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FRANCES MARION
Frances
Marion was America. s highest paid screenwriter, male or female, for more than 20 years. She is credited with writing nearly 200 scripts and won two Academy Awards® for her original screen stories . The Big House and The Champ. An example of her importance to MGM is that in 1930, scripts she had written were nominated for Academy Awards® in seven of the eight award categories.
Marion
was born Marion Benson Owens in 1888 in San Francisco to a well-to-do family. She arrived in Los Angeles in 1912 to work as a poster painter for Oliver Morosco. s theater. With the encouragement of actress Marie Dressler and reporter Adela Rogers St. Johns, Marion entered the movie business in 1914 as a protégé of director Lois Weber. Her name was changed to Frances Marion and she was signed as an actress, but she learned to cut film, paint back drops, move props and write lines for the extras to mouth. She met and befriended Mary Pickford, who cast her in several films, but Marion wanted to write. She managed to convince William Brady, owner of World Studios, to hire her at $200 a week, at a time when the highest-paid writer made $75. Over the next year, she wrote more than 30 films and also ghost- wrote a daily newspaper column for her friend Pickford.
Pickford demanded Adolph Zukor hire Marion to write Poor Little Rich Girl, the beginning of a collaborative friendship that produced over a dozen silent classics, including Pollyanna, Little Princess and Stella Maris. Marion voluntarily gave up the $50,000 a year she was making with Pickford to serve as a war correspondent during World War 1. Appointed by the White House, she documented the activities of the allied women overseas and was the first America woman to cross the Rhine after the Armistice. She married Fred Thomson a world championship athlete and army Chaplain. Three months later, Pickford married Doug Fairbanks and they joined Thomson and Marion on their European honeymoon. Upon their return, Marion wrote and directed The Love Light, starring Pickford and Thomson.
Marion was then offered $100,000 a year (at the time the average annual salary was $1,000 a year) to write and produce films for William Randolph Hearst. She wrote Humoresque, which won the first Photoplay Award (precursor to the Academy Award®) for best picture of the year. Over the next five years, Marion turned out 50 films for top stars including Marion Davies, Norma and Constance Talmadge, Ronald Colman, Gary Cooper and Rudolph Valentino. Using the pseudonym Frank M. Clifton, she also wrote Westerns for her husband, who soon became a top box office cowboy.
In 1925, Marion was called to MGM to adapt The Scarlet Letter for Lillian Gish. That marked the beginning of a 10 year collaboration with Irving Thalberg, head of production for MGM. She followed The Scarlet Letter with The Wind (starring Gish) and Love (starring Greta Garbo and John Gilbert).
In 1928,
Thomson died of tetanus and Marion was left alone to raise their sons. When she returned to MGM, Thalberg entrusted her to adapt Anna Christie for Greta Garbo, the studio. s biggest star and the only one yet to "talk," and two sound films for his wife, Norma Shearer. Adored by Thalberg and paid $150,000 a year by MGM, she turned out Oscar® winners like The Big House and The Champ. In 1933, when Mayer announced he was halving all studio salaries, the writers were the first to react. The previously apolitical and notoriously shy Marion stepped forward with a handful of others to help form the Writers Guild, and was elected its first vice president. MGM briefly dropped Marion. s contract.
She returned to write Riff Raff for Spencer Tracy and Jean Harlow, Camille for Garbo and Going Hollywood for Marion Davies, but it was not the same. She had risen to power at a time when she had casting approval and a say in who the director would be, but now everyone second-guessed everything. While she would be on and off contract with MGM for another decade, she eventually left voluntarily to write original stories. She took classes at USC in anatomy, took up sculpting and painting and wrote novels, plays and short stories. She died in Los Angeles in 1973 at the age of 84.
Written by:
Cari Beauchamp
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HELEN GARDNER
Helen
Gardner, born in 1884, formed the first production company in the United States established by a movie star, the first formed around a single star and the first whose sole purpose was to make full-length, feature films. Her career began after completing a drama program at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, when she went to work for The Vitagraph Company of America. She appeared in the first of her many Vitagraph films in 1910 and became a star when she played Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair (1911). In early 1912, she launched her own independent production company, The Helen Gardner Picture Players. Because of the powerful, steamy roles Gardner created and played in her own productions, she is called the screen. s first "vamp."
