Melnitz highlights young Hollywood's women writers in 'Movies She Wrote'

Wednesday, March 1, 1995

Melnitz highlights young Hollywood's women writers in 'Movies She Wrote'

Series sheds light on 'myth' of a male-dominated field

By Barbara E. Hernandez

Daily Bruin Staff

Patriarchal Hollywood is a given. The films made in the studio system were made by men for men. Women writers were only good for the few "women's pictures" they would make each year, the script given to a glorified secretary, who would receive no credit. Right?

The UCLA Film and Television Archive and the Los Angeles Magazine would like to suggest otherwise in the new series "Movies She Wrote: Women Screenwriters in the Hollywood Studios." Although such scenarios as the used secretary did exist in Hollywood, there were a considerable number of women in Hollywood's early years that were responsible for westerns, B-movies, psychodramas and sci-fi serials, films other than the stereotypical "women's picture."

"Women writers outnumbered men 10 to one in the first decades of the century," says Laura Kaiser, programming coordinator of the archive and curator for the series. "It's gone in waves through the '30s and '40s, until a drop in the '50s. In this series it's the old guard, the most influential in the period."

The old guard includes Anita Loos who first introduced the "gold-digger" in her novel "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," and used it in many of her scripts, including The Red Headed Woman with the perfect screen gold-digger Jean Harlowe. Her biting social satire and wit made many of her scripts accessible years later.

Although some women like Loos were considered valued members of a studio, others like studio head Jack Warner didn't like women writers. It was only the power of the box office, of stars like Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford that made the employment of writers like Catherine Turney, Lenore Coffee and Silvia Richards possible. Without such a demand for female stars in the '30s and '40s, many women writers would have been expendable. "Women were allowed to be very strong," says Kaiser of the time of the box office queens. "And women were a very strong audience."

Yet many found writing to be an ephemeral practice. Frances Marion was reported to say that writing a screenplay had been like writing on sand with the wind blowing. Often in the studio system, scripts were worked on by so many writers that the end product looked nothing like the original. The idea of credit for the sectioned scripts went to whomever had seniority or influence.

Producer Virginia Van Upp, by many accounts, wrote the majority of Gilda, a film about a South American love triangle featuring femme fatale Rita Hayworth. "This was typical of what often happened," says Kaiser, "of women not getting credit."

This happened because of various reasons, many having to do with seniority or power, but also to camouflage one's "femaleness." In the 1930s, MGM was reputedly under the "tyranny of the woman writer," and so women screenwriters would try to draw as little attention to themselves as possible. Often talented writers like Frances Marion (The Big House and The Champ) would hide their work or agree to work uncredited.

Living in the male-dominated studio system, many women writers hesitated to criticize gender roles, instead only empowering their female characters with dialogue or humanity. "By and large, they were not subversive," says Kaiser. "Sometime there are little telltale lines where the female's a little more real, where there are more comic or sarcastic jabs."

The era of women holding any significant number of jobs in Hollywood is a must see for any woman interested in the film industry.

"It should be very encouraging to (young women)," says Kaiser. "It's an important time in this art form not acknowledged by Hollywood."

To Kaiser, this isn't only about learning women's place in history, it's more about fairness and honesty. "This is not radical feminist theory," she stresses, "this is an issue about justice."

FILM: "Movies She Wrote: Women Screenwriters in the Hollywood Studio" at Melnitz Theater. Running March 2 through March 18. TIX: $5 general, $3 students/seniors, matinees $3 and $1.50 respectively. For more info call (310) 206-FILM.