Elaina Archer Interview

MBG: How did you discover Mary Pickford?

EA: I have a degree in film history from the University of Texas at Austin and at that time and probably in some ways still but getting better, most film courses are focused mainly around production, so I was taking a lot of Masters classes and graduate classes on film history and film criticism yet I was not exposed in any way to Pickford even in the basic film history courses. There was absolutely no mention of Pickford whatsoever, and so when I came out to California and I wanted to learn more about her so I called the Mary Pickford Foundation to ask if I could volunteer so that I could learn more about Mary and see some of her rare films. I didn’t know that at that time Keith Lawrence who was managing the Library at the time was starting a production company, Timeline Films out of the Pickford Foundation, he was going to be starting a company called Timeline Films, which were the partners, and they needed a researcher for a United Artists piece they were doing. So I was hired as a researcher and started working, I didn’t have a child at the time so I was spending a lot of nights and weekends just sitting and watching and watching every home movie, every Biograph, every bit of film that I could possibly get my hands on and reorganizing the Library and all the files and all the photos, everything and working with the Margaret Herrick Library so I just ended up taking over as manager of the Mary Pickford Library. Researching Mary inspired me to go out there and produce my own documentaries. I did one on Louise Brooks and one on Clara Bow, one on Marion Davies.

MBG: So you were at the right place at the right time then?

EA: Yes, well I just wanted to learn about Mary. She was a big inspiration to me and learning how she worked with people, how she was such a perfectionist, how she thrived on creative energy, how she respected the people, her crew, the people she worked with, the people who worked for her, who were loyal to her for many years, she really lived to work. Part of the whole Pickford-Fairbanks relationship I think was based on their shared passion for their love of creative filmmaking.

MBG: What is your favorite Mary Pickford movie?

EA: Oh my. There are so many. I always fall back to some of the early, early, charming films like “Amarilly of Clothesline Ally”, I loved “Suds”, I loved “Tess of the Storm Country”,I love “Heart of The Hill’s” and I love the early films like Cinderella from 1915, just stunning, and I love “Mistress Nell” that she does with Owen Moore because you can see very early on in 1914 her comedic talent on the screen, her comedic timing, she was a very sexual, beautiful woman in “Mistress Nell” not yet playing the little girl. It was a very interesting role and she seemed to have a lot of fun with it.

MBG: You mentioned her comedic talents yet most people don’t think of her as a comedienne, which she really was, as well as a serious dramatic actress.

EA: Absolutely. I mean when you see “Suds”, I guess that’s her most Chaplinesque role perhaps, due to her co-star Albert Austin. Mary being a comedian was basically evident very early on in her Biograph’s. You could see in sweet little films like “Sweet and Twenty”, a very early Biograph film that she did and its very obvious early on her knowledge of being able to time a comedic response and her body language. And then you see films like “Poor Little Peppina” of 1916, where she is dressed as a boy and she has to have young boy mannerisms, not only in her body language but her facial expressions. What she did had to embody a lot of layers. She was probably more effective as an actress than Jack (Mary’s brother), because Jack was obviously very natural, he didn’t really have to work hard at it. It’s just something I think is very rare that some people have. I think Mary worked at her gift. I think she really worked hard to perfect every mannerism, every nuance, every move of her hand, move of her head. I think someone like Jack just showed up and did the job and somehow the magic just happened without him having to try very hard.

MBG: Talk a little about “Little Mary” and how she evolved in roles such as “Little Annie Rooney”, playing little girls.

