Little Annie Rooney (With Kathy A. Feeley)

In this episode, our guest is film scholar and professor Kathy A. Feeley. We discuss the classic silent film Little Annie Roonie. We talk about the plot, themes, and overall production of this beloved film. 

We also talk about Kathy’s book about Mary Pickford’s impact on Hollywood and her business savvy. The link to order the book is below. Click and listen! 🎥🎥🎬🎬

https://www.amazon.com/Mary-Pickford-Hollywood-Woman-American/dp/0813348056

Thanks for listening! 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome to Cinema Chat with David Heath. And I am your host, David Heath. And this is uh the podcast where we talk about movies from every era and just about every genre. And uh today we are excited to uh bring to you uh an episode where we are going to talk about the movie Little Annie Rooney with uh Dr. Kathy Feely. Before we do that, I want to ask everybody if you are uh uh on a platform that can allow a review, uh please give give give us a five-star review. And uh it helps us a lot with the algorithms, it's very important, and it will help the show a lot. And if you can spread the word to uh folks you know that uh are into the movies the way you are, the way I am, and then hey, maybe we get some more listeners. Okay, so we have Dr. Kathy Feely here with us. Uh Kathy, welcome to very welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01 1:11

Uh David, thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_00 1:13

Yeah, it was wonderful. Uh yeah, I I I heard you on the on the um uh Tristan uh uh Edelman? Is that his last name?

SPEAKER_01 1:24

Edelman. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:25

Yeah, yeah. Uh yeah, I heard you on his show, which is where I where I uh I got your name and and he's just doing such a great job. Um, you know, I haven't reached out to him because I um I I want to wait until we get to at least 1920 before. So I so I uh because I'm going to reach out to him at some point and say, hey, let's let's exchange uh shows here, do a little show exchange and see if he'll if he's getting for it. But in any case, uh and and a little free pub for Tristan. Um I don't think I've ever mentioned his show on on mine, but yeah, he does a show called the the five best uh films of every year ever, and I think that's what it's called. And uh he's just doing a I I'm so jealous that I didn't come up with that idea.

SPEAKER_01 2:13

Uh it's a great it's a great concept because BAST is so subjective. So I I had 1911, which is an interesting year.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:22

Um and so I really just I was like, we're I I decided to focus on female filmmakers.

SPEAKER_00 2:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:28

This early that early period is such a generative and important period for lots of filmmakers, including Mary Pickford, who we're gonna talk about.

SPEAKER_00 2:35

Yeah, definitely a f uh a female filmmaker. Of course, she started as a big movie star. We're going to talk uh about Lil Annie Rooney, but before we talk about little Annie Rooney and get into detail with that, um tell the audience about your book, Mary Pickford, Hollywood and the New Woman. Uh so this Mary Pickford obviously is a big titan in the in the industry uh a hundred years later. Tell us about your book.

