Half of all U.S. films copyrighted from 1911-25 were written by women. Leading the pack was Frances Marion, who turned out over 200 scripts between 1916 and 1946. She also directed and produced films and was the only female board member of the first Writer's Guild.

Frances' Early Years

Marion Benson Owens moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles in January 1912. Within a year and a half she had an acting contract and a new name, but she really wanted to write scripts. So best friend and screen idol Mary Pickford, known as "America's Sweetheart," talked Marion into moving over to Famous Players where she was promised a crack at the screenplays.

When the 1915 film Poor Little Rich Girl, written by Marion and starring Pickford, became a box office smash, Marion was hired by World Studio in New York to head its script department. She salvaged bad unreleased films by writing new scenes, reviewed all scripts, wrote scripts, helped with casting, supervised screen tests, and directed scenes. Plus she ghost-wrote "Mary Pickford's Daily Talks," a syndicated newspaper column that ran five days per week. Frances Marion wasn't yet 28 years old and, at $200 per week, she was the highest paid scenario (script) writer in the U.S.

Famous Players Lasky lured her back to L.A. in May 1917 with a $50,000-a-year salary, but media titan William Randolph Hearst doubled that number in 1919 when he made Marion a writer-director at his New York-based Cosmopolitan Studio. By 1926, she was the undisputed screenwriting champ: Sam Goldwyn had her on the payroll at $3,000 per week.

Six Degrees of Frances Marion, the Writer's Writer

Her father was friends with the likes of Jack London, so it was a foregone conclusion that Marion would be well-read. As Hollywood's top scribe, she adapted the works of Alexandre Dumas, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bret Harte, Honore de Balzac, Pearl S. Buck, and Agatha Christie. She worked with such popular novelists as James M. Cain (Double Indemnity) and James Hilton (Goodbye, Mr. Chips).

She wrote for humorist Will Rogers and director John Ford. She scripted the final film of Rudolph Valentino (Son of the Sheik) and the first sound film of Greta Garbo (Anna Christie). Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, and Ralph Bellamy found their first major roles in a Frances Marion screenplay. And she helped make Gary Cooper a star. But Marion still made time to oversee the scripts for the Joseph P. Kennedy-produced westerns starring her husband, Fred Thomson (the Number Two box office draw in 1927).

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