Silent Film Nerd

Maria, my fellow research assistant, and I work for a professor we affectionately like to call, "crazy Jane" or CJ for short. CJ is very disorganized and Maria and I often consider quitting. But I think we like writing about silent film too much to actually give notice.

Doing editorial work and research on a book about silent film era women who worked behind the camera may not seem like the most fascinating thing, but really, it's like playing six degrees of separation--SOAP OPERA STYLE!

Everyone is connected to everyone else! And even in early Hollywood everyone was slutty and sleeping around! Jane Murfin (the subject of my first article) was a writer, who in the sound era would go on to co-write such films as Pride and Prejudice and The Women (both 1939) but during the silent era, she was most famous for writing films about a dog named Strongheart, who was co-owned by her lover (note: NOT husband) director, Larry Trimble. Trimble was very handsome and a bit of a ladies man--he also had a serious thing for writers. When Murfin dumped him he married writer Marian Blackton. Marian was the daughter of the founder of Vitagraph Studios, J. Stuart Blackton. Nepotism was (and clearly still is) how you get ahead in Hollywood, and while J. Stuart ran the studio, Marian always had a job as her father's script supervisor or screenwriter. One of the first films she wrote (which her father, of course, directed) was The Redeeming Sin, starring Alla Nazimova. Nazimova was a notorious bi-sexual (as well as Nancy Reagan's godmother!?!?!) who had affairs primarily with women, including the brilliant, successful (and very butch) director, Dorothy Arzner. Arzner started as a editor on the now lost, Too Much Mustard (1919), a film directed by Donald Crisp. Crisp is much better known as an actor in such films as National Velvet and How Green Was My Valley. He was also married for a long time to the very place we started: Jane Murfin.


And that's not the half of it. Sex scandals! Abortions! Lesbians! Murder! Yep the silent era had it all.

Now you know why Maria and have such a hard time actually quitting.