SPEAKER_01 3:04

So it's part of a series of uh biographies of uh sort of significant women's lives that are meant to be accessible. I use it in my undergraduate classroom. It's the one book I've written that like lots of people in my life, right, who are not academics have actually read and they're like, woo, this is great. Um so that's really the goal, right? To make it accessible and to use her life to illuminate sort of the larger issues of the world that she was living through, right? As an immigrant herself, uh, who uh Canadian um uh right who uh moves ultimately from Toronto to New York and finally relocates in 1920 um to Los Angeles, uh, which is emerging at that point as the center of the Hollywood film industry. But before that, she is a child laborer, like tens and thousands, tens of thousands of children uh uh across the uh across North America, Canada, um, and the United States. Her father deserts their family, addiction tears their family apart. And so her mother's left with uh three small children, as well as her mother to take care of and it struggles uh in the late 19th century to figure out what to do and settles upon acting on the life stage, um, in what's known then as the five tens and twenties. It it the hope is it's gonna be a family affair, but Mary's the most talented and becomes the family breadwinner uh when she uh begins uh acting um six or seven, I want to say. Uh tracking down her birth date was tricky because she always wanted to make herself younger. Like some things never change in Hollywood, right? So she's a child laborer who enters the film industry uh in its really early days in days of uh silent cinema and uh learns it all really um and and becomes a star, but significant you pointed to this, David, because she is also she's a screenwriter, she is a producer. She right ends up with three key assets: her own production company, her own studio lot, and she's a she's a founder of United Artists, alongside uh the man who will become her second husband, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, right? The men's names are probably honestly more familiar to our to your listeners, right? Um, she is the only female founder of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, right? They're the Oscars folks responsible for finally that museum that Pickford, along with many others, wanted a decade, sorry, not a decade, a century ago. And it's fascinating to me that it literally has taken so long for that museum to happen, right? Because those founders who founded the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, including Pickford, uh want it even then, but it takes over a century to make it happen. And I encourage people to visit. It's really it's a like it's an extraordinary space. So, yeah, so the book is really uh helping us understand. I mean, it is that Pickford's success is in part rooted in because it isn't just a story of, well, Mary Pickford made it, anybody can make it, right? That she part of her success really, it's extraordinary, like right, but like so many uh folks she worked with toiled their whole lives, right? Uh, not to that kind of success, but that she speaks to people's lives as immigrants, as workers, and she is presenting the so-called new woman on stage, right? That she's often reduced to this caricature of she only played little girls, which is part of what's I think undermines her artistic credibility. Uh, you know, others don't help, like Charlie Chaplin famously like she and Charlie Chaplin do not do not like each other. It is uh her uh uh sorry, I'm managing a cat in a cone right now. David can see it. Uh so it threw me off for a sec. You know, Chaplin comes up with a nickname for her at Bank of America's Sweetheart, right? Because she's the first to be to be right to sort of uh to take on that title, even though she's not an American, she's a Canadian citizen, um, but she's white, she can pass as you know, uh, you know, as a as a red-blooded American. Uh she doesn't become a U.S. citizen until she marries Fairbanks in 1920, actually. Uh he comes up with this nickname of Bank of America's Sweetheart, right? Which is meant to be entirely uh direct right in front of me. That she's hunting out work that she and Fairbanks are working really hard to generate films uh for United Art, right, which they create with Chaplin and director D. W. Griffith. And Chaplin is an artiste, he just produces what he produces and right is sort of denigrating uh Pickford in particular for her popularity. Because along she and she and Chaplin uh, you know, starting in the mid-19 teens are the two most highly paid and sort of most highly known um performers, right? So there's a real kind of competition there uh that always exists.

SPEAKER_00 8:18

Yeah, even though uh they're they they don't have the same appearance, the same bits on screen. Um they both are very sympathetic figures on the screen uh in uh most of their films. Uh so it's uh it it is kind of interesting that Charlie he was has competitive, of course it's interesting that he considers Fairbanks to be his best friend, uh, you know, around the same time. So but that happens quite often. A lot of a lot of people uh you know don't necessarily get along with their best friend's spouse.

SPEAKER_01 8:55

But um any David, I love this story. I want to I can't remember if I got it in my book or not. She and Chaplin end up fighting over a cat. They live near each other in uh in Beverly Hills, and this is after Fairbanks sort of tragically dies at a young age, probably in part from overuse of steroids, right? Because he's Mr. Pep. Uh and it is really one of the first sort of one of the Polly was action adventure stars, right? But like he's always tanning and he's taking steroids, right? And he dies really quite young. I think he's in his maybe his 50s. Um, but she and Chaplin are still neighbors, and she has a cat that Chaplin starts feeding. And so they're sort of battling over this cat. So I I just sort of love that sort of the, and this is it's in the 1940s or so that this is happening, right? So it's sort of uh right, it continues um uh in many ways. So right, her story is also a story of the rise of American empire, right? She and the industry are both uh economically sort of driving the American economy by the 1920s. Uh the uh film is uh in sort of entertainment writ large is right a huge driver of the economy, but also as symbols of empire. Like she and Fairbanks, their honeymoon is also a press junket that they do this international traveling uh and is also about sort of selling the American way of life as per uh Hollywood. So um, so yeah, so so telling us all kinds of things, and then you know, sort of the the crisis of the Great Depression in in some ways gets replicated in the the transition to sound right by 1930, right? That that's happening. And so for Pickford and others, uh she's also middle-aged at that point. So as a middle-aged woman, she's gonna struggle anyway. And what Hollywood never gets right in telling the story of the transition uh to uh sound, it's not about like your dialogue, it's not about your dialect, right? It's not about having a Brooklyn accent, right? Any good dialogue coach can code can coach that. They're just completely different art forms in so many ways, right? And so that's really the challenge. Um, and so Pickford moves on to many other things. She remains a producer, she is the last, uh, the the last founder of United Artists Standing. She sells a couple years after uh Chaplin uh to with great success. Uh she's a novelist, she gets involved in sort of promoting cosmetics and all kinds of other things. Um so so this idea that she that's really cemented in in Sunset Boulevard, that Gloria Swanson, who's briefly a partner in United Artists, she and Pickford are not friends uh in any way, and she sort of glories in the uh sort of idea of uh oh my gosh, what's her name? Gloria uh Gloria Desmond? What is her name?