EA: Yes. Little Annie Rooney is just charming. And she knew that she needed to do that at that time. She had just done “Rosita”, and it didn’t go over too well, plus the “Dorothy Vernon” film, she knew that she needed to get her audience back. Her acting was effected, she was very smart, she knew how to manipulate situations toward the best result. She knew she needed to get her audience back on track with what they loved about her. When she invited all of her writers, and a bunch of gag writers she knew and invited them all to the Pickfair lawn, she put out sandwiches, drinks and tea and said okay, let’s see what can we do to do something absolutely box office, charming and a lot of fun too, to bring the audience back and with comedy, straight comedy, and without it being just a complete fancy little girl. If you notice Mary Pickford “little girls”, they really aren’t saccharine at all. They are very strong willed girls. They are very independent, very bright, and witty, and they hate bullies, they do not put up with bullies. They are not at all the sweet little girl. The dress and the curls, they give her that image but underneath, you’ve got this little battling woman whose really fighting back. She was very athletic. With “Little Annie Rooney”, she credited it to her Grandmother because she did not want to credit herself. She actually had a lot of hands on input into that production, deciding the story, the characters, with the “Our Gang” kids, and a lot of the gags she had worked out. Of course she couldn’t make it a straight comedy because that’s not Mary Pickford. There had to be a serious message in all of her films. She knew what she was doing. She knew how to market herself, she knew how to be creative and to be in control of what she was doing but yet, she was always aware of her audience and what her audience wanted to pay their dime to go into the theater and watch.

MBG: But that’s also what stereotyped her into playing “Little Mary” wasn’t it?

EA: Yes but she really did want to get away from it. That’s why she wanted to do “Faust” but her Mother wouldn’t let her. She tried with “Coquette”, she certainly tried with “Secrets” and I think she did a beautiful job with it. The funny thing about “Secrets” though to me is that the most effective scene in the entire film is silent, when her baby dies, and she is sitting there among bullets flying.

MBG: For those of us out there who are interested in Mary’s films but have yet to see one, which of her films would you suggest seeing first?

EA: I do that a lot. I send out Mary to people who don’t know her. I think “Tess Of The Storm Country”(1922) is a very, in the same sense as like the “Crowd”, “The Big Parade”, any of the big De Mille films. I think it is one of the great classics of silent film. I just can’t understand why she never worked with John S. Robertson again because I think he did an incredible job with that film. I think “Tess” probably. It’s just a shame it has nitrate decomposition in certain sections and its only available on 16mm. But the story itself, the acting, the flow of the film, the exchange between characters, there’s something very magical about “Tess”.

MBG: In films like “Daddy Long Legs”, “Heart of The Hills” and to some extent, as a woman in her thirties playing a thirteen year old in “Little Annie Rooney”, the illusion of her portraying a young girl is so strong because she does look the part of a thirteen year old and yet when she transforms herself into a mature woman in the same film, the result is simply amazing and fascinating to watch and she makes it look so easy.

EA: Well you know she never really had a childhood. So In a lot of ways I strongly believe that Mary was giving herself the opportunity to have a childhood through playing these child roles. Because she was such a very very brilliant actress, because she took her craft very seriously, I think that she was able to play these roles better than a child. She really was able to play the nuances of child behavior however, she also had the sophisticated knowledge you could say of somebody who knows how to react to the situation. Take her films that were remade later by Shirley Temple and they are ghastly. I can’t watch them, they’re awful. If anybody ruined Mary Pickford’s image and career it was Shirley Temple. I mean she ruined Mary’s films. They are terrible. They have none of the charm, none of the wonderful magical quality that Mary brought to them. If everyone says that that’s what Mary Pickford once did, then they kind of put a slant on what Mary Pickford actually did. Its why you’re audience always needs to be educated because people make assumptions.

MBG: Has anyone ever tried making a movie based on Mary’s life?

EA: Yes. People have been trying for years. I know Matty Kemp wrote a script for a television movie that was never done. We have had people approaching us from all over the place but no one ever seems to get the funding.

MBG:   It would make a great leading role for one of today’s actresses wouldn’t it?

EA: I know. I can see someone like Rene Zellweger playing her.

MBG: Let’s talk a little about Mary’s autobiography “Sunshine and Shadow” published in 1955. Can you comment about her book and give us your impressions of it?

