Unmarked Graves and Career Pivots: The Vaudeville Eternal

Hey, Team.

Doing a quasi history lesson piece this time, attempting to use old Hollywood to illustrate modern monopolized IP pumping slop and the stan culture that is trapped slurping it up. I genuinely believe more people would be drawn to more enriching things if we simply! Could afford! Housing! And Healthcare! But alas we can’t and so we must seek our opiates.

When the Earth was new and Edison was still actively stealing patents, there was an actress the public was obsessed with. They would write to the studio, feverishly demanding to know her identity. At the time, she was known only as The Biograph Girl. Actors were not credited in films for a combination of two main reasons. First, actors were embarrassed to be in the pictures. At the time it was still a novelty and not viewed as true art or performance, just another act on the vaudeville stage. Second, studios didn’t want to credit actors because they were afraid acknowledging them as people aka treating them subjects rather than objects might make them do something insane like demand higher (better) wages. The Biograph Girl was adored. Biograph Studios didn’t care. Carl Laemmle smelled blood in the water.

For film school losers, this is a well known story. In order to poach the Biograph girl, Laemmle’s IMP Film Company had to give her a marquee. So Laemmle got to work manufacturing a reality that was fueled by public emotion. He spread the false narrative that the Biograph Girl had died, tragically killed by a street car in New York City. He let the public descend into manic grief. Satisfied by the heights of their agony over a woman they never met, he then placed an ad in the papers disparaging the awful lie, posturing as if some ne'er do well hateful creep leaked fake news for nothing but the joy of mean spiritedness. “We nail a lie,” it read, displaying a photo of the Biograph Girl and her name. Florence Lawrence was alive and well and what a relief, dear public, she’s also still acting. You’ll never guess where your beloved girl can be seen. Why, in a new film from the IMP Film Company, The Broken Oath.

We wouldn’t have stan accounts if the gambit didn’t work. Lawrence was the first actor to receive on-screen named credit. Her name, information that was desperately sought by her fans, allowed the adoring crowds their connection at last. She received a deluge of mail, allegedly leading to her mailman having a breakdown (of his vehicle or his mind, I’m not sure, maybe both). Yes, as the studios feared, she was able to negotiate higher pay because of the value of her name. But also, as the studios previously hadn’t considered, the very inclusion of her name drew guaranteed audiences to the screen. Money. Money. Money. The name-brand found a niche and the person-as-product took its first steps. Studios scrambled to name their stars, promoting them constantly, banking fully on their name recognition to draw in the hearts and minds and wallets of the moviegoing population. This thirst for cash revenue even changed filming technique. The audience was there to see their star, their saint, their mortal god, so the product would obviously need a better display. The standard long shot of previous films found a new dynamic approach: the close up.¹ Now actors could be seen clearly, their faces blown broad for better consumption.

The star-driven model of studios and productions was set into motion. The public was encouraged in their attachments. Interviews with starlets were published, information on their homes and hygiene² was spread far and wide. Who was marrying who, who fell afoul of what misfortune, what product makes Clara Bow’s eyes so piquant? Money. Money. Money. The star-driven model also enforced a priority of novelty. Stars needed to be ever active, ever evolving, ever relevant. Studios needed to keep the content fresh, the revenue ever peaking. Conveniently, stars also kept dying. Hollywood Forever and Forest Hills are dotted with the flush markers of beauties that collapsed under exhaustion, drugs, pneumonia. For every corpse, there would be a half dozen fresh bodies filing in for their shot. Murders, assaults, overdoses, trauma by the truckload. The only priority of the studio was to hide the scandal, not avoid it. After all, as long as the canister kept being stuffed with celluloid, that meant some rube somewhere would be emptying their pockets, and all these troubles could easily be spent away.

After a failed attempt at a comeback in the mid 20’s, Lawrence started to slip into obscurity. She’d had plastic surgery in an attempt to freshen her look, but to no avail. She was not a thrill anymore, she was at this point merely the portal that allowed all these darling treats to tumble into the open mouths of audiences and executives alike. In the thirties, MGM introduced a sort of pity deal to silent film actors that couldn’t transition to the talkies. In an extension of generosity that would be utterly foreign to modern executives, Louis B. Mayer gave background roles and bit parts to these fallen gods for a rate of $75³ a week. This is where Lawrence worked until she died. Her peer Mary Pickford was able to provide a burial using her org, the Motion Picture Relief Fund. But not a headstone. For decades, Florence Lawrence lay in an anonymous grave tucked in the back of Hollywood Forever.⁴

She had performed her entire life. She traveled the country with her mother performing on stage, then in film. She had a stint in the automotive industry, developing the first ideas for turn signals and brake lights (she did not patent these, but she is largely credited for the concepts). Her star power kept her tethered to work, then as the light waned, she had no alternative but the work. She sustained an injury that left her temporarily paralyzed then in near constant agony. It is believed she committed suicide, writing a brief note to her roommate declaring “I am tired.”