SPEAKER_00 12:03

Uh yeah, Norma Desmond, yeah. Norma Desmond. Norma Desmond.

SPEAKER_01 12:07

Norma Desmond is really that Swanson is really clearly uh because that part was offered to Mary Pickford and she probably wisely turned it down. I don't think she would have been up to it. Swanson is clearly, right, sort of uh marking that the Gloria Desmond figure, right, as a sort of is Mary Pickford-esque. And so it cemented this idea that Mary Pickford basically just falls off the base of the earth when sound comes. She does later in her life struggle with alcoholism, as most of the members of her family did. Um, but you know, adopts children, has a very successful third marriage. They're together, she and Buddy Rogers till the end of her life. He's a bit younger than her and outlives her. Uh, and she has a disastrous uh right sort of appearance, getting an honorary Oscar award or something in the mid-70s, which should not have happened, right?

SPEAKER_00 13:00

People were horrified by that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:01

Right. It was a it was a terrible, right? But but but it but it also is sort of erasing an entire sort of uh dynamic life and career.

SPEAKER_00 13:09

Yeah, yeah. It's it and it is it is interesting how that how how that happened and how uh you know and and I and I I we talked about uh on the show, we talked about the the very the different variations of the the taming of the shrew movies. Um and we did that uh I did that with a guest about uh six years ago, and uh and um I know Pickford uh uh uh and Douglas Fairbanks were she was very angry with him on that because uh he didn't work very hard, you know, and she had to work really hard to do what she was doing, and she really resented that, I could tell uh from what I've gathered. Uh and he's he was just so natural, and he you know, there's just there's certain people, it typically is men, uh, that are just very natural and they don't have to work hard to to to do what they do.

SPEAKER_01 14:09

And and I think it's probably it was probably very frustrating for her uh to that yeah, that was that was their only co-production, and it was near the end of their marriage. It was sort of an attempt to try to save the marriage. And you know, Fairbanks had training that she didn't have, right? That he'd he'd worked on the uh in in theater. Like she'd you know, she'd worked in sort of you know live popular entertainment, not Shakespeare, right? So that was an enormous amount of work for her. And they had very different work ethics and and uh uh sort of the way they ran their sets, right? He was a big sort of practical joker, right? And had this very kind of loose set. Here's what I will say about Mary Pickford that you know that there were lots of reasons for folks in the industry to, you know, uh to potentially take an aim at her, right? To sort of just, you know, why not, right? As sort of the queen of Hollywood. But her sets, and they were really, even if she wasn't the director, she was the producer, she was the star, she was the boss, right? That she never, you know, unlike someone like Chaplin, unlike men, right? Like she was unwilling to take on the role of a director, which is too bad, really, because I think she could have actually been very successful. Like she knew the the craft from the bottom up. She knew all parts of it. Um uh uh that she uh that folks were really clear. Like she could be a little parsimonious, let's say. But I think that was also rooted in a childhood of terrible scarcity, right? And and poverty and and this kind of awful right life as a child laborer. We like to glamorize uh child labor when it's in the entertainment world, whether it's uh film or television or sports, right? But really, you know, like it's it's a problem, right, when children are the sort of primary breadwinners. And she would always really sort of talk about that um uh sort of throughout her whole life, right? Being clear that she was performing a childhood often that she never had. Uh but folks were really clear that her sets were safe spaces and there were good spaces to work in. Um I I think that, you know, really, really sort of uh sort of speaks to her character and her recognition as as a female performer, uh, who, you know, sort of to talks over and over again about the way D.W. Griffith and her first husband uh both sexually harass her on her first day of work at Biograph. She tells the story like over and over and over again.

