We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
•v. '•"
Frances Marion Goes Over
An Appreciation By ELIZABETH BENNECHE PETERSEN
THEY may also serve who only stand and wait, but Frances Marion is not going to take a chance on it. The spirit born of years of training in the great West rebels against any such proceeding. So does her ancestry — fighting men all. Her mother is sending her — the only son she has. Had she six she would give them up just as unquestionably and as bravely. As it is she only regrets she can boast but one star in her service flag.
From George Creel, Chairman of the Committee on Public Information, came the announcement that Miss Marion had been appointed to an important post abroad in connection with the motion picture activities of the committee. The significance of the fact that since the beginning of the war only one other woman, Mrs. Norman de R. Whitehouse, has been sent abroad as a representative of the committee is unmistakable. An appointment of this sort is an unusual honor and consequently difficult to attain.
It was the same grit that won her championship for broncho-riding and her exalted position among presentday writers that sent Miss Marion to face the great issue over there. Courage of the highest order was needed for a mission of this sort, but she was not found wanting.
With the suddenness of the year's first thunderbolt came the news that the greatest writer of all was in the East, preparing to leave for France, Between flying trips.to Washington and important conferences there was little time for anything minutely resembling a personal
character, but the memory of her few talks with me before sailing will never be forgotten.
"It's leaving mother and Mary that is the hardest," she said, in the middle of an enthusiastic account of the glorious adventure she was about to start on. "If it weren't for them I wouldn't have a single regret."
And Mary Pickford still tearfully refuses to even discuss the necessity of getting another scenario writer at once. "It isn't only that there never will be another writer like her — that without her scenarios I'll lose the biggest inspiration I have — but I am losing my. best friend, the dearest chum I ever had."
Since "The Poor Little Rich Girl," whose screen interpretation by Miss Marion adapted with such decided success from the stage plays, she has written all the "Little Mary" successes. She holds the undisputed record of writing the best subtitles seen on the screen and works untiredly over them until they are perfect. Not content with originating the characters alone, she works with the director in making real flesh-and-blood people out of them.
I asked her who gave her her start in pictures, and she answered Lois Weber. Since her sixteenth year, when she started her professional life as a reporter, she varied her career from time to time between painting and fiction writing. Then, with the desire to write a book about studio life, she played in pictures to acquire the needed local color. Lois Weber, whom she met shortly after, became a great friend of hers and made her realize that there was a language of the screen and started her in the n
53 ■>
PA6U