Photograph of (left to right) Anne Sullivan Macy, Helen Keller, Mary Pickford, Polly Thomson, Charles B. Hayes, Douglas Fairbanks and an unidentified man, circa 1925 in Hollywood, California.
In February 1918, Anne, Helen and Polly were invited to go to Hollywood and make a movie about Helen's life. The movie, Deliverance, was intended to portray the overcoming of physical blindness and deafness as well as the deliverance from political and spiritual blindness. The film was well reviewed in the national press, but it was not a commercial success. It was considered too "high-brow," with too much moralizing and not enough romance. Nor was it without its production trials and tribulations. On one occasion Anne had a heated argument with one of its financial backers whom she found too controlling; and on another occasion Helen was roundly criticized for taking the movie's scriptwriter, Francis T. Miller, to a dinner honoring Walt Whitman. The dinner would be full of "radicals" and would bring negative publicity to the film project. To cap it all, the women had to borrow money for a journey home to New York during production of the movie.