SPEAKER_00 16:43

Wow. Um so uh yeah, for for for folks that are uh didn't hear before, uh of course uh we are talking about uh the uh the train we're we're talking about little Annie Rooney uh in a minute, but uh but also uh I'll put the book in the show notes, a link to the book in the show notes, but uh it's called uh Mary Pickford, uh Hollywood and the New Woman. And now let's talk about little Annie Rooney uh a little bit. Um it's a the simple movie, but but there's a lot going on with Mary Pickford's acting career at the time. She had just been coming off Rosita, which is really an adult role, uh and and so she had made the transition from the the you know the little girl with curls and to the to a to an adult role, and now 1925 at age 33 um she comes up with little Annie Rooney. Where was uh Mary's career at this point and what brought us to Lil Annie Rooney uh for her to make uh as um you know getting close to a middle-aged woman?

SPEAKER_01 17:57

Yeah. So that's part of her persona, little Mary, because she's under five feet tall, right? She's tiny. Um it's a measure of her craft that she can at the age of like 32, 33, convincingly play. Uh, you know, she does really well. Right? Uh she knows how to do it, she's been doing it. Um, but I would also say that that's one of the problems. This notion people, this idea people have that she only ever played little girls. That in fact, there are very few films where she doesn't sort of get contained in the marriage plot by the end of the film, right? There are a handful of them. Rebecca Sunnybrook Farm and Pollyanna are the two, really. That uh in the in her two that she made about 224 films over the course of her career. Um, and in the vast majority, she plays a sort of wide range of characters, especially in uh sort of the earlier period. And and what is important, and and it's famously in this film, is right, she's no girl, she's a wildcat, right? Yes. That's the way her character is personified. And if I had to sort of say that is the source of her appeal, that she's if she's playing these young, unmarried, young women, girls, young women, sort of girls heading into uh right, sort of adulthood, it allows her the freedom to spend the entire film running amok, uh challenging gender norms, uh uh uh as she does in Little Annie Rooney, fighting with the boys. Yes, um, right, getting messy, um, sort of sort of uh wearing the breeches, right? Like performing as uh in this film, right? She doesn't so much do that, but she'll she does that um uh in uh many of her films, right? Where in uh The Poor Little Rich Girl, sort of famously, right? There's this incredible scene where she's yearning at she's the literally the poor little rich girl who's been looking out the window and neighborhood, this neighborhood gang of boys, and she's been punished by being by by her mother for uh you know something or other by being foot having her knife's clothing taken, a girl's clothing taken away from her, and they dress her like a boy. But then it's extraordinary because she she understands the freedom it gives her. And she goes outside and she plays with these boys dressed as a boy, getting in fights and getting dirty, and she's always doing some version of that, right? Touch of the storm country, right? That that's a like she's a sort of but she's a she's a young neighborhood activist whose father is imprisoned at the beginning of the film. And in that's the film, she remakes it in the 1920s, but it's the film that really truly makes her a star when she's with Adolf Zucker, who's the founder of what becomes uh Paramount Studios, what today we would know as Paramount Studios. Um and in that film, she's right, uh sort of she's a community organizer, rallying her community, right, engaging in all kinds of things, baptizing a bait, a dying baby herself, like in the middle of a church full of people because the minister won't do it. And then at the very end of the film, she's framed again by her father who was unlawfully jailed, and the man who will become her husband. But the entirety of this film, right, and in in the same way in Little Annie Rooney, uh, you know, she has a she has a she has a father who's a police officer uh and and sort of discovers a romantic interest, right? But like she is out on the streets, right? She's out on the streets, engaging, you know, she's like a little ruffian, and she'll come home and there are scenes, these kind of domestic scenes, where she's like making dinner and running the house as the, you know, she's got a father and a brother, and her mother's absent. Um, I don't know, I don't know that they ever explain why, right? And so it gives her the freedom as a female performer in this period to challenge out the status quo dramatically. And then at the end of the film, right, there's again the sort of hinting to containment in the marriage plot. But that's always just like the coda. And if there's one formula in her films, that's it. And that to me is the appeal, right, to all kinds of audiences. Um there's this kind of freedom that she has can have as a young, unattached girl slash woman. Uh and we see and it's all over little Annie Maroney.

SPEAKER_00 22:22

It is. Uh it it's almost like uh one of the uh she played a she played a child, I think, one other time, maybe two other times after this.

SPEAKER_01 22:33

She she uh one more time. Yes, sort of in um in sparrows. Yeah, yeah. She's a kind of sh she's she's young, but she's also playing like a little mother. So even though she's young, she's sort of it's still more like a young woman. I would say more a young woman versus young girl. Um and and that's part and I should also say, and I think we've said this, David, but it bears repeating, the ability to do so at the age of 32, 33 like speaks to her artistry.

