Studios

One of the more straightforward ways to chart Mabel Normand’s career is by segmenting it along her major studio affiliations. The map below offers little in the way of ground covered, but rather demonstrates the bi-coastal production layout in the United states at the time.

Below that is a timeline that charts each period with a studio over time, followed by a dot plot that charts each film’s duration against its year of release. By putting these charts together, we can get a sense of how Normand’s stints with each studio related to the duration of her films.

Studio to Studio

Normand would work at studios based in New York, Los Angeles, and Fort Lee, New Jersey. Her bounce back and forth across the country was typical for many film stars who worked with more than one studio.

(Author’s note: I personally prefer the story map as its own web page, but have embedded it here for your convenience. If you’d like to view it separately you can click here ).

A Top-Level View

This dot plot charts the known (or presumed) durations of Normand’s films over time against the year they were released. As you can see, we find that the move to Goldwyn brings a major rise in durations that does not dip when she returns to Sennett at his new company. However, when she signs on with Roach, the films she makes are shorts again. While sound film was about to radically change how comedy films were made, in general her career falls in line with trends in silent comedy. The 1920s were full of feature length comedies, but there were still several studios, like Hal Roach, that were making comedy shorts well into the early thirties.