Desperate not to lose her job, she stayed backstage, and when Marie came out, Marion told her she’d be fired if there was no interview. Marie paused and asked, “Is that what those bastards told you?” and then agreed to give Marion “the golldarndest interview I ever gave to any reporter!” They spoke for over an hour, and Marie left Marion with the words, “I’ll see you again.”
This came true many years later, when Marion was living in Los Angeles with her second husband. It was 1914, and she was in a park sketching. A woman sat down next to her, feeding popcorn to the birds, and Marion realized this was Marie Dressler. She didn’t say anything for fear Marie wouldn’t remember her, but as soon as Marie saw her, she asked, “Are you the girl who interviewed me in San Francisco?” And then, “I’ve often wondered what became of you. Hate to lose track of anybody I’m fond of.”
They caught up over lunch, and Marie told Marion that with her good looks, she should get into acting. Marion insisted she only wanted to work behind the scenes, but promised she would visit the studio. But by the time she was able to get there, Marie Dressler had left for New York. So this wasn’t to be Marion’s break into Hollywood, but the two had cemented a real friendship. In the future Marion would play an important part in Marie’s career.
Another chance encounter led to her meeting Mary Pickford. This came through a friend, who introduced her to actor Owen Moore at a party. Owen was married to Mary at the time, and Marion couldn’t help but tell him how much she admired his wife’s talent. He replied gruffly, “Mary has an expressive little talent, but hardly what one would call cerebral.” Marion was shocked he would talk about his wife in this way and walked off. Later, he approached her and offered the chance to meet Mary and sketch her portrait. It was an invitation she couldn’t decline.
When the two met, they hit it off, chatting easily for an hour and sharing personal stories about their unhappy marriages. This was the start of a very close friendship and eventually a working relationship, but again, this was not how Marion got her first break.
Marion’s chance to work in Hollywood actually came through a different friend, journalist Adela Rogers St. Johns, who was lunching with director Lois Weber when Marion happened to walk by. Lois saw something in the young, pretty brunette, and asked Adela to arrange a meeting. This was common for Lois, who was known for hiring and mentoring young women.
Marion met Lois at Bosworth Studios with her portfolio of sketches in hand, and said she’d like to design costumes and movie sets. Impressed, Lois offered her a studio job as “one of my little starlets.” Confused, Marion insisted she only wanted to be on the “dark side” of the camera, but Lois explained that at her studios, everyone did a bit of everything. She also wanted Marion to change her name. When she signed her contract, Marion Owens became Frances Marion.
Lois Weber became a huge inspiration for Frances, who watched her in admiration as she filled every role from writer to actor to director with ease. She spent a few years working for her and learned as much as she could, but when Lois got a job at Universal Pictures, Frances decided not to join her.
By 1917, her friend Mary Pickford had become the most powerful woman in Hollywood. Although Mary wasn’t technically supposed to have a say in hiring, she insisted that Frances Marion be the writer of her next movie, The Poor Little Rich Girl. From this success came more, with Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Pollyanna and many others. Later, Mary would call Frances, “the pillar of my career.”
This is something I admire about Frances Marion. Throughout her career, she made long-lasting friendships with many women, who supported each other in work as well as their personal lives. She was a great writer with a sharp wit and a flair for complex plots. But even more remarkable than her abilities was how she became pivotal to so many careers.
She met Greta Garbo on the set of The Scarlet Letter in 1926, and four years later wrote Greta’s first speaking film, Anna Christie, for which Greta won an Oscar. She persuaded Marie Dressler to come back to Hollywood, writing scenarios for her when everyone else thought Marie was past her “use-by” date. Marie won an Oscar for Min and Bill in 1932, was nominated for an Oscar for Emma in 1933, and had a pivotal role in the classic 1934 ensemble comedy, Dinner at Eight. All were written by Frances Marion.
She helped these women and many more, because she too had been helped at the beginning of her career. “I owe my greatest success to women,” Frances said later, “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.”
Through hard work and a lot of determination, Frances became the highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood. She also directed films, albeit briefly: 1921’s Just Around the Corner and The Love Light with Mary Pickford. And while others struggled with the transition from silent film to sound, Frances sailed through. Her greatest critical success came with two talkies, 1930’s The Big House and 1931’s
The Champ.
The Big House was a realistic crime drama set inside a prison, and it won Frances Marion an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. She was the first woman to win this category, and a year later became the first writer with two Oscars when she won Best Story for The Champ. This was about a washed-up boxer trying to reconnect with his son; it had a 1979 remake starring Jon Voight and Faye Dunaway.
Eventually, Frances Marion got tired of Hollywood. With the introduction of the studio system and stricter censorship, it became too restrictive to be creative. As she quipped, Hollywood was like “writing on the sand with the wind blowing.” So Frances walked away from the movie business, but kept writing, and in 1937 she released the first ever guide book on screenwriting, called How to Write and Sell Movies.
By the time Frances Marion ended her career, she had written over 325 films across every single genre. She produced, directed, and broke barriers for future women in screenwriting. She is an inspirational figure because of her talent, her ambition, and her support of other women.
She has also inspired contemporary writers such as Cari Beauchamp, the author of a book about Frances Marion called Without Lying Down. The title is from a great quote by Frances, who once said, “I spent my life searching for a man to look up to, without lying down.” Cari says Frances is someone she looks to as a reminder of what women can overcome. “Anything I’m going through, she went through,” said Cari, “I spend very little time on angst, because it’s been faced before, it’s been overcome before. Once you know you’re a link in the chain, then you’re not alone, you’re not battling this by yourself. You’re a link in the chain, and it’s tremendously empowering and liberating.”
During the height of her fame, actress Helen Holmes was not happy with her scripts. She was frustrated by a lack of daring stunts, and claimed the male screenwriters refused to write action for women if they weren’t capable of performing it themselves. “If a photoplay actress wants to achieve real thrills,” she told a magazine, “she must write them into the scenario herself.”
Helen Holmes was one of the first female action stars, a courageous, independent woman who was at the center of a long-running, popular franchise. Her fearlessness in performing death-defying stunts made her a mythic hero.
Helen’s own history is a bit of a myth itself. There are no official records to show exactly when or where Helen was born, but it’s been estimated as being somewhere close to 1892. Around the age of 18, Helen moved to Death Valley in California, where stories say she learned to pan for gold with Native Americans. Some history books have her moving to New York and becoming a stage actress before heading to Hollywood. Others say she went straight to Los Angeles from Death Valley. Either way, Helen found herself living in Hollywood in her early twenties, where she struck up a friendship with silent film star Mabel Norman. Mabel then introduced