In
November 1912, Gardner released her first independent production, Cleopatra, which is considered the first feature film made in the U.S. Critics and audiences were dazzled by Gardner. s performance as Cleopatra and by the lavishness and beauty of her film. In the 14 years between 1910 and 1924, Gardner appeared in more than fifty films, produced 11, directed at least one, wrote the scenario for at least one, designed costumes, edited films, and created movie advertisements that were far ahead of her time. She died in 1968 at the age of 84.
Written by:
Dorin Schumacher, Ph.D.
Granddaughter of Helen Gardner
Copyright © 2000 Dorin Schumacher. All rights reserved.
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DOROTHY DAVENPORT
Dorothy Davenport was born into a theatrical family in 1895. Her father, Harry Davenport, became a popular Hollywood character actor. Davenport made both her stage and movie debuts at age 16.
In 1912, while filming the Western His Only Son, she fell in love with co-star and actor Wallace Reid, who was also a writer and director. They were married in 1913, after a day's work at the studio, during the filming of The Lightning Bolt. Reid became famous with a showy bit as a blacksmith in The Birth of a Nation. Davenport took time off from movie making to have two children. In 1919, Reid was in a train wreck on location and was badly injured. He became addicted to morphine, and when he died in 1923 at age 30, Davenport became a crusader against drug addiction.
She went with writer Adela Rogers St. Johns to a narcotics conference in Washington and returned determined to make a realistic film about the ravages of drug addiction. Human Wreckage, starring Bessie Love and James Kirkwood, with Davenport in a supporting role, is a lost film about an attorney who becomes a drug addict but doesn't face his own dependence until he realizes his wife is addicted, as well. The film was well-reviewed and a smash hit, making enough money for Davenport to support her children, finance her own production company and support the Wallace Reid Foundation Sanatorium. She produced and starred in one more film for Thomas Ince (who had financed Human Wreckage), Broken Laws, and then produced and co-directed The Red Kimona.
Over the rest of her career, Davenport acted in several films, directed Linda in 1929, and continued directing into the early 1930s. In 1935, Davenport met Arthur Lubin, with whom she was to collaborate for many years. From 1950-1956, she co-wrote the Francis the Talking Mule series, starring Donald O'Connor, the precursor to the TV series Mr. Ed. Davenport never remarried and died in 1977.
Written by:
Laura Drazin Boyes, Film Curator, North Carolina Museum of Art
References:
"Wallace Reid" by DeWitt Bodeen in April 1966 Films in Review
Behind the Mask of Innocence by Kevin Brownlow
Early Women Directors by Anthony Slide
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RUTH ANN BALDWIN
Ruth Ann Baldwin was a journalist who joined Universal Studios as a screenwriter in 1913. She wrote for the serial The Black Box in 1915, did a stint as an editor, and was tapped by the studio to direct. Despite the success of 49-17, a charming and suspenseful Western parody, her career as a director was over by 1920.
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MARY PICKFORD
Gladys Smith was born in 1892 in Toronto, Canada, at age 7 after her father was killed, Smith became the family breadwinner, performing in theater. In 1907, famed theater producer/director David Belasco changed her name to Mary Pickford and gave her a part in The Warrens of Virginia.
In 1909, she began working in moving pictures for D.W. Griffith at the Biograph Company in New York. She stayed with Biograph from 1909 to 1911, leaving for a brief stint with The Independent Motion Picture Company, and later with Majestic. In 1913, after a run on Broadway in A Good Little Devil, Pickford made a definitive break from the stage and signed a film contract with Adolph Zukor and the Famous Players movie company.
Success gave Pickford incredible bargaining power, and in 1917 she negotiated a contract that gave her a $10,000. a-week salary, 50 percent of her film profits and her own production company. Pickford signed off on every aspect of her productions, from the script to the director and often had a hand in editing. She worked with directors Maurice Tournieur and Marshall Neilan, and with her best friend, Frances Marion, with whom she made some of the best features of her career, including Stella Maris, Poor Little Rich Girl and The Hoodlum. In 1919, 27-year-old Pickford co-founded United Artists with Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith and Douglas Fairbanks, who became her husband the next year.
Pickford averaged only one film a year after 1921. Favorite titles from this decade include a remake of Tess of the Storm Country and Rosita. Her last silent film was My Best Girl (1927).
In 1929, talkies had all but obliterated silent film. Pickford cut her signature curls and made two more pictures before the decade ended. Coquette (1929) won her an Oscar® for Best Actress, and Taming of the Shrew (1929) featured the much-anticipated pairing of Pickford and her Fairbanks. But even with good reviews, these films were not as successful as her silent pictures. She retired in 1933 after 23 years of making movies, but continued to produce films. In 1936, her marriage to Douglas Fairbanks ended. Pickford then married actor Charles "Buddy" Rogers, her co-star in My Best Girl. The marriage lasted until Pickford's death in 1979.
