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Though Tess Slesinger wrote only 12 films her contribution to classic Hollywood screenwriting and adaptation deserves focus.  Born on July 16, 1905 to Jewish parents of Hungarian-Russian heritage, Slesinger grew up with three older brothers on New York’s Upper West Side.  Her father worked in the garment world and her mother, Augusta Slesinger went from being a welfare worker to becoming a psychoanalyst and helping found the New School for Social Research. Slesinger learned talents from both of her parents’ professions to fuel her career writing short stories and eventually screenplays.

Read Empowered Women Ran in Her Family and Her Heroines: The Screenwriting Career of Tess Slesinger

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Though writer Catherine Turney was born (in 1906) and raised in Chicago, she and her parents moved to Pasadena in her later teens and that made all the difference. At the age of 20, Turney began working for the School of Theatre at the Pasadena Playhouse where she eventually attended. Turney graduated in 1931 and immediately began working on a play. Bitter Harvest, the story of the controversial relationship between Lord Byron and his sister Augusta Leigh. It marked Turney as a writer of substance with an ability to adapt classics.

Various sources claim that director Dorothy Arzner at MGM then hired Turney to adapt an unpublished novel by Ferenc Molnár’ into a vehicle for Joan Crawford. In the end the The Bride Wore Red credits went to Tess Slesinger and Bradbury Foote. It was typical in the studio system – and before the existence of the Writers Guild – for several writers to be assigned the same project and the producer would decide who received credit in the end.

 

Read From the Pasadena Playhouse to Warner Brothers, Paramount, and Disney: The Screenwriting Journey of Catherine Turney

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Many of today’s screenwriters have come from the world of education so it could be said they are following the path laid out by Ethel Doherty in the 1920s and 30s. Born in Los Angeles in 1899 Doherty and the film industry grew up together. Her parents moved back and forth between Los Angeles and Arizona, so Doherty majored in history and graduated from Arizona State Normal School with plans to be a high school teacher.

Back in Los Angeles she spent two summers at the University of Southern California (USC) and a third one at University of California. Her interest in the film industry meshed with Louise Long, a friend she met at USC, but like many aspiring screenwriters, even today, they needed to pay their bills so both women became high school teachers by day and collaborated on screenplays by night.

Read Knowing History and Writing for the “It Girl” Launched The Screenwriting Career of Ethel Doherty

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In honor of Valentine’s Day it’s time to celebrate a female screenwriter who managed to take bubble-gum parts for actresses and give them more gumption, gravitas, and giggles inside the light musical genre films she was assigned.

Born in New York City in 1909, Dorothy Kingsley could be called a nepo-baby as her mother Alma Hanlon became a silent film star a few years later. Hanlon acted for 4 years from 19150-1919. By then she had left her husband Walter J. Kingsley (press agent to Florenz Ziegfeld), married again and moved young Dorothy to Michigan.

Eventually, Kingsley found her way back into the industry but this time by moving herself and her 3 children to Los Angeles where radio was king. There she met Constance Bennett who like her mother had been a big silent film star in the 1920s but now hosted a radio show. Bennett began buying Kingsley’s jokes for her monologues which lead to a place on the writing staff of the The Edgar Bergen Show.

Read A Master of Musical Romances: The Screenwriting Career of Dorothy Kingsley

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Though born in 1894 in Washington, D.C., the family business was theatre, not the politics of President Grover Cleveland’s administration.  With an actor for a father – Henry Dupree Sinclair – the future Ruth Sinclair would also begin her career on the stage before turning to film, where she wrote for silent stars such as Lillian Gish, Greta Garbo, and Joan Crawford.

Read Trusted to Write for the Greatest Stars of the Silent Screen: The Screenwriting Career of Ruth Cummings

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In the Silent Era, before the existence of the Hays Code (and largely a cause for it), many female screenwriters wrote heroines who flouted the brazen sexual freedom of the new century, a specialty of Josephine “Jo” Lovett. Born in October 1877 in San Francisco Lovett would spend some time as a lead actress on the Broadway stage before moving to Los Angeles to both act and write what were called scenarios for the bulk of her career.

Read Sexual Liberation 1920s Style: The Screenwriting Career of Josephine Lovett

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Born on April 25, 1899 in St. Louis, Missouri to Alice Kern and Robert M. Yost, Dorothy moved to Los Angeles to work in the burgeoning film industry and clearly succeeded in that goal.  By the time she died in 1967 Yost had written over 80 films and achieved what many other writers did not – thriving in both Silent Films and into the Sound Era. Interestingly, it was her foray into film that brought her journalist brother Robert Yost into the film industry after she found her footing there. Her first screenwriting credit came in 1920, his in 1935 after some years on the staff of local newspapers, as publicity director for Fox West Coast Studios and finally head of the scenario department for Fox.

Read From Missouri to Musicals: The Screenwriting Career of Dorothy Yost

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