Serial Queen Ruth Ann Baldwin Knew How to Craft a Cliffhanger

As with far too many women in this early era, not much is documented about Ruth Ann Baldwin except her 31 writing credits and 12 directing credits from 1913-1921 thanks to the work of the many contributors to IMDb. Various sites report her birth in September of 1886 in West Suffield, Connecticut and no sites can name the date of her death. It’s an astonishingly frequent experience for these female powerhouses who founded the industry so it is more than fitting that we keep their names alive – and as much of their work as has and can still be preserved.

Hazy too is Baldwin’s background in journalism. She seems to have worked for newspapers in San Diego before moving to Los Angeles and hooking up with the Bison Film Company. Relatively new to the business, having been established in 1909, the company produced westerns. While the title of her first film The Werewolf (1913) means certain things to viewers today, this version comes from a Native American legend about the magical ability to make people into wolves and back into human form to exact vengeance. Sadly, being of nitrate stock, it was lost with many other films in the 1924 fire at Universal Studios.

Baldwin’s next film, The Prince of Bavaria (1914), also involved adaptation in that Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper inspired the idea of switching places to learn about each other’s lives. A similar swapping of status underpins her next few films. In The Vagabond (1914) a hobo is accidentally taken for a dead man and embraced by that man’s family until the truth comes out. In Traffic in Babies (1914) after her father is caught embezzling funds a rich young woman becomes a nanny rather than marry her fiancé so that he won’t have to be burdened by scandal. In The Heart of a Magdalene (1914) during a contest for a new painting of the Madonna, mother of Christ, an artist chooses a local prostitute as his muse and model. Adaptation came back into play with her screenplays for Damon and Pythias (1914) involving the friendship of Damon, the senator, and Pythias, the soldier, in Ancient Syracuse.

Thanks to studio archives scholars have learned that Universal became interested in hiring Baldwin in 1915, likely for her ability with adaptations, to go to London and collaborate with mystery novelist E. Phillips Oppenheim. Together they turned his novel The Black Box into a successful serial starring then popular talents Herbert Rawlinson and Ann Little.

As the length of films grew from one and two reel shorts to full features, so too did Baldwin’s career. She can be found in some searches as Ruth A. Pierson because she married actor Leo O. Pierson and wrote some westerns for him including her one surviving feature,’49-’17 (1917) which she both directed and adapted from the short story by William Wallace Cook. The story parodied westerns – and foresaw The Truman Show (1998) – in that the story involved an urban dweller whose boss in 1917 requires him to recreate the 1849 gold rush town in which he once worked as a miner “Forty-Niner.”

Baldwin’s last writing credit came in 1917 and her last directing credit in 1921. After that her life is a mystery, worthy of much further research and, perhaps, of its own movie…

Many thanks to the Women Film Pioneers Project, a digital scholarship pilot project by the Columbia University Libraries. For more information: https://wfpp.columbia.edu/pioneer/ccp-ruth-ann-baldwin/

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