Written by:
Christel Schmidt
Women Pioneers Project
Independent Scholar
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NELL SHIPMAN
In 1922, at the pinnacle of her career as a writer, producer, director, star and animal wrangler of wilderness-adventure films, Nell Shipman relocated her production company, studio and zoo of wild-animal co-stars to upper Priest Lake, Idaho. All of her successful films were shot primarily on location in spectacular natural surroundings, and she portrayed women who lived in close alliance with the animals around them. She was involved in every aspect of filmmaking and consciously separated herself from the big studios, both in terms of the content of her films and their production methods. Given the consolidation of film production and distribution channels that occurred at the time, the further Shipman moved from Hollywood, the less successful her films became.
Born Helen Barham in 1892 in Canada, the young Nell joined a touring vaudeville company, met and married Ernest Shipman and, in 1912, the two moved to Southern California. Shipman wrote and acted in various short films for Vitagraph, Selig and Universal, and in 1915 was chosen as the lead in Vitagraph's $90,000 production of God's Country and the Woman. The film did extremely well and Shipman followed it up with the critical and financial success Back to God's Country in 1919. The next year, she divorced Ernest and made the car-chase picture Something New with her lover, former race car driver Bert Van Tuyle, who was co-director of the film and a partner in Nell Shipman Productions. Film historians believe that he was primarily responsible for the 1921 financial disaster The Girl From God's Country. The Grub Stake (1922) was Shipman Productions. final major film. It was supposed to recoup the losses incurred on The Girl from God's Country. However, due to lack of access to reliable distribution sources, Shipman made no money from the film. In 1925, Nell Shipman Productions went bankrupt. Nell split from Van Tuyle and gave her animals to the San Diego zoo.
Shipman
continued to write and leave her home open to animals of all sorts until her death in 1970. Her most famous work after her success of the teens and . 20s was 1935's Wings in the Dark, a story about a seeing-eye dog that starred Myrna Loy and Cary Grant. Her autobiography, The Silent Screen and My Talking Heart, was published in 1987.
Written by: Tom Trusky
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ALICE GUY
Alice Guy was born in 1873 in France. After an early childhood in Chile, where her father owned a chain of bookstores, she attended strict convent schools in France. As a teenager, she experienced a series of tragedies, including the death of her father and brother, leaving her and her mother to fend for themselves.
Guy studied typing, stenography and "new sciences," and at age 21 began working for a company that produced still photography and optical equipment. She was eventually promoted to office manager of the Gaumont company.
In 1896, she began making films herself, continuing her office manager duties at first, but then was quickly made head of Gaumont film production. In addition to a steady stream of silent films, she made more than100 synchronized- sound films for the Gaumont chronophone from 1902 to 1906. In 1907, Guy married Herbert Blache, another Gaumont employee. Gaumont made Herbert manager of the Flushing, NY, plant, which was originally built to produce English- language chronophone films, and in 1910 Guy decided to take advantage of the under-used Flushing plant. She started her own company, Solax, and made silent films using the Gaumont studio. Solax eventually went bankrupt.
By the late teens, both Alice and Herbert were directing feature films on a for-hire basis for whomever would employ them. During this period, Guy directed a series of "painted woman" melodramas starring the great Olga Petrova. Unfortunately, all of these films appear to be lost. The couple separated in 1918 and Herbert went to Hollywood with one of his actresses. However, he invited Guy to join him there later with the children and hired her to work for him on several features, two of which starred Alla Nazimova. Guy was forced to return to Fort Lee to handle the Solax bankruptcy proceedings and returned to France in 1922. For the next 30 years, she lectured widely on film and wrote magazine fiction and novelizations of film scripts, but she never remarried, nor did she make another film. Over the course of her career, Guy produced, or supervised the production of thousands of films. She directed approximately 400 films herself.
Written by:
Alison McMahan
Reference:
The Birth of Film Narrative: The Life and Work of Alice Guy Blache, the
World. s First Woman Filmmaker, by Alison McMahan
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MABEL NORMAND
Born in 1892 in Staten Island, madcap Mabel Normand became one of early Hollywood's most popular stars and one of its tragic causalities. In 1914, Mack Sennett, the head of The Kestone Film Company announced that Normand, who was at the height of her career, direct every picture she starred in. She made some 125 films for the company between 1912 and 1916, many of them bearing her name in the title. She also directed Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle and Charlie Chaplin.