SPEAKER_00 23:05

I I it's one of it this is quietly one of the best performances in a film ever, in my opinion. Because yeah, she is that age and she is able to pull it off, not just because she has kind of a young looking face, not just because of the makeup or or whatever they they did to her to make her look slightly younger or or quite a bit younger. Um, but the uh it just uh the overall performance uh I I'm I'm curious. Um I I missed it when it came out first run 101 years ago, by the way. So um uh what do you think the reaction was in the movie theater during the first 20 glorious minutes of this, where it looked like a glorified uh R Gang episode almost, but it had Mary Pickford, you know, the at certain times, the the biggest movie star in the world. Uh and what what do you think the reaction was to the audience when they were seeing her uh do doing this um you know as sort of a um I don't know, it's like it's almost like a like a tribute to uh all the other things that she had done, you know. But I I I don't know. What do you think the uh reaction of what was after they saw Rosita her playing an adult role and and some other movies where she was more adult type, but now all of a sudden here she's full-blown kid?

SPEAKER_01 24:37

Um, I think that uh it she makes the decision she's gonna return to the formula she knows that works. She's done a series of films um where she's playing a wider range of roles, and they aren't as successful. Though they are successful, they're just not successful by Mary Pickford standards, right? So she um she returns to the formula that people sort of know and love in some ways. And so I think you know the film did really well. It did what it needed to because she was also now um she had United Artists to worry about. She had a she was a studio head. She was a studio, you know what I mean? So let's think about that. Like these days, studio heads are not also starring in and producing their own films, they are managing lots and lots of people. Um so this is right, those are like a lot of hats to wear. Again, this is someone who has her own production company since 1916. Uh this, right, she uh United Artists is created in 1919. Um, and then she and Fairbanks get their own studio lot, in part so they can work together, like they can go to work together, they're working on different productions, um uh, which is what makes the sort of failure of the taming of the shrew in 1929. Like, because it really, like if if you think about it as a concept, like it's it's sort of genius, their marriage is falling apart, they have very different work environments they want to work in. But back to Annie Rooney and its reception. So I think it's just this kind of like, oh, it's our Mary, here she is, right? And it's also she it's it's also interesting, though there are many problems, right? That the sort of that she's the leader as you know, little Annie, little Annabelle, Annie Rooney. Uh she's the leader of this child gang. And all of the other children, child performers are real children, they're actual children. Like I went back and I was like looking them all up because I was like, hmm, are they all, right? Because some of them are like, well, this one looks like they could be a bit older, but I think the bat all of them, the rest of them were children, and she pulls it off, right? She's like playing a child in the midst of actual children. Um and it's a multiracial, multi-ethnicity.

SPEAKER_00 26:52

Yes, it is, yeah. Right.

SPEAKER_01 26:54

That it's said in this kind of like, you know, uh lower east side of Manhattan.

SPEAKER_00 27:00

It's New York.

SPEAKER_01 27:02

Right. Uh sort of where very explicitly in the beginning, they set it up, right? You see, you know, uh they see I think it's the Brooklyn Bridge we see in the beginning. Um, and so it's really clear, and so there is uh there's a Jewish member of her gang, black member of her gang, Italian, Greek, Chinese.

SPEAKER_02 27:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:22

So that's really clear. And she's the only girl. Um uh, but just right, she's their leader. She the other gang is a gang of it's sort of unclear. They're Irish and she's Irish, right? She's little, uh, little Annie Rooney. And so it's kind it's setting up this um very sort of particular world that's also right, there's stereotype, right? The the the way in which um the the Jewish boy is sort of like characterized as like always a businessman, um, and the the the black gang member is really kind of a spin-on alfalfa, right? Doing that OG kind of thing. Um but it is uh sort of speaking to this immigrant world, which this was the world she came out of in Toronto, then in New York, before she makes that move to Los Angeles in 1920. So she right for many members of her audience, right, she's speaking to their experiences and their lives.

