tell if it's her playing
the woman who's doing this or not. I'll go out
on a limb. I definitely think it's her, But she's
looking stamps and this guy comes into the post offs
and he gets all excited about her because she's looking
her lips, and he grabs her and kisses her, and
(49:19):
they get stuck together with all the glue from the stamps.
And then somebody has to come over and cut his
mustache offs so that separate, and then she has a
mustache that relates to the convent because the nuns told
the girls that if you kiss a boy, you'll get
a super mustache. Then there's the consequences of feminism. I
(49:42):
think she's in that one too. I like the ones
that she's in. She's wearing like a bare coat and
carries a rifle. They throw the men out of the
bar and the women are all sitting there and drinking.
So that's a fun one. And there's another one where
she drops in a cabbage patch and has a baby.
That's her too, that one's called Madame has her cravings.
(50:06):
The madame, as portrayed by Alice Ki, also steals candy
from a baby, absent from a distracted diner, a herring
from a beggar, and a salesman's pipe before having her baby,
and a roadside cabbage match. It is a wacky and
wonderfully weird five minutes. So these you can see on YouTube,
(50:28):
but there is no extant film. More associated with Alice
kis Falling Leaves. The published scenario is unique among her catalog.
Falling Leaves is the only one that says Alski blush
on it that I can find. I have found any
other stories with her name on it. The star of
(50:48):
it is a little girl, and it's from the point
of view the little girl. When the cameras watching the scene,
the little girl will be behind somebody, but then she
comes out so you can see her face, so we're
all was looking at her face to see what she's thinking.
She looks like she's six. She has an older sister.
It looks like she's seventeen or eighteen, but she's coughing.
(51:11):
The doctor tells the mother that when the leaves saw
off the trees, she'll be gone. The little girl hears it,
and then she looks at the leaves and she goes like,
I can do something about this. So she gets some
string and she ties the leaves on the trees. While
(51:33):
she's tying the leaves on the trees at night, some
famous inventive doctor comes by and she says, you're a doctor,
come in and see my sister. And he has this
elixir that he's just developed. He cures her and they
get married. So you know, that's the story, but it's
(51:55):
about the little girl. I think Alice did that a lot.
She took a sad story and even a happy ending,
and that was just her way of coping. I think
she drew on her personal experience because she wrote a lot.
She had to write on demand, like every day, producing
those films at Gomant and then again at her own company.
(52:16):
You accuse writers of that, and they go like, no, no, no.
You can't tell which exact detail of the story is
from her life, but some of them are details from
her life. You find this, you find this analysis scenario
is a little six year old girl who's that, you know.
I think her whole life is about what happened to
her when she was a little girl. A lot of
(52:37):
her stories were about these problems come to the family,
but then the family and is reunited. I think that
was one of her driving creative forces because her family
was broken up. I mean, if you have a you know,
easy life, why would you produce art? What for and
(53:00):
had conspired for, Alice was not to last. A series
of ambitious films like the nine feature Dick Whittington and
his Cat lost money for the Soulax studio. The War,
the changing industry, even factors more personal could have had
their impact on the company's downfall. But at the end
of the day, what happened to Solas is anybody's gas.
(53:25):
I have my own business for a few years, and
I was amazed. You know, when you start your business,
people come in and go like, how's it going like
the first day, and you realize right away that you
have to say it's great every day, no matter how
it is, because people won't patronize you if they don't
think you're successful. So even from the first day, you
have to say it's going great, everything's great, And then
(53:48):
the littlest thing can push you over the edge. Bad weather,
an uninjured loss, sick for a week, I mean, you
can't recover. When things got tight in like nineteen the
studio is a nice asset for them. They rented it
to other film companies. Solax transformed again and became for
(54:13):
over eighteen months under the name of Popular Plays and
Players as a player for Universal World, Metro Path and others.
We were rightly called suckers fish who take not only
the bait but the hook. Herbert and Alice were still
working there making films for the other companies, but they
(54:35):
were renting the studio to the other companies. I don't
know if there's a Solax film after nineteen fourteen that's
called the Slax film. But she was making films after
just they were under names of different companies. But that
studio had a fire in nineteen nineteen and then she
sold it in bankruptcy in ninete. I think Herbert had
(54:57):
come to Hollywood en for record. He ran off with
this leading lady she came in about. She worked on
a couple of films with him. Tarnished Reputations was the
last film that she's listed as director on, so was
the last for her. I don't think she liked Hollywood,
(55:17):
so that's when she decided to go back home America.
They say, always takes back anything she gives you. Completely discouraged.
I resolved to return to France with my children. Just
(55:38):
look at it from her point of view. You know,
her mother was getting older. She had a couple of
sisters left in France. They've gotten through the war. She
probably didn't see them for four years during the war.
I think she just wanted to go home, and you know,
her marriage broke up and that was hard for her,
and then she couldn't get work. So you know, who
likes that, and she's in a foreign country. Why not
(55:59):
go home? The film industry and France did not recover.
Gomant made like three films, so there was no place
for her in the film industry in France. So she
started writing until her daughter started working, and she managed.
But I don't I don't think she had a lot
of money in the rest of her life. There's not
(56:24):
a lot known about after she goes back to France.
William Fox was a friend of hers, and she worked
for Fox making film scripts into novels that could be sold.
She did that in the late thirties. By then she
was sixty something, and then she wrote her memoirs in
the nineteen forties early fifties, she got interviewed a lot.
(56:45):
In the fifties and early sixties, her daughter and son
were here in the US, so she came back here
in nineteen sixty four, and she died in the US.
In of the over one thousand films that al Ski
(57:08):
is credited with directing, most of which she wrote, produced,
and occasionally even start in, less than a quarter are
thought to survive. When she returned to America, she went
to look for her films, confident that she could find them.
She never did. Alice went to the Library of Congress
and wrote letters to film archives, but she was only
(57:30):
able to find two or three of her films. Even
in her nineties, Alice, cryptic as ever, described the love
she left behind. She wrote about it in her memoirs, which,
despite her efforts, she could not get published during her lifetime.
(57:51):
In a newspaper interview in ninety three, she let slip
the words my faithful Gustav and no one knew who
she was talking about. Uh. Interviewed by her granddaughter in
front of French TV cameras, in Alice says, I'm glad
they would have married him. Oh. Ephemeral is written and
(58:47):
assembled by and produced by Any Reese, Matt Frederick, and
Tristan McNeil. Our American Eliski was portrayed by Victoria Temple.
Janelle Dietrich is the author five books on Elie k Blache,
including the novel Mademoiselle Alice and her newest work, The
Famous Boarding School at fair Yer. Find them wherever books
(59:10):
are sold, and find us at ephemeral dot show next
(59:51):
time on Ephemeral. My grandfather, William gret Still is commonly
known as the Dean of African American composers. That's mos
sleep because he has a very long list of first
like he was the first black man to conduct a
major radio orchestra. He could get so irritated that people
were always calling him a black composer because he was like,
(01:00:13):
what do you call Copeland a Jewish composer every time
you introduce him. We need to just stop treating it
like black music. Stop only performing the Afromaerican Symphony, stop
only performing it during Black History Month, start playing the
freaking music. Support Ephemeral by recommending an episode, leaving a review,
(01:00:39):
or dropping this a line at Ephemeral Show. More podcasts
from my heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
and learn more at ephemeral dot show
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