Normand's
career began in New York, where she worked from 1910-1912 at Vitagraph and Biograph. She worked with D.W. Griffith. Later, Sennett, who became her lover and collaborator, helped her to create films that capitalized on her sexiness and unique sense of humor. By 1916, Normand was an established and highly successful star. Mack and Mabel created the Mabel Normand Feature Film Co. But as peers like Pickford and Chaplin negotiated their way through various production companies and increasingly lucrative salaries, Normand only made one film on her own. The feature Mickey which was a runaway success, but Normand didn. t see any of the proceeds. Although she did not have enormous success as an independent producer, she was well-loved and had many close friends. She suffered from tuburculosis, alcoholism and drug addiction. Normand's popularity declined along with her health. She made her last film in 1927 and died in 1932.
Written by:
Radha Vatsal, Coordinator, Women Film Pioneers Project, Duke University
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LOIS WEBER
Lois
Weber. s stature as a director was unparalleled in early Hollywood. A multi-talented creative force, Weber not only wrote and directed films, but also played leading roles in many of the pictures. In 1916, at the height of her career, she became the first and only woman granted membership in the Motion Picture Directors Association, a precursor to the Directors Guild of America.
Weber was
a pianist and actress who started directing when she went to Gaumont in 1908. Her husband, Phillips Smalley, began working at the company shortly after. Weber wrote scripts and the couple both directed and acted in the one reelers. The two joined Universal in 1912, where Weber wrote, directed and starred in one short film each week, quickly becoming the studio. s most important director. Weber was elected mayor of the new Universal City in Los Angeles in 1913. In 1914, they joined Bosworth Productions, where they were encouraged to make a series of ambitious feature-length dramas. Weber. s first feature was a screen adaptation of The Merchant of Venice in 1914.
Returning to
Universal in 1915, Weber began to produce some of her most pointed social commentary films. She tackled drug addiction in Hop, or the Devil. s Brew (1916), capital punishment in The People v. John Doe (1916) and birth control, perhaps the era. s most contentious issue, in not one but two films, Where Are My Children? (1916) and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1917). Her scripts focused on the plight of exploited shopgirls in Shoes (1916), under-valued educators and clergy in The Blot (1921) and gossip mongering in Scandal (1915). Later, she would direct the only screen appearance of famed Russian dancer Anna Pavlova, in The Dumb Girl of Portici (1916).
Her films contain some of the most subtle and sophisticated cinematic effects of the era. She experimented with early color processes, with dissolves and superimpositions, matte shots and elaborately choreographed camera movements, developing a wholly visual cinematic grammar to convey nuanced emotional states. She pioneered the concept of location shoots, including renting fully furnished homes as sets to add realism to her films.
In
1917, Weber bought her own studio and created Lois Weber Productions. She was one of the few directors of either gender with sufficient clout to do so. She brought cinematographer Dal Clawson with her, and her husband served as the studio manager. Here she produced some of her finest domestic dramas, including What. s Worth While?, Too Wise Wives and What Do Men Want?, all released in 1921.
Weber. s
production company ultimately folded and her career faltered when Jazz Age audiences were no longer drawn to socially relevant films. She directed three more features for Universal in the . 20s, A Chapter in Her Life (1923), The Marriage Clause (1926) and Sensation Seekers (1927), but suffered increasingly bad reviews. After having difficulty getting directing assignments, Weber directed her final feature, White Heat, in 1934. When she died at age 57, in 1939, Frances Marian, whom Weber brought into the film industry, was at her bedside.
Written by:
Shelley Stamp, University of California, Santa Cruz
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CLEO MADISON
Cleo Madison was born in Bloomington, IL, in 1883 and toured in vaudeville and on stage, forming the Cleo Madison Stock Company, before entering the movie industry in 1913. She acted in short films and serials, including The Fascination of the Fleur de Lis, The Trap and A Mother's Atonement, with Lon Chaney
After The Trey of Hearts (1914), a serial in which she played twin sisters, made her a star, she wanted more control over her films. In the end, Madison succeeded and she was given her own company.
She wrote, directed and starred in Her Bitter Cup in 1916. In it, Madison plays an idealistic slum girl who opts for the life of a kept woman, with tragic results. Footage of a freak L.A. snowstorm added an unusual background.
By
1921, her career was mostly over. She acted in a few films in the mid-. 20s, but then went into office work. She died in 1964.
