Hollywood's "scriptgirls"

Lizzie Franke, Scriptgirls: Women Screenwriters in Hollywood (London: British Film Institute, 1994), 172 pp.

Some of Hollywood's best stories are the ones behind the camera, and some of the most colorful characters are the ones penning the scripts. And as Lizze Frank in forms us in her ground-breaking study, Scriptgirls: Women Screenwriters in Hollywood, the person holding the pen has very often been a woman. Franke, a British film lecturer and free lance writer (a regular contributer to the Guardian and Sight and Sound, offers a lively, engaging account of the women who've written the movies from the silent era into the 1990s.

While the contributions of a few female screenwriters such as Anita Loos have been welldocumented, Franke sets out to showcase less familar lives and stories, as well as the central issues faced by women writers throughout the history of cinema. She sets up her book as a development from the silent era to the talkies to the inventions of television and modern feminism. Franke finishes with current "case studies"-interviews with contemporary screenwriters like Nora Ephron and Callie Khouri. Her book is also peppered with wonderful photographs, and it includes a selected filmography of women scriptwriters of the sound era.

During the early days of the new industry, cinema provided women with a variety of opportunities. However, as Franke points out, this was largely because it was a rather debased and degraded medium. Women and men in the proliferating film production companies, in a "relatively egalitarian atmosphere seemed destined to become equal partners..." (6). Franke's profiles of the careers of Gene Gauntier, Jeanie Macpherson, Elinor Glyn, and Beulah Marie Dix are a revelation. For example, working for companies like Kalem and Biograph, Gauntier reportedly "wrote and produced or sold to other companies" some three hundred scenarios. As there was no copyright law protecting authors, Gauntier borrowed freely and...