UCLA Film & Television Archive's Research and Study Center (ARSC) is pleased to announce the recipient of the ARSC Student Research Award for the 2010-2011 academic year. This award is made possible by a grant from the Myra Reinhard Family Foundation.
"Behind the Great Man: Female Screenwriters and Collaborative Authorship in Early Hollywood"
By Philip Leers. View a PDF of the essay.
Abstract
This essay approaches the notion of authorship in early Hollywood cinema through studies of four female screenwriters: Frances Marion,June Mathis, Jeanie MacPherson, and Zoë Akins. During the silent era, female screenwriters outnumbered their male counterparts ten to one, and many of them achieved a considerable measure of influence within the industry and celebrity without. The contributions of these women have largely been written out of history, the victims of a combination of gender bias and the privileging of directors and stars as the loci of meaning-making in their films. This essay argues for a more expansive understanding of authorship which accounts for the collaboration between writers, directors, stars, and others, and each case study addresses a different problematic: Frances Marion’s writing for Mary Pickford raises the issue of authorship not just of film texts, but of star-as-text. The framing of June Mathis’ discovery of and scripts for Rudolph Valentino as a mother-son relationship evidences the film industry’s anxiety over the success of “othered” filmmakers. Histories of Jeanne Macpherson’s partnership with Cecil B. DeMille reveal the extent of historians’ investment in the figure of the solitary male director. Zoë Akins scripts for Dorothy Arzner present an argument against the reinscription of auteur theory around a female director. Drawing from films, scripts, and other primary and secondary accounts of the filmmaking process, this essay highlights the creative input of a vital community of female screenwriter-collaborators in early Hollywood, and interrogates the various social and historical forces that have conspired to obscure their contributions to film history.
About the Author
Philip Leers is a 2nd year M.A. student in the Moving Image Archive Studies program at UCLA. He received his B.A. in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Chicago, and holds an MA in Cinema Studies from the University of Toronto. Upon completing his studies at UCLA, he will be serving as research associate in the time-based media collection at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.
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