Written by:
Laura Drazin Boyes
References:
Reel Women, by Ally Acker
Early Women Directors, by Anthony Slide
"Forgotten Early Women Directors" by Anthony Slide, in Films in Review, March 1974
Lon Chaney, The Man Behind the Thousand Faces, by Michael F. Blake
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DOROTHY ARZNER
Dorothy Arzner made 17 features between 1927 and 1943 and is the only female director in Hollywood to make the transition from silent to sound pictures. She was a gifted editor who cut Valentino's Blood and Sand and many other films. But Arzner wanted to direct.
She accepted an offer to direct at Columbia, but Paramount was loath to lose her and allowed her to direct Fashions for Women in 1927, starring Esther Ralston. She also directed the studio's first sound film with Clara Bow, The Wild Party. Bow had terrible microphone fright, so Arzner devised the first boom by attaching a microphone to a fishing pole to track Bow as she moved around the set.
Arzner went on to direct Katharine Hepburn in her second starring film at RKO, Christopher Strong. She also helped elevate MGM contract player Rosalind Russell to stardom in Craig's Wife. The Bride Wore Red, starring Joan Crawford, followed at MGM, but the plodding pace saw Crawford labeled "box-office poison." Arzner made two other films, including the much-admired Dance, Girl, Dance (1940), and then retired from the screen.
In her personal life, Arzner's masculine appearance and dress were much remarked upon in contemporary interviews and articles. Her look of tailored suits, short hair and no make-up was in vogue in the 1920s when she adopted, but she never altered, her personal style. She lived openly with her partner, choreographer Marion Morgan, from 1930 until Morgan's death 41years later. Arzner died in 1979.
Written by:
Laura Drazin Boyes, Film Curator, North Carolina Museum of Art
References:
Directed by Dorothy Arzner, by Judith Mayne
Women Filmakers: A Critical Reception, by Louise Heck-Rabi
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IDA LUPINO
Ida Lupino was born in 1918 into an illustrious theatrical family. Both her parents and numerous relatives were famous on stage in her native England.
School didn't hold much interest for Lupino and she crashed Hollywood as a bleached blonde teenager. Her career took off when she earned a part in The Light That Failed, starring Ronald Colman. Warner Bros. was then anxious to sign her as a second string Bette Davis, and Lupino cannily signed a non-exclusive contract so she could work elsewhere. She made a splash as a murderous wife in They Drive By Night, and next starred opposite Humphrey Bogart in High Sierra, on her way to becoming a glamorous, popular and wealthy actress known for her volatile temperament. She stayed at Warner Bros. until 1947.
Lupino didn't try her hand at directing until the premature death of her beloved father, when she vowed to fulfill his ambitions for her to direct. She formed a production company, The Filmmakers, with second husband Collier Young, where she produced and wrote, as well as directing.
By 1950, four films she directed had been released: Not Wanted, a hard-hitting drama about unwed mothers; Never Fear, about polio-stricken dancer; Outrage, which chillingly portrayed rape and its consequences and; Hard, Fast and Beautiful, in which a girl is forced into a pro tennis career by her domineering mother. Her low-budget films, shot for less than $160,000 and mostly without stars, and were made with toughness and integrity. They bravely took on risky subjects, focusing on lower-middle-class heroines.
The Filmmakers fell apart in 1954 after she directed two more features, The Hitchhiker and The Bigamist, and co-wrote the script for Don Siegel's Private Hell 36 with Young. Lupino then began a long career in television, directing more than 100 episodes of shows like Have Gun, Will Travel; The Fugitive; The Untouchables; and Twilight Zone. She also returned to acting in a somewhat autobiographical comedy series with her third husband, Howard Duff, called Mr. Adams and Eve, and received an Oscar® nomination in 1972 playing Steve McQueen's mother in Sam Peckinpah's Junior Bonner. Her last feature film directing assignment was The Trouble with Angels in 1966.
Her
stance was frequently anti-feminist, as seen in her most frequently reprinted quote: "Any woman who wishes to smash into the world of men isn't very feminine& Baby, we can't go smashing. I believe women should be struck regularly, like a gong." These sentiments may reflect her contemporary values, but are repudiated by her achievements.
Written by:
Laura Drazin Boyes,Film Curator, North Carolina Museum of Art
References:
Ida Lupino, by William Donati
Women Directors, by Barbara Koenig Quart
"Lupino Noir," by Carrie Rickey, in The Village Voice 11/4/80
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GENE GAUNTIER
Gene Gauntier literally plunged into films around 1905. When she arrived on location for her first movie role, she discovered that the villain was to throw her into a 30-foot-deep millpond. "The plunge was my open sesame to the film world," she later said.