EA: There are moments in her book where suddenly she starts to be really open. She starts to open up and then she closes again. Its like she starts to open the door a little and lets you in and then she suddenly slams the door because she’s afraid. At that stage in her life when she wrote that book it was not a good time for her. From the late thirties on is a devastating story. From childhood, after her father died, that was devastating. From then on she said right, I’m going to buck up, I’m going to face anything that happens. She became so strong that she really needed people to rely on her. Later in her life when her brother was just a lost cause, one of the things I tried to do in that documentary (“In Mary’s Shadow” The Story Of Jack Pickford) was not, even though the title is about him in Mary’s shadow, to make Mary out to be an overbearing, witch type role. She really wanted him to do well. She loved her brother. To hear Kevin Brownlow’s audio tape interview with her in 1965, the way she talks about her brother, the most talented, the handsomest. And Lottie was just such a nightmare, and then having Gwynne, you know, that was not probably something she was proud of having to do. But her mother died, Doug(Fairbanks) was a manic depressive and him getting old and having to face old age, I mean I think she would have been perfectly happy having Doug in her life for the rest of her life and having a quiet life working on their charities at Pickfair. But he wouldn’t go for that. And I think that with him philandering and having open affairs, her mother dead, family basically dwindling away, she was suffering. I have this theory that during the movie “Forever Yours”, she had a nervous breakdown. That was the year of her bad facelift, the year she fired Marshal Neiland, fired Charles Rosher, and actually put a film out of production, which she would have never done, and we have four minutes of a work print from that film and it looks beautiful. It really does look very lovely with no sound. I think she was just going through a bad time and the alcoholism really started to kick in in the thirties . Its good that she had Buddy (Charles “Buddy” Rogers, her third husband) in her life but it wasn’t what she really wanted. I mean it was nice to have this kind, loving gorgeous younger man in love with you and wanting to marry you but Douglas Fairbanks Jr. told us he used to sit by her bedside and she would hold his hand and think that he was his father.   In Eileen Whitfield’s excellent book, she tells the story about when Doug used to come to Pickfair, sit by the pool, hold her hands and say how sorry he was and then he had to go home to Sylvia at the beach house. And in the beginning of the Kevin Brownlow, Robert Cushman Academy book, when she used to show up in the fifties at the old Pickford-Fairbanks stage and sit on a stool and someone would call Sam Goldwynne and say that Mary Pickford was there, he would say to just leave her alone. She would just sit on that stool and look around and remember the happiest times of her life. Its where she made a few films, Doug made “The Black Pirate”, right next door to each other, where she made “Tess”. That was her life. Let’s face it, up to 1914, she was busy, she was getting paid. But from 1914 until about 1930, this woman was tops. She really was on top. That’s why when she started Artcraft, she started renegotiating her contract and revising her image to do one a year, slow it down, each year would start to get less and less exposure for her so her audience wouldn’t get sick of her. That’s when she started the Motion Picture home. She was thinking ahead. When she started United Artists, she was thinking ahead. This woman was a planner. She thought about decades ahead of herself at the time. Unfortunately she couldn’t think decades ahead about her emotional state but she took that ambulance fund and said the war’s over, we need to take care of ourselves, we are in a business where we don’t have protection, we’ll be widowed, and broke and everyone laughed at her. They would say, what are you talking about, its tax free money, we’re making millions. And she was right. Years later when Kevin Brownlow went to interview the Biograph actresses in the Motion Picture Home, they would not talk about Mary Pickford. He would ask them, can you tell me anything about working with Mary? And they would say no, she’s the landlady, she pays the rent. And with United Artists, that was her conception from the very beginning. She was sick of block-booking, she was sick of the studios having power and control over her when she was the artist, she was the creative entity, she wanted to develop her own projects, she wanted to produce them, star in them, hire the writers, hire the crew, be in the editing room, see the finished results, she wanted to market, publicize and distribute her own film. That’s a smart woman. Its where I got all my ideas (laughs). What I’m saying is, the only way an artist can protect themselves, if they have the money and the power and if they know how to market their own image, that they are worth something to the public for years to come and not just a flash in the pan. And it’s a big struggle in the film business to have that, especially if you are a woman. I battle it all the time. I’ve been battling it for five years. The only place I have creative control is with Mary’s Library. I have a lot of control with my documentaries but I really have to fight for them, except for Jack, because that one was done on my own. But women need to really fight their way up. I mean, she had the money (Mary) and the clout, which she knew, was going to last forever, but she had what she knew what her image and her skill were worth and that’s what she monopolized upon.

