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 Helen to the “King of Comedy”—director and producer Mack Sennett, who then encouraged her to become an actress.
Within a year of first being in front of the camera, Helen made twenty pictures. A year later, she had a contract with Kalem Studios, where she fell in love with director J.P. McGowan. The two were married sometime between 1912 and 1915. Again, the date remains a mystery, with no marriage certificate to be found.
Both Helen and J.P. had fathers who worked in the railroad industry, and perhaps inspired by that, they began making films which starred Helen in or around (or frequently, on top of) trains. This was at the same time that first-wave feminism was growing, and Helen was eager to prove that women could be action heroes too.
At the theaters, serials were all the rage. These were long-running series featuring a main character in different adventures across multiple episodes, usually with a cliffhanger ending. These serials screened before the feature film, with each episode lasting around twenty minutes. And it was the female-led serials which gained the biggest following; audiences loved seeing lady protagonists in action scenarios. I enjoy their titles: The Perils of Pauline, The Exploits of Elaine, and The Hazards of Helen. The latter starred Helen Holmes.
Helen’s character in The Hazards of Helen. was a railroad station telegraph operator who fought crime on the side and did indeed get herself into hazardous situations. She jumped onto moving trains, wrestled men who were holding guns, leapt between burning buildings, galloped horses down rocky mountain cliffs, and saved the railroad company from financial ruin. Many of these adventures were written by Helen herself, and she also filled in as director when her husband was hospitalized after a nasty fall on set.
After almost fifty episodes, Helen and her husband left The Hazards of Helen. and Kalem Studios to set up their own company. At Signal Film Productions, they made more popular serials, such as The Girl and the Game and A Lass of the Lumberlands, featuring Helen partaking in even more exciting railroad-themed adventures.
The press had a fascination with Helen and wrote stories about her daredevil antics with breathless headlines like “Houdini Outdone by Helen Holmes!” Another article noted her strength, saying Helen liked “pretty gowns” but could “burst the sleeves of any of them by doubling her biceps.” And Moving Picture World magazine covered the excitement of “Helen Holmes Day,” for which the California State Fair had organized Helen to perform a live stunt. In front of an audience of around 250 people, she jumped from a moving train into a moving car mere seconds before the train crashed.
For some of her more dangerous scenes, Helen was doubled by a professional stuntman. But she insisted on performing as many as she could, which led to some scary moments, such as the time the brakes on her truck failed as she was speeding downhill, or when she narrowly escaped a burning train, and that other time when her eye was punctured by cactus thorns. There’s also an unconfirmed rumor that Helen’s thumb was severed when she jumped from a horse onto a moving train.
But
