Frances Marion was a multi-talented screenwriter, actress, and director of the silent era and early talkies. She was one of the most renowned screenwriters of the era and was the first writer to win two Academy Awards, for The Big House and The Champ. Despite her success she doesn’t have the recognition today that she deserves. Ahead of screenings of three of her films at Hippodrome Silent Film Festival, we spoke to writer, critic, and film historian Pamela Hutchinson about Marion’s life and career, and why so many of the trailblazing women of early cinema came to be sidelined.

Can you tell us a little bit about the life and career of Frances Marion?

Where do I begin? Frances Marion was one of Hollywood’s most successful and most popular screenwriters. You don’t hear about her so much because the bulk of what she wrote was during the silent era, then in the 30s. She started out as an actress, but she found herself drawn to what she called the, ‘dark side of the camera’. She took every opportunity to write rather than act. When she was being cast, she would be cast in vamp roles, because she was a very glamorous looking woman, but that wasn’t fun [for her]. She was looking for opportunities to tell stories. She’d been a writer, she’d been an artist before she got involved in film. And it was bit by bit that she got those opportunities.

The first really exciting opportunity for her was a screenplay for her friend Mary Pickford, who was obviously already a big star. And she thought she was going to have this big premiere in New York, but then she discovered that the negative had been destroyed in a laboratory fire, and that couldn’t happen at all. So every so often, she had to sort of start again and try something new. A big break actually came with an adaptation of a Fannie Hurst short story called ‘Humoresque’. That was a huge hit. That film is now lost so we can’t see it, but it set her off on a path of adapting novels to the screen, of making films that really, really strongly appeal to women audiences. She was a feminist. She really strongly believed in women’s suffrage. And her career in Hollywood is really defined by a lot of the friendships she made with men and with women, but her female friendships were really important to her.

She’d become friends with a writer like Fannie Hurst or a star like Mary Pickford, and she’d find a way to work with them. So with Mary Pickford, she had a very long standing collaboration. She wrote most of Mary Pickford’s defining film roles, and similarly with other people who she’d met along the way like Marie Dressler, who was an older actress. Having been championed by Marie Dressler all the way through the beginning of her career, Marian writes great roles [for Dressler] in Min and Bill and Dinner at Eight that really revived her towards the end of her career when otherwise things might not have been so good for Marie Dressler. So she becomes this figure who’s completely entangled with Hollywood. She’s writing great stories. She’s having interesting collaborations with so many people. And it’s kind of a shame that we don’t know her name quite so well these days.

Do you think there’s any particular reason why she doesn’t seem to be as well known? That seems to be quite standard since there were a lot of very accomplished women working in the film industry during the silent period. Was it was it when the studio systems really started to take hold that women started getting edged out?

When the streaming system comes in Hollywood begins to look like any other American corporation. Men take all the top jobs and nobody wants to think that the women who they are trying to elbow have been responsible for their big successes. So she had to be increasingly discreet about how much she was writing when she was at MGM in the 30s, which is such a bizarre thing to think. But also, I think we don’t have the same understanding of what a screenwriter is that Frances Marion did. The Hollywood joke is that the screenwriter writes it and then is banished from the set and has no say; that the director and the cast and crew can do whatever they want to their screenplay. And that just wasn’t how Francis Marion saw it.

She would work on the screenplay and the shooting script, and she’d be there working with the director. She’d be on set, going through what was happening, consulting and producing in that way, and she stayed around for the final edit and for writing intertitles, the whole thing. That was her idea of writing, even though she enjoyed screenwriting because it was something she could mostly do sort of by herself and had control of that. Once the film has been made, she wants to get involved as well. And so it’s hard for us to understand quite how integral she was to the success of some of these films that she worked on like The Wind and Stella Dallas. Big names.

She was like so prolific but given she worked during the early period of cinema, what volume of her works are actually now lost?

There are a few key things that are lost. But because she was quite successful there is quite a lot that we can sandwich. With Mary Pickford, as I say, her first big screenplay breakthrough Humoresque is lost, but there are other films that she made with the same director, Frank Borzage, that you can see. There’s just been a reconstruction of a film that she directed solo. She directed a few pictures, but not many. Just Around the Corner is a film that she directed by herself and that is playing HippFest this year. It’s not been that easy to see for years and years and years, but it’s now been reconstructed. So the answer is more and more is available to see and that’s what’s really great.

And how did she handle the switch from from the silent era to the talkies? Because presumably, that would fundamentally alter how a screenplay was written?

Well, it’s at the beginning of the talkies that she wins her two Oscars and she only started in the late 20s. But she is the woman who wrote Greta Garbo‘s first talkie. She wrote that first line. I mean, took it from the play, but she adapted quite well. But it is around the time that sound comes in that people start getting embarrassed about the amount of female input there was during the silent era. Anyone who was well known during the silent era was suddenly associated with a slightly antiquated version of Hollywood. So people start talking about how, ‘She’s writing screenplays, but she’s not writing the dialogue. We have some male experts for that’. As if women don’t talk!

