Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, Irving Thalberg) seated in the audience. Furthermore, Marion’s influential hand was evident in the careers of award winning actors (Mary Pickford, Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer, Marie Dressler), directors (George Cukor) and producers Louis B. However, in Beauchamp’s view the night belonged to Marion in a more expansive sense – Marion’s screenwriting credit appeared on films nominated in seven out of the eight award categories. On that night Marion won the screenwriting award for her innovative prison film, The Big House. The prologue to Beautchamp’s biography pinpoints Academy awards night, 5 November 1930, as the culmination of Marion’s career. These questions are implicit in Beauchamp’s study of Frances Marion and the network of women (and prominent men) who supported her career and benefited from the longevity of her success. The impulse driving this feminist research derives from an acute sense of women’s dubious offscreen status as bit-players in an industry which thrives on women’s onscreen status as spectacular objects of male fear and desire. By focusing on a number of case histories selected to exemplify different periods, Francke poses the double-sided question: how have different production modes facilitated women’s access to filmmaking through scriptwriting and how have women scriptwriters made a difference to both ‘women’s pictures’ and other classical Hollywood genres.
Frances marion screenwriter series#
Paving the way for Beauchamp’s biography of an individual writer and her milieu, Francke’s series of case studies of Hollywood’s women screenwriters has a broadly political agenda: ‘to give the debates about women working in the film industry some sort of socio-historical perspective.’ When Francke points to the women screenwriters behind classics, including Gilda (Virginia Van Upp), The Big Sleep (Leigh Brackett), and Bringing up Baby (Hagar Wilde), she celebrates their achievements and, at the same time, investigates the sexual politics of the Hollywood industry.
Although a feminist ethos informs both books, Beauchamp’s study is devoted to piecing together a mosaic of women’s life stories insofar as they contribute to a detailed, celebratory picture of Frances Marion whose name Beauchamp had initially come across in the autobiographies of Anita Loos, Adela Rogers St John, Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish. Like Francke, Beauchamp is keen to locate Marion within a unique social milieu of women writers, actors, producers and occasional directors who constituted a liberated (yet volatile) milieu shaped by a burgeoning (though disreputable) industry.
Marion’s career was broadly sketched in Script Girls, Lizzie Francke’s 1994 survey of women screenwriters working in Hollywood from the silent era until the present.
Frances marion screenwriter archive#
In her weighty biography, Beauchamp draws on an extensive archive of written and oral sources to flesh out the life story of Frances Marion, Hollywood’s most highly paid screenwriter (male or female) from 1917 until the 1930s. Cari Beauchamp’s meticulously documented biography of the screenwriter Frances Marion (born Marion Benson Owens to a San Francisco society family in 1888) focuses on the changing fortunes of women in the Hollywood industry from 1912 until 1946. The creative role of women behind the scenes in Hollywood has been an issue for feminist film history since the rediscovery of women directors, Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino in the 1970s. It is also a significant mode of writing new players into standard film histories. 1997īiography is a significant mode of narrating Hollywood history. Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood.īerkeley: University of California Press.
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