2013 Essays

Lule Warrenton

Gaines, Jane

We do not as yet have documentation on the “Hollywood Girls’ Club” or “the first all-woman film company” that Lule Warrenton was reputed to have started in 1923 (Slide 1996, 48). These would not have been her first efforts to get outside the niche she had occupied since she began at Universal in 1913. Dubbed “Mother” Warrenton, as a character actor she specialized in maternal roles. The first reference to Lule Warrenton as a director can be found in a 1916 article in the Moving Picture Weekly featuring the formation of her company within Universal Studios, formed to produce a picture then titled The Calling of Lindy. The following year, Moving Picture World announced that with the production of The Birds’ Christmas Carol, Warrenton would be “the first and only woman producer with a studio and company all her own” (1030). We now have a historical vantage on such hyperbole, however, and wonder how many times publicity from this period used the novelty of a woman producer or director to promote a picture.