SPEAKER_00 28:24

Yeah, it's it's to me, it's such a it's this is just such a really great film. I I I uh I wrote on my letterbox that I just love everything about the the film. I I uh I I I love the beginning, that it's so fun, but it it quickly becomes real life, you know, 20 minutes in, and we have uh a lot of comic release throughout, but but it really is a drama that has this really wonderful uh you know setup. It's almost like watching a uh a short before the the feature, uh because it's uh it's not two different movies, but it's it's just a different feel, which is what real life is. You know, you know, some days, sometimes you're gonna feel really great, and every and then the next day you're like, oh this uh this happened. Um but yeah, the the the whole bit about the the gangs that there is some you know non-clarity there, if I if I can say that word that term, um on why they don't get along, because yeah, she's Irish too. But why didn't you get along with the Kelly's? But she does get along with Joe Kelly. And of course, uh for uh for the people that are are listening to to this and haven't actually watched the film, we're gonna get into spoilers here in a minute. So now is the time where you can hit pause, now watch little Annie Rooney, and then come back and listen to us talk to uh finish. Just hit pause. Come back and listen to the rest. Um, and you know, and also if you forget to come back, um don't forget to buy Kathy's book. Um and uh again, there will be some uh uh linked in the show notes, but uh but I want to talk um about uh the last uh the last act, and then maybe of course uh we find out that her father dies and she has this, you know, clearly this you know uh you know wonderful, warm relationship with her father, but uh as you would hope everyone would, but but it's just devastating. And uh and and just to tell everybody, I I mean I'll cry at anything, you know, whatever, you know, but but I think even though I knew it was going to happen last night when I re-watched it, I I balled for 30 straight minutes because I just couldn't handle all of that that sweetness and and sourness and everything all combined. And um what are what are your thoughts on that on that last act?

SPEAKER_01 31:12

Um oh, so we can now talk about it, right? Yeah, we can't shoot the issue.

SPEAKER_00 31:17

It's 101, it's it's only been out for 101 years. So just in case anybody doesn't hasn't seen it, right? Yeah, but as I said before I started recording, my my mom watched it for the first time uh last night. So there's a lot of people that um you know, a lot of people around that weren't around 101 years ago to watch this when it first came out. So um so what uh yeah, what are your thoughts on the that final act? I I'm really curious to hear what you have to say about it because it's just so it's sort of the classic, right?

SPEAKER_01 31:48

She has this crush on Joe Kelly, who is also um, you know, in a gang. Um uh the sort of adult version of this Kelly gang that she's fighting. And I think unbeknownst to her and her uh police officer father, uh, because her police officer father thinks his son uh Tim is going to become a police officer like him, Tim is a member of the gang, that that Joe isn't just his friend, right? That they're both sort of getting involved in organized crime effectively. And so the death of uh of uh Officer Rooney, who's this beloved community figure, um, changes everything, right? So uh uh both Tim and Joe, you know, sort of decide to change their lives. Tim becomes a police officer, um, and Joe uh, you know, creates like a sort of a trucking company, it would appear. And uh and and also important, Annie has a crush on Joe. Yes, right, that that starts in the film. And so that's sort of uh right, like her journey to maturation. And so at the end of the film, she's in the front of the truck with Joe. They encounter Tim, the police officer, and in the back of the truck are the children and the gang. But notably because Mary's Mary Pickford and her character's hair is always hair is so important. Uh, the girl with the little curls, that she's uh Annie has been wearing braids, right? Sort of as a signifier of her age that she's still a child. And in this final scene with Joe, she's got her hair down, and we the curls. And that's a sign that she is maturing, she is becoming a young woman. Joe is now an appropriate uh sort of object of interest. Like clearly they're developing some kind of relationship. But interestingly, all of her friends in the gang who are in the sitting in the in the bed of the truck remain children, right? So this is sort of this is the classic, right? Little Annie Rooney is getting it getting uh uh sort of set up in the marriage plot at the very end of the film. But she has spent the entire film stealing things, riding horses through the streets of uh lower Manhattan, uh, and you know, running a gang and also running her home. There are these scenes of domesticity, right? So that it's helping to kind of make the uh the rest of it sort of feel okay, right? That she'll end up conforming in some way. But it's always just the hint. The body of the film is about right, her adventures.

SPEAKER_00 34:24

Yeah, no, it it it's uh but it it's so beautiful. Do you and uh I'll ask you something personal. Do you cry during during during the last parts of this that that film?

SPEAKER_01 34:35

Uh oh, the death of the father is a real tearjerker.