As a total coincidence, on the same page as the announcement of her death in The Lewiston Daily Sun, there is a brief article celebrating increased safety on the roads due to better traffic enforcement and safety engineering. This engineering can be assumed to mean increased use and understanding of brake lights and turn signals, neither of which was she associated with at the time. From unmarked graves to unassigned celebrations, there’s a strange and poignant balance in how, even at the very end, she went without a credit.

If I could fart out something I’ve been trying to verbalize ever since driving past the Warner Brothers lot and seeing someone who was at the time famous on Vine walking out dressed for a meeting and looking disgruntled: the social media age is a rework of the early days of Hollywood. Where once there were tentpole studios and stars, the drive to get a slice of the pie led to an expansion. At first, a democratization of the industry, it all became accessible on the ground level. Just get enough eyes on you and the rest will follow. Then, those that stood to make money (distributors, platforms) upset the structure and rig the game to prioritize existing big voices. The democracy crumbles, the smaller and more diverse players are left to either rot on the shelf or wither on the vine (hah). TikTok was once a democratized platform, its algorithm ensuring a slot-machine like gamble for accounts: truly no one could ever predict whether they’d go viral, whether they’d be able to build a platform and more sustainable lifestyle from there. Then in a bid to draw in bigger names, already famous faces, the structure was upset. The market was saturated. No one can stand out unless they’re truly extreme, or know someone already platformed who can give them a boost. It’s the same in film and television. Creatures cloak themselves in scandal to be seen, others call in a favor from their kin.

Vaudeville relied on a reliable collection of variable talents. Singing, dancing, slap stick, music, puppetry. The prix frixe style meant there was a reliable roster of what to be hired for, the variation meant there was more chance to be hired at all. Learn a trick and maybe you can find a meal. Vine, TikTok, YouTube, the video centric platforms created a neo-Vaudevillian environment. People posting, vying for eyes to show their gifts, sometimes landing a brand deal, sometimes landing a job, sometimes attending a meeting at WB and gaining very little at all. By the way I am almost certain that Warner Brothers sighting was a meeting about Airplane Mode, a uniquely atrocious film that came out in 2019 but was very clearly conceptualized sometime around 2012/13 and then swirled around in production notes hell until finally being painted across the wall in a diseased spray of acute diarrhea. The film’s distributor is partnered with a joint-venture of Warner Brothers, which is information they probably don’t care that I could get in under five minutes, but should be deeply embarrassed I got in under five minutes.⁵

In early Hollywood, it was entertainment rising from the grave of vaudeville. Vaudeville, an industry that ran on starving artists, people flinging themselves (sometimes literally) across the stage and to the floor to stay alive.⁶ The transition was, technically, seamless, as early film was once a Vaudeville act in of itself. The first crop of talent to grace the silver screen were veterans of that world of travelling shows, desperately seeking a respite. If you can just make it big in entertainment, you’ll never experience poverty again. If you can just go viral, you can pay that medical bill, you can finally cover rent, you can pay for that lawyer you hired to fully separate from your abuser. Like the highly flammable days of nitrate,⁷ there are no guardrails. People are dying young, people are being placed under a microscope larger than anyone thought possible. People are commodities, something for studios and executives and managers and agents to pump for percentages. The industry is so young, there are no rules yet on how to truly manage a social media star. Abuses, predictably, abound. Like Lawrence’s contributions to automotive development, if the achievements are outside of the established brand, they will be disregarded, dismissed or forgotten. There’s no such thing as a surprise turn in anyone’s career. Brittany Broski, formerly Kombucha Girl, has begun releasing music. This is not a shock, it’s been drip fed and hinted at since the start of her rise in the public. From sporadically singing in earnest to operatic renditions of “Mask Off” by Future, to her peers in the social media sphere commenting in asides that Brittany can sing, this musical venture is natural. While on the surface it appears to be a gamble, it actually follows a structure and is in fact no risk at all. Then and now, everything about a person is up for grabs, it’s pure luck whether what’s grabbed is advantageous. From there it’s whether a person has the ability to market it.

