Interview [Written]: Cari Beauchamp on Anita Loos

Here’s a treat: A Nitrate Online interview with Cari Beauchamp, who wrote the edited the book “Anita Loos Rediscovered,” this after Loos’ niece “unearthed volumes of her aunt’s writings.”

As background: In the first two decades of the 20th century, there were more women writing movies than there were men, and Anita Loos was perhaps the most well-known.

Here are some excerpts with interviewer Dan Lybarger:

Dan Lybarger: What excites me as a film geek is that the book features scripts from the Silent Era, which have not been available previously.

Cari Beauchamp: They are difficult to find, and even when you find them, they’re certainly not published. It’s very rare that they’re published. I know how surprised I was even as a film historian to actually read the full silent scripts and realize how incredibly extensive they were. That’s what I like about the book, too.

The first set (in the book), which is literally these two-page little stories, which aren’t not scripts at all. And yet they were perfect for Griffith because that’s what he did. He didn’t use scripts. He used stories and then was truly able to control the direction.

But then as we move on, even in the late teens, I’ve been able to read scripts, for instance, like Poor Little Rich Girl and scripts for the Mary Pickford films, which surprised me were 50 to 60 pages long. It was very surprising, like a Scarlet Letter, of course, which was a revelation to me because it was not just a script as we would think, with many more stage directions than anything we would dare see today. A screenwriter wouldn’t dare put in “close-up midrange shot” and literally do a very ornate set decoration. In the script “camera cuts to close-up of church bells tolling,” telling folks not only the director how to do their job, but the editor as well.

Screenwriters today have been humbled over the years. They wouldn’t dare put things like that in (laughs). Or they certainly wouldn’t bother because they know they’d be changed.

One of the things just like that in terms of and what you see in Anita’s and other people’s of that time, the writer would go write the script, and at M-G-M in the early 30s, it was the writer and (M-G-M production chief Irving) Thalberg. If the writer was a respected enough, Thalberg would call in the writer, and they would cast the film. This was certainly true of Anita and Frances Marion.

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DL: Her later stuff seems even more cynical than the early stuff.

CB: So much of what she was writing about relationships she was either figuring out her own relationships, or if she couldn’t get the upper hand in real life, she could get it in her writing and in her characters.

DL: Like the Clark Gable character that Jeanette McDonald subdued in San Francisco.

CB: Exactly. Or if she cared too much in private life, in her writing she could pretend that she didn’t care.

DL: As a guy, I’d have to say her presentation of men has a different tone than I…

CB: Oh, jeez. When you take it to a certain peak, she is beyond cynical. I mean she says that all men are pimps one way or the other. All they do is use us, and yet she doesn’t have that much of a higher regard in her writing for women than she does for men.

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DL: She and Frances Marion left around the same time.

CB: They became script doctors. That was it.

DL: It was a shame because these two women really built the industry.

CB: And they didn’t even need that acknowledgement, but they did need their work respected, and they didn’t feel they had that. They felt used because their scripts weren’t wanted. They were just there to doctor everybody else’s, and after having had the power they had had, i.e. the incredible power to cast films, not just write original stories or adaptations, to pick the director of the film and to be on the set of their movie. It was considered to be their movie. To then be put in a writers room and produce nine pages a day or whatever it was or not to produce anything but to read these other things and see if you can punch it up. Here’s Anita who’s done all this stuff punching up the third Thin Man. This was not good. They weren’t paid as much was they had been, so they left at slightly different times and in slightly different ways, but they both left the business.

Anita loved being a New Yorker, when she moved to New York, and her first play was Happy Birthday with Helen Hayes, which was a huge success, so she arrived as a successful playwright, and she loved that role. By then Emerson was in the sanitarium, and she was her own person with her own life. She had her own apartment across the street from Carnegie Hall and stayed there for 40 years, thank you very much and established a very nice life for herself.

For the entire interview, go here.

You can read my series analyzing “How to Write Photoplays,” written in 1920 by Anita Loos and her husband John Emerson here.

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