Fanchon Royer — Hidden Glamor (1938) 🇺🇸
Fanchon Royer, only woman film producer, proves there are other fields than acting for smart girls to conquer
by Tom Kennedy
In all the lively cargo of glamor-seeking girls who are trundled into Hollywood from all corners of the land, you would be hard put to find a single prospective gift to the movies who ever expects to be a film producer. Not that many girls wouldn’t like the idea if they stopped to think about it. But who would think about it? A film producer is one to whom everybody says “Yes, mister;” the big boss of a show that’s for men only. That’s what most everybody thinks. But thinking doesn’t make it so, and you needn’t be surprised when we introduce Fanchon Royer as a film producer with more than twenty-five productions to her credit.
Make no mistake, Hollywood’s only woman producer was no different than her sister fame-seekers, before and since. When she went to Hollywood from Des Moines she had in mind only one thing — to become a star. That was in 1918, and Fanchon Royer was then sixteen, and very ambitious.
One who has had so many extraordinary experiences needs no promptings to call up vivid accounts that form an amazing saga of the woman who has proved that members of her sex can find glamor and great success behind the cameras as well as in front of them. Even so, this particular reporter found the alert, stylishly slim and responsive Miss Royer he interviewed today even more interesting than the heroine of the almost legendary episodes that bring her career up to the latest Royer Production. She knows every trick and dodge, every corner and cranny of that labyrinth of artful business curves and twists that is known in the trade as the Independent Market. However, that is a different story.
The woman producer the picture-goers don’t know, is the aforementioned stylish, good looking young matron who rounds out ten years in film production with her newest film, Religious Racketeers, an exposé of fake spiritists, mediums, salesmen of the super-natural— independent producers must get “exploitation angles” into their pictures, because each film must be sold as an individual show, and not part of a group or program as in the case of the so-called “major” producer. Mrs. Harry Houdini, widow of the magician, is the feature of Religious Racketeers.
“I’m going to present this picture myself, as a special show in most of the large cities,” Miss Royer was telling us That entails renting theatres and managing the whole show herself. “I don’t want to sell it out for general distribution and then go back to Hollywood and have nothing to do until I start another production.” The fact that such enterprise calls for a wisdom of show business that few of the foremost men producers would care to try their hand at in no way daunts this remarkably able woman. “It will be fun,” she says.
She can be equally blithe in telling how just two years ago she came back home to Hollywood broke, from Mexico where she had gone to tend to business in connection with her productions. Well, she wasn’t exactly broke— there was sixteen dollars; to take care of eight people: herself, her five children and two employees. Mention of her five children tells you another phase of the remarkable career of Fanchon Royer. Her oldest child, a son, is fifteen; her youngest, a girl, is not quite three years old.
In the lobby of a theatre where she previewed her first picture Miss Royer learned the essentials of independent production. In the first place she hadn’t made the picture with any idea of launching herself as a producer. Fanchon Royer at that time was in a different line of the film business. After playing extra and bit parts in several films she became the editor of a trade paper concerned with the actor’s welfare and viewpoint. From that she had entered the agency business and had several promising young people as clients. One in particular— a dark-haired blue-eyed chap— did not seem to be getting anywhere in particular. So she decided to make a picture to show producers that this tall, good-looking fellow was a real prospect. She made the picture, and Grant Withers was started on his way. He became an outstanding leading man of the screen and the man who led Loretta Young to the altar for a marriage that was later dissolved in the divorce courts.
The picture made, and well-praised, Fanchon Royer went about selling it to distributors. She was interested in impressing one film man in particular. It was he who told her in the lobby of the theatre: “I know they liked your picture — but an independent producer doesn’t have to worry so much about that, as about getting something into the film that will make it a box office attraction.”
From that time on, Fanchon Royer has stuck to the “exploitation pictures” as they’re called in the trade. As a producer she can tell you down to the last dime how much a picture cost for story, raw film, lighting, camera work, players and laboratory work. In her own field, she is competing with some of the shrewdest business brains the film industry has developed. That it is not by any means a lick-penny business we think we might convey very briefly by telling you that one of the most successful producers is a man, still comparatively young, who has amassed a fortune estimated at sixteen millions in independent production and distribution.
Fanchon Royer doesn’t specialize in those DeMille gold bathtub settings’ or great mass spectacles. Nor is she in any way concerned with introducing that mythical thing called “the woman’s angle.” Her films are action pictures. The titles of some of her films indicate that. Before Religious Racketeers there were such thrillers as A Million to One, Pilot X, Ten Laps to Go, Fighting Lady.
“The only difficulty a woman experiences because she is a woman in this business,” she told us, “is that it’s hard to get the heads of organizations you deal with to believe you’re worth bothering with.”
Asked if she thought there were any advantages automatically falling to a woman producer, she attributed the courtesy she has always had from directors, actors, technicians and laborers on the set to “chivalry.” It isn’t dead, she thinks.
Since she started as a business executive by seeing only the actor’s side of it — both as a magazine editor and an actor’s agent — we were inclined to think her complete understanding of the player and his position might have something to do with her success in getting along so well with the talent. However, it was nice to get to know Fanchon Royer better, and right cheering to hear that chivalry is not dead.
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Fanchon Royer, left, has had a career as colorful as any Glamor Girl’s! She makes pictures instead of acting in them. Above, a scene from her latest film, Religious Racketeers, with Betty Compson and Mrs. Harry Houdini. At far left, with one of her five children.
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They make a good team! Leo Carrillo, that ingratiating fellow, joins forces again with Edith Fellowes [Edith Fellows] in City Streets. Remember them in Little Miss Roughneck?
Collection: Screenland Magazine, August 1938