When she joined the Kalem Film Company, she was eventually asked to take a whirl at scenario writing. "I had caught the knack," she said. "From henceforth, I was the mainstay of the Kalem scenario department. Tom Sawyer was the first of 300 that I wrote and produced or sold to other companies."
She sometimes wrote three one-reels (10-12 minute films) a day to keep the Kalem cameras cranking. "A poem, a picture, a short story, a scene from a current play, a headline in a newspaper - there was no copyright law to protect authors, and I could, and did, infringe on everything." She was paid $20 a reel for writing, a good salary considering the director was paid only for $10 a reel for directing. She cribbed Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur, writing the script in two days; the 16 scenes were then filmed in three days.
Eventually, Biograph, lured her away from Kalem at double the salary. While there, she worked with D.W. Griffith, who was directing his first film The Adventures of Dolly.
Gauntier missed acting and the camaraderie at Kalem, so she defected from Biograph. Kalem offered her the opportunity to direct, but she preferred writing and acting, even though she directed The Grandmother (1909) and a epic film on the life of Christ, From the Manger to the Cross (1912). She played the Virgin Mary and directed and it was hugely profitable, but Gauntier was discouraged when it was released without credits.
She felt the movie business had passed her by and left the movies in 1918 to cover World War I as a journalist, and then retired to Sweden to write novels. She died in 1966.
Written by:
Laura Drazin Boyes,Film Curator, North Carolina Museum of Art
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LENORE COFFEE
Lenore Coffee was born in San Francisco in 1897. When Clara Kimball Young opened her own studio in 1919, Coffee read in the Motion Picture Exhibitors Herald that she was looking for a script. Coffee submitted The Better Half and began her career as a scenario writer.
Two years later, both Metro and Universal were vying for her services. One of her most successful collaborations was with Cecil B. De Mille, for whom she provided several scripts in the late 1920s. She wrote her first talkie for MGM, at a time when one person wrote the plot and one the dialogue. But she convinced Irving Thalberg that a script could be a job for one screenwriter only. The result was a success - 1930's The Bishop Murder Case, with Basil Rathbone starring as popular detective Philo Vance.
Thalberg then
assigned her Possessed, for Joan Crawford, which struck a chord with Depression audiences and made a lot of money for the studio. But Coffee's relations with Mayer and Thalberg at MGM were rocky, she was fired and rehired several times there during the . 20s and . 30s.
By
1938, she was at Warner Bros. The studio was searching for contract writers who could script films for its charismatic actresses. As Catherine Turney, another female scriptwriter at Warners in the . 40s said, "One of the reasons they hired me was that the men were off at the war and they had all these big female stars. The stars had to have roles that served them well. They themselves wanted something in which they weren't just sitting around being a simpering nobody."
Coffee wrote a number of films for Bette Davis, including The Great Lie and Old Acquaintance. She also wrote the campy Beyond the Forest for Davis. Coffee's last film was Cash McCall, with James Garner and Natalie Wood, in 1960. She died in 1984.
Written by:
Laura Drazin Boyes,Film Curator, North Carolina Museum of Art
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ANITA LOOS
Anita
Loos sold her first script to D.W. Griffith in 1912, although she was not 12 years old at the time, as she later claimed. She was one of the most prolific chroniclers of Hollywood's early days, although her accuracy waxed and waned as she got older. But she had many accomplishments, including writing many of Douglas Fairbanks. early comedies and films for Norma and Constance Talmadge, great stars of the . 20s. Her book, play and movie of Gentleman Prefer Blondes (she was a brunette) brought her lasting fame.
Loos
was born in 1893 and spent part of her childhood on her father. s stage, playing in San Francisco and San Diego in companies of plays like Little Lord Fauntleroy and Quo Vadis?. She watched the short films that were often shown at intermissions and decided she could do just as well, or better. She was self-taught, spending hours in the library reading classics and the New York newspapers. Biograph seemed to make the best pictures, so she copied the address off of a film can and sent them a script for The New York Hat, which was filmed with Mary Pickford in the lead. She got $25 for her work. When Griffith came to California, Loos visited him, looking so youthful that Griffith mistook her mother for his scenario writer. She wrote more than 100 scripts for him, as well as the titles for Intolerance.