Another fart, and yet no plops! Belief in Hell or hoping there is a Hell is an expanded version of viewing the law as a tool of revenge rather than justice. Which is something I’m reflecting on right now. It’s all well and good for me to say “hey I’m anti carceral. I don’t believe the point of handling crime should be to compound the harms inflicted by one or more individuals even if the harm is being placed upon the initial aggressor.” But the fact I do turn around and think to myself “I hope there’s a Hell and I hope [insert politician/billionaire here] goes there.” is me finding a loophole in my anti carceral high horse. Perhaps the US being so majorly carceral with zero interest in rehabilitation, diversion, re-entry, all that good stuff, is because the US is, ultimately, a Puritanical Christian nation. Sure, the Puritans faded away as the country expanded, but their core beliefs and goals did not. They rebranded and proliferated– why else would there be a prayer breakfast hosted at the White House if we weren’t Christian Nationalist? I’m not being hyperbolic. We enforce the death penalty for the same reason abortions are increasingly criminalized. As the nation continues to devour and shit and belch, the more it relies on the presence of Hell, a place where the undesirable non-white non-evangelical non-straight non-male scum under their boots Belongs(™). And just to be sure, they’re ensuring there's Hell here, too. It’s even better than the Hell of the thereafter, it’s something they get to watch and enjoy while still on the mortal coil. Somehow a guy years and years ago saying it’s not good to abandon the sick, that we ought to protect the vulnerable, bring the outcasts in, abandon brutal and hypocritical punishments, and not allow wealth and resources to be hoarded let alone used to abuse and control the lesser off, had his words twisted into something entirely organized around taking pleasure in suffering. Both the experience of it and inflicting it.

Which is all well and good and scores very high marks for self-reflection. But at the end of the day, I hope there is a Hell, and I hope I am sent there. I wish to dedicate my eternity to making sure theirs is the worst it can possibly be.

I learned the term “Role confusion.” It's a phenomenon of someone being unsure about themselves or their place in society. Common in teens, and I would not be shocked if it is a point of trauma for children and teens in entertainment.

Tina Nguyen’s article for The Verge, The Rise Of The Infinite Fringe
A piece delving into the origins of just how the US of today became so prone to conspiratorial thought, and how the evolution of media and social media created an environment utterly hostile to any attempts to reason with (let alone remove) conspiratorial thought. For no reason at all one of my most prized possessions is a vinyl record I bought in a rummage crate for $2 called THE CONTROVERSY: THE DEATH/THE WARREN REPORT. It details the Warren Report and has recorded interviews with average citizens⁸ that believed something more was afoot. It’s good! I often think about the woman who sewed a surveillance device into her purse in the hopes of catching an admission or slip up on tape.

Taylor Lorenz does it again. A new “child safety” law passed in Utah that offers–shocker–very little in the way of protecting children and quite a lot in the way of providing avenues for active censorship and punitive measures against future content that doesn’t serve the agenda of those able to enforce this law.

The way my eyes glazed and smoothed and soothed upon sighting the phrase “panopticontent.” I’ve written before and I’ll write again about how we interact with the internet via a self-enforced observer effect. Who we follow, what we share, what we post, it is all done (generally speaking) with the tastes of Who Might See in mind. We’ve entered a parasocial relationship with figures that don’t even exist– the shadows dancing in Plato’s internet age cave are unknown and uncertain anonymous creatures backlit by the threat of their potential perception. Knowing that about me, obviously I like this piece and want to share with the class.

I’m Trapped in that “WHO’S THAT POKEMON??” Meme except the tv is demanding “WHO’S THAT CUTIE??” To which I scream “A BEAUTIFUL BUTCH LESBIAN!!”

A pause.

The silhouette fills as the shrill voices respond “IT’S A TUMBLR SEXYMAN!!”

>:O

“FFFFUCK!!!!!”

…and I’m literally always saying that!!

Okay, that’s all for now, Team. Talk soon (threat)!

Relevant Links:

Lewiston Daily Sun Obituary

Vanity Fair bio of Florence Lawrence