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