[Romance + Film]
Not long after film was born, it was nowhere near being called the seventh art. Montage was still an unfamiliar foreign word with a French feel, and film editing was considered a simple job that required no skill. The pay was meager, the work was looked down upon, and women were usually the ones who did it.
Mercedes had no direction in life from a young age and became a proud street loafer. A friend brought her to a film studio, where she picked up a strip of film for the first time.
Then she never put film down again for the rest of her life.
Mercedes did only one thing in her life: define what film really was.
Though Mercedes's contributions to film earned her a place in the annals of art history, and her name was still often mentioned in the next century, people were most fascinated by the legendary story of her marriages. They loved to talk about how she dumped the father of cinema and swiftly married a real estate tycoon, how she unhesitatingly took half his fortune when age had taken its toll on him, and how she quickly found herself another boyfriend, twenty-three years her junior, after becoming a billionaire.
Posterity summed up her love life this way: Mercedes's Boyfriends Are Forever Eighteen.
Moral: Independence
