Published in 1997
475 pages
Cari Beauchamp is the award winning author of Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and The Powerful Women of Early Hollywood. She also edited and annotated Anita Loos Rediscovered: Film Treatments and Fiction by the Creator of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and co-wrote Hollywood on the Riviera: The Inside Story of the Cannes Film Festival. Her book, Adventures of a Hollywood Secretary: Her Private Letters from Inside the Studios of the 1920s, was published in 2006.
Cari wrote the Emmy nominated documentary film The Day my God Died which played on PBS and she was nominated for a Writers Guild Award for Without Lying Down: The Power of Women in Early Hollywood which she wrote and coproduced for Turner Classic Movies. She has also appeared in over a dozen documentaries.
She has written for Vanity Fair, Architectural Digest, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and various other magazines and newspapers. She is an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Scholar and her books have been selected for “Best of the Year” lists by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and Amazon.
She has appeared as a featured speaker at venues throughout the United States and Europe including The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, The British Film Institute, the Museum of Modern Art, The Edinburgh Film Festival, the Cannes Film Festival, the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, The Women’s Museum of Art in Washington D.C. and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Before turning to writing on a full time basis in 1990, she worked as a private investigator, a campaign manager and served as Press Secretary to California Governor Jerry Brown. She lives in Los Angeles.
What is this book about?
Frances Marion was Hollywood’s highest paid screenwriter – male or female – for almost three decades. She was the first woman to twice win an Academy Award for screenwriting. From 1916 to 1946 she wrote over two hundred scripts covering every conceivable genre for stars such as Mary Pickford, Gary Cooper, Greta Garbo, Marion Davies, Rudolph Valentino, Clark Gable, Marion Davies, Rudolph Valentino, Clark Gable, and Marie Dressler. Irving Thalberg “adored her and trusted her completely, ” William Randolph Hearst named her for the head of west coast production for his Cosmopolitan studios, and in 1928, Sam Goldwyn raised her salary to an unparalleled $3,000 a week. Her stories were directed by George Cukor, John Ford, Alan Dwan, and King Vidor, and she went on to direct and produce a dozen films on her own. On top of all this, she painted, sculpted, spoke several languages fluently, and played “concert caliber” piano. Though she married four times, had two sons, and a dozen lovers, Frances’s life story is mostly the story of her female friendships. As talented, successful, and prolific as Frances Marion was, these relationships were as legendary as her scripts. Without Lying Down is an eminently readable and meticulously documented portrait of a previously hidden era that was arguably one of the most creative and supportive for women in American history.
