From 1912 to 1919, Universal produced some 170 films directed by women, many of them for the studio’s female-oriented Bluebird label – and the great majority of them now lost. Universal’s roster of female directors included Cleo Madison, Ruth Stonehouse, Ruth Ann Baldwin, Elsie Jane Wilson and Ida May Park, though the most celebrated of them was Lois Weber, a former Christian evangelist, concert pianist and stage actor, who entered films in 1908.
Working with her husband, Phillips Smalley, Weber directed, wrote or starred in over 100 one-reel films between 1911 and 1917 for Universal’s Rex subsidiary, including the innovative 1913 Suspense, with its sophisticated use of a screen split into three separate images. After directing their first features for Universal (including the recently restored 1916 The Dumb Girl of Portici, starring Anna Pavlova), Weber and Smalley created their own company, Lois Weber Productions. But Weber’s taste for moralizing, Christian-themed films fell out of favor in the rapidly evolving America of the 1920s, and eventually, on her own after her divorce from the womanizing Smalley, she returned to Universal as a studio employee for her last few films.
Released March 20, 1927, Sensation Seekers seems in many ways Weber’s response to the changing times. Based on the short story Egypt by Ernest Pascal, the film is a moralistic melodrama in the popular DeMille style, centered on a Long Island socialite (Billie Dove) with a Jazz Age enthusiasm for drinking, smoking and shimmying – which she has apparently acquired from her dissolute father, played in a pointed cameo by Weber’s ex-husband Smalley. Egypt – so called because she is the “most pagan of her set” – finds herself drawn to the strenuously modern, emphatically masculine minister of the local Protestant church (Raymond Bloomer). Although the minister briefly considers throwing over his vocation to run away with the scandalous Egypt, the heavens intervene in the patented DeMille manner, as a storm of Biblical proportions arrives in the last reel to sort out the characters’ fates.

One of three films Weber made in the late 1920s that sparked a brief resurgence of her career, Sensation Seekers is a mas­terful example of her mature work. Here she returns to her interest in gossip and scandal, updating the context to the Jazz Age. Billie Dove stars as Egypt Hagen, a society ‘flapper’ who renounces her hedo­nistic lifestyle for a more ethical path. It was the second role Weber had written for Dove, catapulting the actress to stardom after several years of playing leading roles with little impact. Critics noted that We­ber’s direction had brought out “the full talent of an actress who heretofore has been more or less purely decorative”, not­ing that Dove’s performances demonstrat­ed that she had become “virtually over­night an actress of the first rank”. Late in life Dove remembered Weber as “the best director I ever had… If I’d had any­thing to say about it, I would have had her direct all my pictures. I had a lot of men directors that I liked too, but she under­stood women”. It is ironic that Sensation Seekers propelled Dove to fame – before filming was even complete she had signed a five-year deal with First National – for the film stands alongside 1926’s The Marriage Clause and Weber’s subsequent release, The Angel of Broadway, to mark a trio of films offering remarkably reflexive meditations on the performance of femi­ninity in Hollywood’s glamour culture. If The Marriage Clause and The Angel of Broadway both explore female stardom in the theater – a clear stand-in for the mov­ie industry – Sensation Seekers comes at the question of performance and celebrity from a more oblique angle. A well-known socialite, Egypt lives her life on a kind of media ‘stage’, where her every move is watched and reported upon. The ‘sensa­tion seekers’ evoked in the film’s title are just as much Egypt’s neighbors and fel­low church-goers (eager for a scandal be­tween their pastor and a handsome young woman) as they are Egypt’s own ‘ultra-jazzy wealthy set’. Intercutting equates the group’s racy social gatherings with the ruthless behavior of Egypt’s neigh­bors, gathered to watch the ‘sinful’ goings on, gossiping mercilessly in church, and crowding around to read newspaper cover­age of Egypt’s arrest. There is little differ­ence, the film asserts, between those who seek sensation through alcohol or sex and those who seek it through scandal and gossip mongering.