Ruth Harriet Louise (born Ruth Goldstein, January 13, 1903 – October 12, 1940) was an American photographer. She was the first woman photographer active in Hollywood and she ran Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's portrait studio from 1925 to 1930. Louise began working as a portrait photographer in 1922, working out of a music store down the block from the New Brunswick temple at which her father was a rabbi. Most of her photographs from this period are of family members and members of her father's temple congregation.
In 1925, she moved to Los Angeles and established a small photo studio on Hollywood and Vine. Louise's first published Hollywood photo was of Vilma Banky in costume for The Dark Angel (1925), which appeared in Photoplay magazine in September 1925. When Louise was hired by MGM as chief portrait photographer, she was twenty-two years old and the only woman working as a portrait photographer for the Hollywood studios. In a career that lasted only five years, Louise photographed all the stars, contract players, and many of the hopefuls who passed through the studio's front gates, including Greta Garbo (Louise was one of only seven photographers permitted to make portraits of her), Lon Chaney, John Gilbert, Joan Crawford, Marion Davies, Anna May Wong, Nina Mae McKinney, and Norma Shearer. It is estimated that she took more than 100,000 photos during her tenure at MGM. Today she is considered an equal with George Hurrell Sr. and other renowned glamour photographers of the era. In addition to paying close attention to costume and setting for studio photographs, Louise also incorporated aspects of modernist movements such as Cubism, futurism, and German expressionism into her studio portraits.
The Big Parade has been praised for its realistic depiction of warfare, and it heavily influenced a great many subsequent war films, especially All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). The Big Parade is regarded as one of the greatest films made about World War I and, in 1992, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. The Big Parade was one of the great hits of the 1920's, earning gross rentals of $4,990,000 in the United States and $1,141,000 overseas on a budget of $382,000 during its initial release, with MGM recording a profit of $3.4 million, its biggest of the silent era. The domestic earnings were MGM's biggest until the release of Gone with the Wind (1939). It played in some larger cities continually for a year or more, boosting Gilbert's career and made Renée Adorée a major star, although Adorée would soon be diagnosed with tuberculosis and die only a few years later. The film ultimately grossed $18–$22 million in worldwide rentals and is sometimes proclaimed as the most successful film of the silent era, although it is most likely this record falls to D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). The film won the Photoplay Magazine Medal for best film of the year in 1925. The medal is considered the first significant annual movie award, prior to the establishment of the Oscars.
After the film's producers found a clause in Vidor's contract that entitled the director to 20% of the net profits, studio lawyers called for a meeting with him. At the meeting, accountants upgraded the costs of the picture and downgraded their forecast of its potential success. Vidor was thus persuaded to sell his stake in the film before he could receive his percentage. However, the film's tremendous success established Vidor as one of MGM's top directors.