Douglas Fairbanks was under contract to Griffith at Triangle Pictures, and Griffith didn't know what to do with this wellspring of pep and humor. Loos wrote an energetic romp for him called His Picture in the Papers, and Fairbanks was off and running. "If I every ventured into sentiment, Doug would send for me and say, 'Dammit, I'm no actor. I can't play a love scene.' So, I'd cancel the sex activities and have Doug jump off an airplane," she recalled.
The director of the Loos-Fairbanks films was John Emerson, who was first her collaborator and then her husband. Their comedies, like American Aristocracy, His Picture in the Papers, Manhattan Madness, The Martimaniac, The Americano and Wild and Woolly, were hugely successful. She went on to do a series of comedies for the vivacious Constance Talmadge, before writing Gentleman Prefer Blondes.
In the 1930's, she wrote several films for Jean Harlow, including Red-Headed Woman, one of the scandalous films that brought the censors' wrath upon the movies. She specialized in pithy one-liners and character development. Frances Marion, who was at MGM then, too, said she, Loos and Bess Meredyth were consulted on nearly every MGM script during the 1930s. Loos gave up movie writing in the 1940s and moved to New York to write plays (including adapting Gigi, making a star of Audrey Hepburn), novels and several memoirs. She died in 1981.
Written by:
Laura Drazin Boyes, Film Curator, North Carolina Museum of Art
References:
A Cast of Thousands by Anita Loos
The Talmadge Girls by Anita Loos
The Parade's Gone By, by Kevin Brownlow
Without Lying Down by Cari Beauchamp
Silent Stars by Janine Basinger
Louise Brooks by Barry Paris
Sin in Soft Focus by Mark Viera
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DOROTHY FARNUM
Dorothy Farnum was born June 10, 1900, in New York City. She had a brief sojourn as a film actress in 1915, and then became a scenario writer. She wrote her first script in 1920, a comedy for Constance Talmadge called Good References.
At Warner Bros., Farnum adapted Beau Brummel for John Barrymore. His flamboyant performance was ignited by a romance with his leading lady, 17-year-old Mary Astor. The film was released after the dazzling success of his stage performance in Hamlet, and made him a movie star. Barrymore devoted himself to the screen thereafter.
By the late 1920s, she was working at MGM, along with Frances Marion and June Mathis. She wrote several silent films for Greta Garbo, including her mesmerizing American debut, The Torrent, adapted from a novel by Blasco Ibanez. Farnum also wrote The Temptress and The Divine Woman for Garbo, and adapted Rafael Sabatini's Bardlys the Magnificent, for director King Vidor. Farnum also wrote The Pagan (1929) for Ramon Novarro, whose "only god is nature and whose only law is love." There was no dialogue, but music and sound effects, and Novarro sang "The Pagan Love Song" (over and over).
In 1926, she gave the Los Angeles Times the following recipe for success: "You must think with your heart and feel with your head. When I write my scenes, I try hard to progress not from one though to another, but from one feeling to another. For the majority of people want to have their hearts excited and their minds let alone when they come into the world of low lights and soft music of a motion picture theater."
Written by:
Laura Drazin Boyes Film Curator, North Carolina Museum of Art
References:B
The Talmadge Girls by Anita Loos
Ramon Novarro by Allan R. Ellenberger
My Story by Mary Astor
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JANE MURFIN
Jane Murfin was born October 27, 1892, in Quincy, Michigan. She had a long career as a playwright, beginning in 1918 with Daybreak. Her plays Lilac Time and Smilin' Through, written in collaboration with actress Jane Cowl, became quite successful both on stage and in their screen adaptions. Her first screen scenario was Marie, Ltd. in 1919, and she produced or directed several of her own films.
Her greatest accomplishment during the silent era was the thrilling adventure films with Strongheart, her German Shepherd. She wrote and produced these popular predecessors to the Rin-Tin-Tin films. Strongheart, who supposedly had served neutrally in the German Red Cross during World War I, was "a dramatic dog, an emotional actor" and was one of the most renowned animal stars of the 1920s.
Lilac Time, based on her play, was one of Colleen Moore's most successful pictures, a lavish, romantic story of a peasant girl's romance with an aviator in World War I France. The film, which was silent with an orchestral soundtrack, helped established Gary Cooper as a romantic hero. Murfin then collaborated on scripts for many important female stars at RKO and MGM in the 1930s and early 1940s.
Murfin and Anita Loos were the principal adapters on George Cukor's film of The Women, although there were many other hands, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, and she co-wrote the Greer Garson-Lawrence Olivier Pride and Prejudice with Aldous Huxley. Her last screen credit was for Dragon Seed, based on Pearl Buck's novel, about a rebellious Chinese woman, played by Katharine Hepburn in 1944.