SPEAKER_00 34:38

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:39

I, you know, I like I you know, this is I mean it's a dramedy, it's a melodrama. She that's her forte is the melodrama. It's really the dramedy, actually, because they're comedy dramas, right? That there's always, right? Like for many of them, not all of them. But even Stella Maris, right? Which is one of the most melodramatic of like there's always great comic relief happening. There's stuff in it, yeah. Um you know, the first time I watched it, I mean, ages ago when I was like working on the book and like like it was so long ago that I got the DVD. Like Netflix was a great source when you had the like you got D from Netflix. I watched it as a D as a Netflix DVD. Yeah, yeah. Before things were streaming and more things, I I mean some think more things are available. Some things still feel like where to go, where are we gonna find it? Um and I, you know, I still like I am both a a media scholar, but also a fan. And so, you know, I and it I didn't see it coming, right? I mean, now I've seen it multiple times. I know uh the ending, but it's it's really affecting because he is this really, you know, important uh center of gravity, not just for his own family and his own children, but for the whole community, right? That he's clearly protecting, um, that he is a symbol of sort of uh community and love and and uh you know following the straight and narrow. And so it the tragedy of his death, right, like turns into it changes the lives of uh both Annie's brother and you know what we can think the you know figure is her future husband.

SPEAKER_00 36:17

Yeah, and I I I love I I love the the um the applesauce part where she's she she rips up the no because uh she thinks that she is going to die because of the blood transusion. She's willing to die to save Joe Kelly. And that's the that's the thing that and of course she wasn't in peril at all, you know, but she thought that she was going to die. I love the way she says, Well, so when do I croak?

SPEAKER_01 36:54

It kind of reinforces that she's a child, right? Uh you know, being sort of naive in that way, um uh and and really like very sincere and very kind of like immature and dramatic and kind of sweet, right? That that is uh uh you know one of many um affecting moments. So David, I did want to say you had mentioned this and I hadn't thought about this, thought about it in this way before, which is why I always I love teaching films and I love talking about them because I always learn new things and see them in different ways, right? When you talk to uh you experience it all the time, right? Um the that beginning of the film, I mean, this is a woman who made some over 160 short films, right? So these are the very, right? This is sort of their early cinema, right? From like, you know, uh 1898 until about you know 1912 or so, 19, 1912, 1915. People remove into the era of the you know, sort of movie palaces and feature, feature-length films as we understand them today, right? That they're like that are an hour plus, right? These are short, they're like they go, they you know, go from like one minute to five minutes to 15 minutes. Um and I really think the opening of that film is is very explicitly an ode to right the bulk of right, the the the the the history, right? But because she's she is a sort of pioneering preservationist um in in the industry when people weren't thinking about it, she was the one of the one of the people who was. And so that first 15 or 20 minutes, that opening scene, is really also a love letter to the world of of short films, right? That run like you know, a very simple, you know, are 10 or 15 minutes long. But I really I think that's very explicitly a love letter and a Valentine, not just and to to audiences, to the audiences who have grown up in cinema with her and know that and know and understand the language in a way that if you aren't a cinophile, if you don't, you know, if you're not a scholar, if you're not somebody who's like in silent cinema, you're gonna fully miss it. So you caught it. So thank you. I'm adding it to my notes on this stuff.

SPEAKER_00 39:13

Uh I I may have brought up the point, but you succinctly uh you know explained it. Uh yeah, I I love that. Um, those are all really, really good points. I I I I just love that first 20 minutes. I just I I I I it's almost like the anti-saving private Ryan, you know, um, you know, I how the first 20 minutes is nothing but violence. But here we have it's violence, but it at the same time it's tamed violence and and it's just little kids. And uh and uh but but things get real in the in the film later and and but we have that first you know segment um that like said looked like uh one of the better uh uh our gang episodes, you know, uh from the the this the silent uh our gang episode. That's what it looked like to me, very much so. Um but um before before I before we cut out here, I I I wan I I wanted to put myself in peril here. Um I uh you know uh Tracy uh uh Gosel is right. She wrote a book about Douglas Fairbanks.

SPEAKER_01 40:27

Um yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry.

SPEAKER_00 40:29

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:30

Absolutely. I have I'm I can see it on my bookshelf.

SPEAKER_00 40:32

Oh, okay. I can see it on my bookshelf. Literally.

SPEAKER_01 40:35

It's like Yeah, the tit it's First King of Hollywood, right?

SPEAKER_00 40:39

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah. Uh highly recommend anybody retreat that book uh too. Um but the um yeah, I got myself in trouble with Tracy uh because I told her that I I I I actually like Kiki. I'm sorry, but I I I know Mary would hate it if uh if someone said this, but I I I kind of like seeing the fish out of water, you know, cut type stuff, and I enjoy the broad comedy. Um the uh what do you think the main problem was uh with transitioning from silence uh uh to the the sound? It's a different animal, but uh obviously it's something completely different. But what do you think uh are one or two of the main reasons why people uh in general, not just Mary, but in general, what what caused this uh to be a thing?

