What I'm Reading: Early Hollywood Pioneers

Periodical Reading Recommendations

First off, an apology for the lack of posts over the last few weeks. Between the Sundance Film Festival and a trip to my old stomping grounds in Atlanta, I haven’t had the proper amount of time to write as much as I would have liked. That said, in the time since my last What I’m Reading dispatch I have finished two books about Early Hollywood, both of which I will be discussing in this edition of the newsletter.

Two very illuminating books about women in the early days of the Hollywood studio system

Last newsletter I mentioned I had started reading Cari Beauchamp’s Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood. Although I finished reading the book before Sundance, I wasn’t able to write out my thoughts before I got caught up in the festival.

I enjoyed how, like the title implies, Beauchamp seamlessly wove in the careers of other women from this era. I had no idea how intertwined Marie Dressler’s career was to Marion’s. Dressler herself is such a fascinating figure in terms of looking at how popular entertainment waxed and waned in the first part of the 20th century. I loved learning so much about how Mary Pickford grew as an artist through her collaborations with Marion. I also thought it was fascinating that Marion’s second husband Fred Thomson was at one point one the highest grossing stars (he mostly made westerns) in the mid-1920s, yet now most of his films are considered lost.

Another thing this book did really well was lay out how the business of Hollywood worked through the lens of Marion’s career, and to some extent those who were in her orbit. You often hear about just how obscene the salaries were for stars (and in rare cases like Marion, writers and directors) were in the silent era, but to see their salaries as plain as day really boggled my mind. Although I thought Beauchamp sometimes censored some of the more sensational aspects of the era, I did appreciate how honest the book was about the mechanisms and politics at play in the studios. To understand that art, it is truly important to understand how business slowly warped it.

There were also a few tidbits that lead me to believe that this was one of the many books Damien Chazelle read while researching Babylon.