Episode 019—Too Pretty for Film (feat. Cassie Ballschmidt)
We're sharing history with a special guest. Chicago filmmaker, Cassie Ballschmidt takes the reigns to school us on American screenwriter and director, Frances Marion, just as Frances Marion schooled the whole dang film industry.
Follow Cassie Ballschmidt on Instagram: @cassiesstory for more info on her, her work, and her upcoming projects.
Sources for this story: Time, Columbia University’s Women Film Pioneers Project, The Atlantic, and others (see below for formal citations)
Original Theme: Garreth Spinn
Original Art: Sarah Cruz
Citations:
This Forgotten Female Screenwriter Helped Give Hollywood Its Voice
BY ERIN BLAKEMORE
https://time.com/4186886/frances-marion/
“Off With Their Heads: A Serio-Comic Tale of Hollywood”
Francis Marion
*“How to Write and Sell Film Stories”
Mariposa Gazette in 1914.*
The Women Who Write the Movies (1994)”
Marsha McCreadie
“Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History”
Vicki Callahan
“Shaping the Craft of Screenwriting: Women Screen Writers in Silent Era Hollywood”
Donna Casella https://wfpp.columbia.edu/essay/shaping-the-craft-of-screenwriting-women-screen-writers-in-silent-era-hollywood/
“Decoration, Discrimination and “the Mysteries of Cinema”: Women and Film Exhibition in Sweden from the Introduction of Film to the Mid-1920s”
Ingrid Stigsdotter
https://wfpp.columbia.edu/essay/
*“How Twelve Famous Women Scenario Writers Succeeded,”
Photoplay*
*“Francis Marion interview in 1920 Motion Picture Magazine”
Doris Delvigne*
“When Hollywood’s Power Players Were Women”
NAOMI MCDOUGALL JONES
“Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood”
by Karen Ward Maher
https://www.jstor.org/stable/25097391?seq=1
“Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood”
Cari Beauchamp
“Script Girls: Women Screenwriters in Hollywood”
Lizzie Francke
“Virgins, Vamps and Flappers: The American Silent Movie Heroine”
Sumiko Higashi
“Anonymity: Uncredited and Unknown in Early Cinema”
Jane M. Gaines
Hollywood’s Modern Women: Screenwriting, Work Culture, and Feminism, 1910-1940.”
Wendy Holliday; Susan Ware
https://www.worldcat.org/title/hollywoods-modern-women-screenwriting-work-culture-and-feminism-1910-1940/oclc/873966777
“Blueprints for Feature Films: Hollywood’s Continuity Scripts”
Janet Staiger
“The American Film Industry”
edited by Tino Balio
“Dividing Labor for Production Control: Thomas Ince and the Rise of the Studio System,”
Janet Staiger
“Mothering, Feminism and Representation: The Maternal in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film 1910-1940”
E. Ann Kaplan
“How to Write and Sell Film Stories”
Francis Marion
*Francis Marion interview with Elizabeth Peltret of Photoplay in 1917*
“Frances Marion: Part II, She Wrote the Scripts of Some of the Milestone Movies,” Films in Review XX, no. 3 (March 1969)”
De Witt Bodeen
“The Women Who Write the Movies”
Marsha McCreadie
“Screenwriting for the Early Silent Film: Forgotten Pioneers, 1897-1911.” Film History 9, no.3 (September 1997)”
Edward Azlant,
*As quoted by other source. Could not first hand