Frances Marion

Who She Was 

Frances Marion was born Marion Benson Owens in San Francisco in 1888 and became the most successful screenwriter of Hollywood's silent era. She started in the film business doing almost everything, acting, moving scenery, writing press releases, and cutting film, for the pioneering director Lois Weber. When the star Mary Pickford gave her the chance to write, Marion created a string of hits and became one of the highest-paid writers in the industry, at one point earning $50,000 a year at a time when that was an enormous sum. During World War I, she went overseas as a war correspondent. When talking pictures arrived, she made the leap that many silent-era writers could not, and she won the Academy Award for Writing for The Big House in 1930 and the Academy Award for Best Story for The Champ in 1932, becoming the first writer ever to win two Oscars. Over her career, she wrote more than 300 scripts, and in 1937 she published a guide called How to Write and Sell Film Stories. She died in Los Angeles in 1973.

Why She Matters

Frances Marion proved, at the very beginning of the movie business, that the writer could be the most valuable person on the lot. She did it in an industry that was inventing its own rules as it went, and as a woman in a field that would later shut most women out for decades. Her career shows that screenwriting is a craft you learn by doing, that versatility is a strength, and that the person who understands story has real power in filmmaking. For young writers, she reminds them that the profession was built in part by someone who started out shifting scenery and refused to stop learning.