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When Women Wrote Hollywood: How Early Female Screenwriters Disappeared from the History of the Industry They Created. A Case Study of Four Female Screenwriters

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Abstract

Histories of Hollywood sans serious reference to the contributions of pioneering women screenwriters and directors allowed the mythos of the Great Man to merge into the mythos of the Great Director which solidified in the auteur theory. Tracing the lives of four Silent Era female screenwriters—how they entered, conquered, and then disappeared from the industry—this chapter brings their names (Meredyth, Unsell, Macpherson, Fairfax) back into the canon of screenwriting studies while also rediscovering two marginalized women (Micheaux and Wong) who made films outside the Hollywood factory system. This chapter investigates the reasons for their disappearance, which include the rise of the studio system itself, male mismanagement of female-run production companies, unreliable narrators of both genders, and the lack of female historians of cinema.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Orig.: “E alla tecnica teatrale si ispira il cinema. Un saggio della Macpherson all'inizio degli anni Quaranta studia per il film l'arco narrativo in tre tempi da rispettare anche in ogni singola scena”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Stephens College, Columbia, MI, USA

    Rosanne Welch

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  1. Rosanne Welch
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Correspondence to Rosanne Welch .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Stage and Screen, University of Greenwich, London, UK

    Rosamund Davies

  2. Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK

    Paolo Russo

  3. Institut für Theater-, Film- und Medienwissenschaft, Universität Wien, Wien, Austria

    Claus Tieber

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Welch, R. (2023). When Women Wrote Hollywood: How Early Female Screenwriters Disappeared from the History of the Industry They Created. A Case Study of Four Female Screenwriters. In: Davies, R., Russo, P., Tieber, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Screenwriting Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20769-3_14

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