Scandal Mongers, Universal’s 1918 release of Weber’s 1915 feature Scandal, is one of her most sustained explorations of the damaging effects of gossip, a theme also touched on in the two shorts included in the program, as well as later features like Saving the Family Name (1916) and Sensation Seekers (1927), also screening at the festival. Here Weber and Smalley play a stenographer and her boss who become embroiled in scandal when he begins driving her to work after she breaks her ankle. Media-fueled scandal, visualized as a hideous beast seen hovering over the characters, is associated with a kind of blindness, a failure to see what’s really going on. Women are chiefly to blame: so busy are they policing the conduct of others that they fail to recognize the damage they are causing. Bourgeois propriety disrupts, rather than supports, marriage. In the end, the professional partnership and mutual respect the couple exhibits in the workplace becomes a model for forward- looking heterosexual relationships. The film’s fourth reel is missing.