Putting Women Back in (His?)tory…
Without Lying Down by Cari Beauchamp
Cari Beauchamp did not set out to create history. She uncovered it. To this day film schools of all different prestige continue to ignore teaching factual history because it would mean unteaching that men created Hollywood. But don’t get it wrong: Beauchamp doesn’t write Marion’s biography as a martyrdom of women being excluded, but the stark reminder that women were always running things. Marion Frances is the comet among the stars, but through the biography we get to meet all of the women who got her there with their quirks and hurdles in-tact, showing historians that you don’t have to pretend to be a self-starter in order to be remembered. Charlie Chapin being immortalized while Mabel Normand is forgotten is the reason for biographies like these. A director does not have to eliminate all of the people who work for them to be remembered, just as Marion being a woman doesn’t eliminate all of the revolutions she made for film and writing. It’s time for historians to remember.
Frances Marion
A section of every biography that matters to me is how they got their start. For Marion, she was a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner and would later take a break from filmmaking to resume reporting in World War I. Already given an ultimatum: get an interview from Marie Dressler or your fired, attempted to pin two women against each other. Yet it leads into a common feat—getting the job done when no man thought you could. After feeling in limbo in her career, Marion returns to contract art work to find herself at the right place at the right time. Marion reunites with her longtime friend Adela Rogers to run into the social circles of Mary Pickford and Lois Weber. Weber’s $50,000-a-year contract was unheard of. Last to be selfish, she made Marion her protégée behind the camera and behind the page.
We relish in the ascent of Marion’s pay rate from selling The Foundling Script for $125 to her American world record of $200 a week with William Brady to $2,000 a week with William Hearst. Through her showcase of fifty films, Beauchamp also writes us the poetic moments of Marion’s busy life. After her car accident Marion pays for all of the passenger’s medical bills and spends her days in her cast on linguistic meditation, music, and writing against doctor’s orders. Marion traverses through several marriages but all of them are filled with years of love. Her marriages are not publicity stunts, but treatises on the belief that certain loves manifests in lovers that are meant to be experienced in different milestones in one’s life.
In her retirement from MGM, Frances continues to write, sculpt, and advocate for women’s rights. Still, she doesn’t insist on immortalizing herself, a humble feat but a debilitating one for Beauchamp if it wasn’t for France’s assistant combing through her trash. Part recording of social ills, part manifestation of female truth, Beauchamp reclaims Marion’s legacy in history.