The Lady of the Shadows...

Meet Julia Crawford Ivers

Julia Crawford Ivers is a bit of an enigma and I love it.

Blink and you’ll miss her Wikipedia bio. It mentions that her sister Grace died at age 14, but omits that she was the first female head of a studio. The Women Film Pioneers project at Columbia University says: “When discussing Julia Crawford Ivers, film historians primarily emphasise... her remarkably introverted personality”,  yet in December 1921, the New York Telegraph reports that “on one side of our table where Mrs Julia Crawford Ivers was the charming hostess…” -- then goes on to list all the fancy famous people that she hosted. 

So even the minimal information we have about her is contradictory. I don’t know about you, but I’m intrigued.

Most bios will tell you that Julia Crawford was born in Los Angeles, but oddly enough her 1921 passport survives, and it states that she was born in Boonville Missouri on the 3rd of October 1869. According to Los Angeles county records, the family was resident there by 16 August 1870, so she was an anomaly in the film industry: an actual native Angeleno.

Further, you know how Hollywood is all about youth and if you haven’t made it by 25 you can forget it? Julia Crawford Ivers would beg to differ. She was forty-one when she entered the business, and was still at the peak of her career well into her fifties.

She had a grown up son, James Crawford Van Trees, who was a prominent cinematographer right up until the late sixties. I can’t find out what happened to Mr Van Trees Sr but whatever his eventual fate, Julia married Oliver Ivers in 1900. Oliver Ivers was an oil tycoon, richer than midas, and he passed away two years after their marriage in February 1902. 

According to her obituary in the Los Angeles Times in 1930 (she died at the age of 62 of stomach cancer), Julia started working in the film industry in 1913, around a decade after she was widowed. She went into business with Frank Garbutt, who had been a business partner of her late husband. 

The earliest credit I can find for her is for screenwriting, a film called The Rug Maker’s Daughter in 1915.

Whether she was assisting up until then, or working on films that haven’t survived, I can’t be sure. As I’ve mentioned before, credits could be fairly random and arbitrary in those days, so she could have been writing, producing, directing or making the tea -- there’s no way to know. In 1920, she told Moving Picture World that she had “done almost everything around a studio but sweep the floor”.  

And this is one of the many things I love about her. As a wealthy widow she absolutely could have chosen to be the prototype Real Housewife of Beverly Hills (before they’d built Beverly Hills, but still…)Instead, at forty-one, she decided to embark on a career.

The first movie she is officially credited with directing, The Majesty of the Law, in 1915, was well received, with the Atlanta Constitution praising it for its appeal to “all classes.” It tells the story of a Virginia judge who hands down severe sentences in court, only to secretly help the families of those he condemns. I haven’t been able to track down a copy to watch, but it strikes me as a bit in Lois Weber’s oeuvre, a drama with social and moral overtones. 

An interesting theme of the teens (which deserves its own post so I will dive deeper later!) is that it almost seems as though, while men were running around making shoot-em-up Westerns and slapstick comedies, it was female filmmakers making serious dramas. In 1918, Lois Weber said that “the feminine influence is needed in films,” and I think I can see what she means.

In 1915, according to When Women Called the Shots by Linda Seger, Julia became the first female general manager of a studio: the Bosworth film studio. Given that she had just made a movie with message of compassion, of social responsibility, it seems no coincidence that one of her first orders of business was to woo Lois Weber briefly from Universal over to Bosworth. The notion of women hiring women has a long history.

While Julia is only credited with directing four of the fifty-odd films she wrote, I suspect she directed more. While the issue of credits being a bit random was prevalent throughout the industry, it does seem as though women (then as now!) most often fell afoul of not getting the credits they deserved (see Freddie Sagor and Flesh and the Devil from last week). In the early twenties, Jesse L Lasky appointed Julia one of four supervising directors at Famous Players-Lasky (at the time evolving to become Paramount) which would seem to suggest that she was considered to have significant directing experience. 

It also seems that she edited her films too. In 1917, she told the New York Telegraph (in one of the interviews she never gave!):

 “Cutting is something that I love,” averred Mrs Ivers. “I mean cutting films. I accomplish this, so to speak, in the hand. That is, I actually decide on the parts I wish to delete while I have the film in my hands and cut them out then and there. Some persons do not agree with me that this method is best, but I have found it most satisfactory.”

The same article, perhaps not surprisingly, goes on to say that: 

Probably Mrs Ivers is the busiest woman in the country - at least one of the busiest - and while she will do a considerable amount of work while in New York she declares that she had a fine rest on the train coming across the continent. She will then enjoy a similar brief respite on her homeward journey - and then, back to the desk at the studio with piles of work confronting her.

Almost uniquely for filmmakers of the period, Julia Crawford Ivers seems to have more or less stayed at the same studio and with the same people for her entire career.

While she technically worked at Pallas Pictures, Bosworth, Famous Players-Lasky and finally Paramount, it was actually just the name on the door changing because of mergers and takeovers. 

She was still collaborating with Garbutt ten years after they first went into business together.  He was cinematographer on possibly her most successful work, a series based on the Tom Sawyer books, directed by William Desmond Taylor.

By the late teens, Julia Crawford Ivers was collaborating almost exclusively with William Desmond Taylor.

A 1920 article refers to her as the “special writer for Mr Taylor’s Paramount Productions.” Some accounts suggest an affair, or at least that she was in love with him, but they’re unconfirmed, and don’t strike me as likely.  I found a 1922 article for the Los Angeles Record, which reads, “Friends recall how Julia Crawford Ivers “mothered” the director through his attacks of indigestion.”

Maybe it’s just me, but that doesn’t really sound like foreplay.

Next month marks the one hundred year anniversary of the murder of William Desmond Taylor.

As you may know, despite exhaustive investigates spanning decades, it remains unsolved to this day. I’m going to dedicate several posts to the case over the next few weeks, not only because I think Taylor deserves it (he strikes me as one of the good guys), but because his death played a pivotal role in ending this early feminist heyday for Hollywood.

There’s also going to be an extra deep-dive long read for paid subscribers only, so if you don’t want to miss out, you know what to do!