She was married to Donald Crisp from 1932-1944, who had worked with D.W. Griffith as both an actor and director, but is best known as a kindly character actor in films like How Green Was My Valley, for which he won an Oscar®.
Murfin was one of the founding members of the Screen Writers Guild. She died in Los Angeles in 1955.
Written by:
Laura Drazin Boyes Film Curator, North Carolina Museum of Art
References:
The Film Encyclopedia, by Ephraim Katz
Silent Stars, by Jeanine Basinger
Without Lying Down, by Cari Beauchamp
Reel Women, by Ally Acker
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JUNE MATHIS
June Mathis was born into a theatrical family in Colorado in 1892. A vaudevillian from childhood, she once toured with one of the great stars of the day, female impersonator Julian Eltinge. When her last play closed in Los Angeles, she relocated to New York, taking writing classes by day and seeing movies by night. In 1918, she entered and lost a film scenario contest, but she was offered work in Hollywood and moved again. She was swiftly promoted to the head of the Metro scenario department and "artistic supervisor." This meant she was, in reality, a producer, a post she would occupy until ousted by Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg in their disputes over Ben-Hur.
Her imagination contributed to many distinctive screenplays, including collaborations with the flamboyant Alla Nazimova and Rex Ingram. Mathis had a mystical bent and always wore a "magical" opal ring while writing. But she was a hard-headed executive as well, devising a system of careful pre-production planning that sharpened the story while eliminating unnecessary costs.
She advocated that Metro buy Blasco Ibanez's Four Horsemen of the Apocolypse. She also argued for Rex Ingram to direct, effectively initiating the most important phase of his career. And she wanted a supporting actor named Rudolph Valentino to play the lead, Julio. She went on to adapt a number of his films, including The Four Horsemen, The Conquering Power, The Sheik, Blood and Sand and The Young Rajah.
She was involved in the now-reviled task of cutting Erich von Stroheim's masterpiece Greed from 24 reels to its final release length of 10. She then became involved with the epic filming of Ben-Hur. In the midst of production, Metro merged with Goldwyn and Louis B. Mayer's company to make MGM. Mathis was deposed, though the film still bears her signature.
She was then hired by Colleen Moore's production company, but her tenure was brief. In 1927, at the age of 35, she died of a heart attack while seeing a play in New York City. Her friend Rudolph Valentino had been buried in her mausoleum the year before and Mathis was buried beside him. Mathis was a role model for other women in the film business. She took her work as a professional seriously and respected filmmaking as an art.
Written by:
Laura Drazin Boyes Film Curator, North Carolina Museum of Art
References:
Nazimova, by Gavin Lambert
The Parade's Gone By, by Kevin Brownlow
Silent Stars, by Janine Basinger
"Pioneers," by Marsha McCreadie in Nov/Dec 1994 Films in Review
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BEULAH MARIE DIX
Beulah Marie Dix was born in 1876, and graduated early from Radcliffe, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa and the first female recipient of Harvard's Sohier literary prize. She was a novelist and playwright, specializing in historical fiction, with 28 books in print in the century's first 40 years.
Visiting her friend and theatrical agent, Beatrice de Mille (mother of William and Cecil), Dix was unexpectedly captivated when she saw Cecil filming an epic scene with Geraldine Farrar as Joan of Arc. Dix's daughter wrote, "If anyone had told her that she was to stay through the next three decades, writing for the movies, and that I would go to school in Hollywood instead of Boston, she probably would have packed us back aboard the next East-bound train." Dix felt her intellectual achievements put her above those in Hollywood, and she consented to dedicate herself to the screen because, "I work only with William de Mille, who is a dramatist of equal standing with myself, so I lose no professional prestige."
As a child, she wrote adventures for Tommy Drew, her alter ego, but after marrying Henry Flebbe, she renounced her boy hero. As a dramatist, she preferred "male" subjects, because she felt they were taken more seriously.
She traveled to Hawaii in 1928, hoping the talkies would go away, but they didn't. She moved to RKO in the 1930s, to doctor scripts, and her writing became increasingly anonymous. Her last credit was in 1933, for adapting her play The Life of Jimmy Dolan, a melodrama about prizefighters, gangsters and gamblers, starring Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.
Written by:
Laura Drazin Boyes Film Curator, North Carolina Museum of Art
References:
Script Girls, by Lizzie Francke
Hollywood When Silents Were Golden, by Evelyn Flebbe Scott
Reel Women, by Ally Acker
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