MBG: For someone interested in visiting the Mary Pickford Library, what can they expect to see and what could you show them about Mary Pickford?

EA: We have thousands of photographs, a million tapes (laughs); I wouldn’t know where to start. I guess I would probably show them a clip tape that I put together of the last Milestone releases that we did, the rescored, retinted films, and also I have a tape that I use for a lecture and its like from 1909 to 1933. I use it at the colleges where I show basically a view into her life, into her films, into what we are doing with her films, what we are doing at the Library, you know I basically turned the Library around, with the website, with our Library bank account, all money licensed from our Library to documentary companies or any kind of company, I ask for a non-profit donation, within the constraints of their budget, I’m very fair, and I don’t do a per-second or per-minute thing or anything like that, I just ask what they can afford, how much are you going to use and let’s come up with a fair price. That money gets deposited to our Library account and that money is used for hiring new composers, tinting and rescoring, cleaning up the master videotapes to put out on home video with Milestone and to create new negatives and new prints of her films. This year alone I have had two restorations, one with Photoplay on “Heart Of The Hills”, a gorgeous new tinted print, and at Cinecon this year we will be showing off our 35mm gorgeous new print of “Through The Back Door”. Both with new scores, both to be released on home video by January or February of next year and that’s exciting because basically we are not having to go out to find our own funding, but we’re not using the money that we make off the Library for profit, we are using it to restore Mary’s films.

MBG: Does the Library have any footage on video or anything on audio tape of Mary being interviewed?

EA: We have some footage of her being interviewed by Adolph Zukor in 1964 and we do have a lot of radio and audio that she did. The only on-camera interview I have with her besides that awful academy award segment that’s so sad and hard to watch, is her with Zukor in 1964 where they talk about the past and sit and have tea.

MBG: Are there any surviving relatives of Mary around today?

EA: Her adopted daughter and son are still living. Gwynne’s daughter is still with us but I haven’t heard from her in years. She actually came to the Library about three years ago looking for pictures of her mother, but also interested in Mary.

MBG: What are your thoughts about 1927’s “My Best Girl”? What do you think of the movie and of Mary’s performance?

EA: Mary always said that nothing sells better than a Cinderella story. It’s a timeless film. We just screened it with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in June and its beautiful. It is a classic, timeless piece. It’s a beautiful film about true love and Mary is absolutely charming and wonderful and my favorite scene in that film is when they are walking through the rain and all the traffic is missing them. But it’s the power of their love that drives the evil forces away (laughs).

MBG: The added film footage on the DVD version of “My Best Girl” that you added to the end was a nice touch. Can we expect more of that on future DVD releases?

EA:       I’m going to try. There were two of the tapes we put on an IMP, (Independent Motion Picture) and a Biograph. We put “What The Daisy Said” after “Daddy Long Legs”, we put “The Dream after either “Stella Maris” or “Amarilly”, I can’t remember which, and then we put Doug and Mary home movies after one and Mary and Buddy after “My Best Girl”. The next batch of five are “Heart of The Hills”, “Through The Back Door”, “Little Lord Fauntleroy”, “Suds” and “Poor Little Rich Girl”. Those are our next five, with full scores.

MBG: As a final question for you Elaina, if you had the opportunity to ask Mary Pickford one question, what would you ask her?

EA: I would probably want to know what she did when she hit times of adversity. What she did, like there are certain things when things get really tough in this type of business that I have to do to get rid of all of the bad energy, the bad vibes, and really try to focus on the good and get myself back on track. When she would be torn in just a million directions and what was it that she did to constantly keep herself going., to be able to stay focused on the work and stay in control of her life. How did she do it for such a long time? How was she able to stay in control like that? What was it that kept her going? She faced so much and had so much responsibility and the way she juggled her money, her friends, her family, her career, her productions. What was it that she had that kept her strength up? I wouldn’t want to ask her what was it that made her give up because that’s a sad question to ask. I prefer to ask what was it that kept her going.

MBG: Thank you Elaina for your time and helping to keep Mary out there for us to watch and enjoy.   Keep up the good work.

EA: It was my pleasure.