Ladies who rewrote the script

A TRIP to the Bo’ness silent film festival next week is a chance for a lovely wallow in vintage films that had been forgotten or misremembered for decades, until brought to life once again.

It also celebrates a time when women were a bigger part of the picture. During Hippfest, there’s a chance to laugh along with Marion Byron and Anita Garvin, the female answer to Laurel and Hardy, in their best film A Pair of Tights, or catch the gold-plated heartbreaker Stella Dallas, written by the extraordinary and prolific screenwriter Frances Marion, pictured.

A great new book called Silent Women: Pioneers of Cinema reminds us that no modern movie writer has been as successful or powerful as Frances.

Between 1912 and 1945, she was the highest-paid writer in Hollywood. A double Oscar winner, she joined forces with megastar Mary Pickford to become a movie force that outgunned even Cecil B. DeMille.

Frances wrote Anna Christie for Garbo, gangster pictures such as Secret Six and boxing melodrama The Champ. Half the films made were written by women. Bess Meredyth was co-screenwriter of Ben-Hur, while Lois Weber was a successful director, who ran her own production company.

Now women writers are a very small sisterhood in the film industry – none is paid as much as men, or get the chance to write Oscar winners such as Spotlight.

Today is International Woman’s Day: isn’t it high time Hollywood tore up its current script?