How did you first come across Frances Marion?

I’m pretty sure that it was because of understanding that you know, Mary Pickford, as we understand Mary Pickford is the brainchild of two women. You know, our Mary Pickford, who was a phenomenal force; she was a producer who had very strong ideas about what she wanted to do. And there was screenwriter Frances Marion. You read all these stories about their friendship how close they were, and how closely they worked on creating this nice, really appealing persona that Mary Pickford had, the kind of scrappy tomboy with the long ringlets. And then, of course, I read a great book. Cari Beauchamp wrote a biography of Frances Marion called Without Lying Down. The title refers to the fact that Frances Marion said she spent her whole life looking for a man that she could look up to without lying down. She was so funny. Cari Beauchamp’s book is really phenomenal because it tells us a lot about Frances Marion and about her collaboration. But it also tell us about the other interesting woman that she worked with, and she knew. And it’s just really important to mention that book because it was so important to our understanding and, sadly, Cari Beauchamp died at the end of last year so we can’t really talk about Frances Marion without talking about the woman who introduced us to her brilliance. It’s a very, very readable book.

How long was her actual career? She lived well into her 80s, but did she continue to have a career up until that time?

She leaves Hollywood around the 1940s. She decides, that’s it, she’s going to stop. In the 1940s a lot of the work that she was doing went uncredited. At one point she was signed back on a contract at MGM but it was basically just so that no one else hired her. She was there as a consultant. So in 1946 or so she decides to walk away from Hollywood. She thinks she’s just going to write plays. She’s like, ‘That’s it. I’ve done everything I can do in Hollywood’, and she did feel a little bit bitter. You know, she sort of said that the MGM lion had become, ‘A cat that destroys its own’. And she she’d gone from thinking that there were a lot of opportunities in the film world to realising that a lot of the doors were closed to her now.

In terms of her work, where would you suggest that an interested viewer would should begin with Frances Marion? 

I mean, you’ve probably seen a Frances Marion script without know, you know, you know if you’ve seen Dinner at Eight or Stella Dallas, or one of those big hits. If you think about her silent work, really The Wind, which is playing at HippFest, is one of her absolute greatest films. Se had this ability to take a novel and turn it into a Hollywood play, not just that, but to turn it into a female-led Hollywood script. And what she does for Lillian Gish is phenomenal. But actually, you can, you can binge quite a lot of Frances Marion films. If you’ve looked at her collaborations with Mary Pickford, Stella Maris is playing at the festival and that’s one of her very best films. But they’ve made a lot of films together like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, which really kind of bring to the fore this lovable tomboy Mary Pickford persona, and you can’t go wrong with any of those.

And beside Frances Marion, who are your other favourite silent filmmakers?

I’m afraid we do not have long enough. I’m really sorry, but just cancel your week! I have to say though, it’s quite interesting because the woman who first hired Frances Marion to be refined starlet, to which Francis Marion said,  ‘Oh, no, thanks, I don’t want to do this,’ was Lois Weber. She’s one of my favourite silent filmmakers, just filmmakers generally and she’s a really interesting person. She really believed that, working within Hollywood or the American film industry, she could make films that would change the world. And she was so passionate and so serious and such a strong feminist. You know, I don’t think that Frances Marion could have had a better place to start out than working for her.

And what is it do you think about silent film in general that keeps drawing in new people every generation?

What is it that those people like? I think you know there’s a special bond that happens between the audience and the film in silent film. We know how we respond really well to being shown something rather than being told, since being a little kid. Everyone knows that silent films show rather than tell but they also there’s just that little gap, that little tiny imaginative leap, that the audience needs to make to come to the screen to just join in the storytelling themselves. And so half of the film takes place on screen and half of it takes place in your imagination. I think it’s irresistible and you know if that doesn’t appeal to you, the combination of a great movie and live music just knocks people out every time. You can’t beat it. You may or may not be interested in silent film as a period of film history or as a style of filmmaking, but a silent movie show; that’s irresistible.

Are there any other projects you’ve got in the pipeline?

This might sound bizarre to your audience, but I’m actually on the weekend going to Istanbul to give a lecture on the female energy of British silent cinema. It’s been great fun just looking into all the great women who worked in British silent film on screen, the faces that animate all the best comedies and so that’s something I’ve worked on that’s quite quite bizarre. But you know, anybody who loves silent cinema should know that I wrote a book on Pandora’s Box, one of the greatest of all silent film, which is, you know, is far racier than anything else I’m working on at the moment.

The Hippodrome Silent Film Festival 2024 will run Wed 20 – Sun 24 March at the Hippodrome Cinema in Bo’ness

Stella Maris screens Thu 21 Mar 2024

Just Around the Corner screens Fri 22 Mar 2024

The Wind screens Sun 24 Mar 2024