I owe my greatest success to women. Contrary to the assertion that women do all in their power to hinder one another’s progress, I have found that it has always been one of my own sex who has given me a helping hand when I needed it.
— Frances Marion
Out of the four big nominated films at the third annual Academy Awards in 1930, only one didn’t have a credited female writer. In fact, two were written by the same woman: Frances Marion.
Marion won “Best Writing” for The Big House that night, and the following year, she won her second Oscar, this time “Best Story” for The Champ -- making her not only the first woman screenwriter to win an Oscar (in 1930 — bear in mind it took until 2010 for a woman to win Best Director), but only one of six screenwriters ever to win multiple times.
Frances Marion was ultimately credited with writing over three hundred screenplays.
She was involved in the direction and production of at least half a dozen - and most likely many more because in those days roles were fluid and not as strictly credited as they are today. She wrote career-launching or defining roles for Mary Pickford and Rudolph Valentino, and Oscar-winning performances for Garbo, and vaudeville star Marie Dressler. She was the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood (not the highest-paid female writer; the highest-paid writer), starting at MGM on $2,000 a week, at a time when the average yearly salary was just over $3,000.
And she was known for mentoring aspiring screenwriters - particularly women.
In 1926, Sam Goldwyn’s personal secretary, Valeria Belletti, wrote home to a friend:
Dear Irma
This has been one of the happiest days of my life, therefore I must write to you. Miss Marion sent her car down to my hotel to bring me to her home to have lunch with her. I was so thrilled! Miss Marion and I spent the whole afternoon together, and she was so affectionate towards me. … before I come back [Valeria was about to take a three month trip to Italy], I am to notify her about 2 months in advance, and if her own secretary is sufficiently well known to go on as a scenario writer, she is going to take me and develop me into a scenario writer and I am to live with her. Irma - it seems impossible that I of all people should have won her confidence and regard to such an extent that Miss Marion, the dean and peer of scenario writers, should want me as her protégé.
Can we just take a moment to consider the deliciousness of this line of female screenwriters helping each other out in 1926?
Frances’s dedication to mentoring young women may have been her way of paying back the chances women had given to her.
It was writer Adela Rogers St Johns who introduced Marion to Lois Weber in around 1913. Weber was then one of the top directors in Hollywood and hired Marion as her assistant, thus beginning her Hollywood career. Lois was personally involved in every aspect of production, from writing to casting to directing to producing to editing. As her assistant, so was Marion. It must have been the most intense crash course in filmmaking ever, but Marion proved herself more than up to the task.
By 1917, she was as well on her way to becoming one of the hottest screenwriters in the industry. She’d written smash hits starring Mary Pickford — Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and Poor Little Rich Girl — and was already the highest-paid contract screenwriter in the biz, on a whopping $200/week from World Film Productions in New York.
However, on April 2, 1917, the US entered the First World War. With a characteristic sense of adventure, Marion headed across the Atlantic to report on the contributions of women to the war effort, becoming the first woman to cross the Rhine into the former German territory after Armistice. While in France, she met a young American soldier named Fred Thompson who would become her third husband — and probably the love of her life.
Marion once said that she spent her life “looking for a man I could look up to without lying down,” which is yet another reason we want to be her when we grow up.
After the war, Frances and Fred headed back to Hollywood, where Frances worked for Paramount and the Hearst Film Corporation (as in Hearst magazines; she was a lifelong friend of William Randolph Hearst and his longtime mistress, Marion Davies). It was for the Hearst Film Corporation that Marion officially directed her first film, Just Around the Corner in 1921, before being poached by the newly formed MGM, where she would stay more or less for the rest of her career.
At MGM she churned out hit after hit, including the smash hit weepie, Stella Dallas and Son of the Sheik with Rudolph Valentino and Vilma Banky. She almost single-handedly got the entire world obsessed with Greta Garbo and John Gilbert’s affair, by writing the ever-so-sexy Love, an adaptation of Anna Karenina (they changed the title purely so the movie posters would read Greta Garbo and John Gilbert - in Love.) Marion also wrote Garbo’s first talkie Anna Christie, featuring the immortal line “gimme a whisky, ginger ale on the side and don’t be stingy, baby.”
She was known as an actors’ writer, specalising in writing vehicles for the studio’s stars, and she was involved in discovering both Clark Gable and Gary Cooper. According to Cari Beauchamp’s definitive biography of Frances Marion, Without Lying Down: “Hedda Hopper claimed that he [Gary Cooper] was so her type of man that when Frances first saw him standing against the wall of the studio building, she gave him a second look… and as she went through the door, even risked a third.”
In the early thirties, Marion became the only woman on the board of the newly-formed Screenwriters Guild, wrote one of the first how-to screenwriting books How to Write and Sell Film Stories and taught screenwriting at the University of Southern California. She retired from Hollywood in 1946 to write plays and novels, and in 1972, the year before she died, published a memoir, Off With Their Heads: A Serio-Comic Tale of Hollywood.
One of the many things that fascinate me about Frances Marion is that she seems so real.
So many of those early pioneers of cinema seem like distant, demi-gods, but, to coin a phrase, you feel as though you could have a beer and moan about impossible notes or flaky actors with Frances Marion. She worked to become who she did. She screwed up and she learned; she hustled, and she wasn’t infallible.
For example, in 1915, she more or less blagged her way into a job with William Brady, who was one of the most powerful producers in New York at the time (he would produce the very first film version of Little Women in 1917.) She arrived for her first day of work, was shown to an office, and, according to Without Lying Down:
“… concentrated on being as inconspicuous as possible while staring at a blank sheet of paper. Reality set in and with it came self-doubt and consternation over her audacity.
Then her practical side took hold and as she pondered her past, she seized on one of the first lessons she learned from Lois Weber: “a good editor can make even a mediocre film seem important.” Perhaps World had some movies that had been shelved as unreleasable that she could somehow doctor.”
Sure enough, she managed to find such an abandoned film in the vault. She polished it up and not only did Brady sell it for a massive profit of $900, but it made a star of his daughter, Alice.
It’s stories like that that make me love her. She was a phenomenally talented writer, but she never pretended to sit around churning out effortless hits without breaking a sweat. She got imposter syndrome and her mind went blank just like the rest of us. What writer can’t identify with that sensation of staring at a sheet of paper and wondering where all the words went — but how many of us would be as ingenious, and as humble, to come up with her solution?
If you expect to write stories pulsing with real life, or put upon canvas compositions that are divinely human – you must go forth and live! — Frances Marion