Script Girls by Lizzie Francke - review by Fiona Shaw

Fiona Shaw

Year of the Woman

Script Girls

By

BFI 172pp
 

David Mamet’s description of Hollywood as a sinkhole of depraved veniality remains at odds with our hopeless hope that it can become ‘a protective monastery of aesthetic Truth’. Annually, droves of writers, actors, directors and producers go there to create, and if the place is decadent, it is because they are forbidden to do so by a monstrous economic machine which hijacked the system a long time ago. Screenwriting was the early victim of this system, partly because as an activity it is hard to define. Pages that entice the performer and investor through the letter box are rarely the ‘sides’ that are utilised on the shooting day. (Sides are the multicoloured sheets which have been processed the night before.) They are the result of renegotiation and simplification. Screenwriting, unlike theatre writing, is not the expression of the unconscious self but the compromised conclusion of an original idea.

The evolution of the art for women in the profession is beautifully described in Lizzie Francke’s Script Girls. The book begins with the early part of this century, when the sins of naïvety resulted in Gene Gauntier being taken to court for adapting Ben Hur without permission, through the heady days of infinite possibility in the Thirties and of remarkable achievement in the Forties, then through the McCarthy reign of terror in the Fifties, and finally to the declaration of 1993 as ‘The Year of the Woman’ in Hollywood. In her introduction, Francke makes it clear that her intention in writing this book was celebratory and not an attempt to catalogue incidences of discrimination. This attempt is partly what makes it such a poignant read, because the book expands beyond its brief to become an unusual look at this century and the writers themselves become unsung heroes in coping with the moral and political gauntlets that have been cast before them.

The unsophisticated nature of early film–making made it easy for women to participate. As early as 1895 Alice Guy Blaché borrowed her boss’s camera and took off. Gene Gauntier became one of the earliest screenwriters, or ‘scenarists’ as they were called, writing melodramas and adventures. Her prolific talents meant she was writing as much as three scenarios a day. She was also an actress earning $50 per week for that skill, and $20 for writing – how things have changed. The rise of censorship controlled what might have been a new Renaissance in thought by putting a ceiling on the imagination, driving some writers to produce and direct their own projects in order to maintain some control.

By the 1920s, Hollywood, dedicated to product rather than process, had sown the seeds of its rigid identity. Star–like personas were created for writers who were successful. Frances Marion was one writer who happened to be beautiful and managed to survive attempts to package her whilst remaining highly paid. Yet she related an encounter with Mr Fox, who did not hire her, declaring: ‘Nobody cares nothing about female writers. Actresses, yes, they got glamour, but writers, the poor schlemiels.’

Bluestockings did find their place and socially conscious films were made. Talkies expanded the industry, attracting a new wave of playwrights, including Dorothy Parker. But competition was hot and the newly built Culver Studios took only five women to join its force of thirty–three writers.

Scriptwriters such as Kate Corbaley, however, wielded growing power, and the rise of female stars like Joan Crawford and Jean Harlow resulted in the industry being hungry for female material. Creative teams emerged between actress and writer. Greta Garbo and Salka Viertel were one particularly successful team, whose work on Queen Christina allowed Hollywood to hint at lesbianism. Then, as now, Hollywood exploited the sensationalism to its economic end.

Conscription in the Forties did make space for more women writers while also managing to push women to the forefront as subjects for film. Catherine Turney, Joan Harrison and others heralded the film noir period, which emphasised women as a suitable focus for a film rather than as mere adjuncts to male stars. Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca, co–scripted by Harrison and Sylvia Richards, and Mildred Pierce with Joan Crawford are two famous examples.

The Fifties remain the chilling centre of the book as well as of the history of Hollywood. The cruel reality of that time has ink–stained the clear waters. It was McCarthyism that rang the death knell for Sylvia Richards’s career, even though she named names. She left Hollywood and became a schoolteacher. One feels a generation of potential was lost and, indeed, a continuum broken. The hangover of that abomination remains today.

The gentle toppling of the studio system resulted in the rise of individual project–makers and independent film companies. The next tidal wave of challenge came in the Sixties in the form of feminism. Francke does not allow us to conclude that female scriptwriters were punished for being women because Hollywood did seem to have an interest in feminist topics with films like Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More and An Unmarried Woman, though both of these were written and directed by men, which speaks for itself. With the Seventies, frustrated women writers learned that the future lay in directing. Sadly, the blockbuster Eighties undermined most opportunities for women in any area of film. Indeed, by 1989 Kathleen Turner was the only female box–office star in the Top Ten. This caused Meryl Streep to comment that at this rate ‘by the year 2010 women may be eliminated altogether’. Every now and then films like Thelrna and Louise manage to break the mould.

The picture that concludes is that Hollywood movies, despite a flurry of possibility in the Forties, remain clichéd in form: white, middle–class, male and terrified. With such ossification, reform from within seems unlikely and the breath of change may well come from Europe or Australia. This is already beginning with directors like Agnes Varda and the almost messianic Jane Campion, which gives one reason to hope that women will have the chance to express themselves as human in an industry that only sees them as female.

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