SPEAKER_01 41:41

Um some of it I think is age, right? Like what you know, age, gender, a lot of factors, right? Um because it is it's a different art form, like a silent film stage. You can have music playing, like Fairbanks, you know, was running practical jokes while production was happening. Um, that you're using a scenario, it's a different way of acting, right? That you're you know, that is right, you you don't have the words and you're operating, they weren't called screenplays, they were called scenarios because they were impressionistic. It was like these are the things that are happening, this is how you might react, right? I mean, you have the inner titles that show up, but really good silent cinema doesn't need to overly rely on those intertitles, right?

SPEAKER_00 42:24

Little Andrew doesn't have very much at all.

SPEAKER_01 42:26

Right. So um, so so it is it requires different skill sets, right? This the sets have to be absolutely quiet. Um it is learning dialogue if it's something that you haven't been doing, right? Like that's a that that's a skill. Um there's a question of dialect and sort of right, there's the you know, the the the the uh you know mid-Atlantic accent that emerges as the you know sort of the ways in which, right, sort of famously Catherine Hepburns, right? The most kind of fame best when she and Carrie Grant are good examples of that sort of vaguely British accent, right? And if that's not something that you're interested in or capable of doing, it means you're gonna be typecast in a certain way. And for Pickford, it's also her age, right? She's in her mid-30s, so she had the talk, right? She can't be, you know, she's aging out of being an ingenue, um, and is like, you know, kind of like not uh uh it certainly does perform, right? Sort of more mature roles, but she I mean, she's also somebody who's been working since she was seven or eight years old. So, you know, the idea that she is gonna sh right. I think she makes the sort of wise decision to retreat from the screen, but she's doing other things in the decades that follow, right? If I can correct one thing. So I don't think I gave you just one or two reasons why the trend why that's a lot of reasons, obviously.

SPEAKER_00 43:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:57

Could could be challenging, right? That it is and then so in Pickford secures, she goes back, she secure, I mean, she has her own production company starting in 1916, but she goes back and secures the rights to everything uh that she made, right? The significant numbers of of short films she made. She has them all, and then she starts to feel embarrassed, right, about her work and considers destroying it, and then she gives it to the Library of Congress and they fumble it, and right, we almost lose it. Um, and then um the Eastman School steps in, right? So so that right, because we need to remember with Silent Cinema, we've lost globally 80% of what was produced, right? Because film stock was volatile, volatile, hard to store. And also people like it was the idea this is art. Yeah, right. That that's the whole battle, the industry, right, until the miracle decision in the 1950s, uh, that finally gives film, right? Film loses the protection, right? First Amendment protection as an art form and has to fight to get it, um, and finally does with the miracle decision. And so Pickford has that own her own internal battle. Um but luckily we have virtually not everything, but close to everything she ever made, right? Which is uh important, right? Because it's not just her, right? It's an it's the output of the industry and all of the sort of performers around her and the story of early Hollywood, which is also a women's story. Um and we we sort of lost that thread, right? And and more recent, you know, the surge of uh sort of feminist film scholarship has helped to remind everybody, actually, like Pickford wasn't an anomaly. She becomes more of an anomaly when the sort of so-called classical Hollywood studio system comes into being in the mid-1920s. Um, but women, there are there's still spaces where women are are doing important work, but it's it's harder, right? When it becomes a kind of you know global corporate juggernaut. Uh when it's clear, like, oh, this shouldn't just be the domain of the immigrants and the outsiders, right? That this is big business.

SPEAKER_00 46:14

Yeah, yeah, it is.

SPEAKER_01 46:15

Um big business that can sell the American way of life. It plays a central role, right, in uh rise of American Empire in uh in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

SPEAKER_00 46:28

Yeah. Well, we have been talking to Dr. Kathy Veely about Lil Annie Rooney, and also remember to get her uh book, Mary Pickford, Hollywood, and the new woman. And um, I want to say thank you very much for coming on here and giving us your input on uh a very important figure in the film industry um, you know, uh in Mary Pickford. And um and hey everybody, give little Annie Rooney a rewatch uh if you haven't seen it in a long time, because it will be sure to put a smile on your face. Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_01 47:10

Thank you for having me, David.