A Girl Like I

"She was a very important scriptwriter who worked with D W Griffith in the early days of silent film. Loos was known for two things as a scriptwriter. She was able able to write scripts that turned actors into stars, as her script for Red-Headed Woman did for Jean Harlow. She was also known for being able to get sexual innuendo past the censors, thanks to her wit and her grasp of how the film industry worked. An example of that is her screenplay for the film The Women . A Girl Like I helps us to chart the transition from theater to film. Born in 1889, Anita Loos started out in the world of theater. Her father was both a newspaperman and a theater owner. Steeped in the world of entertainment from a young age, Loos understood how it depended on publicity and news coverage, and how that publicity and news coverage can be manipulated and angled. Loos tells a lot of charming stories about the theatrical world that film replaced. She was a child actor who played both male and female roles, Little Lord Fauntleroy one night and the female heroine of the melodrama East Lynne the next. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter We are used to thinking of film as killing theater, but initially, the main way people saw films was in traditional theaters. Films started out very short, just three or four minutes long, and many vaudeville theaters showed a few films in between live acts. Anita Loos learned about film while working in the theater. She describes watching movies from the other side of the screen while changing costumes backstage. That story is probably apocryphal, but it’s such a lovely image. Loos decided to start writing film scripts at a young age. She paid attention to the different kinds of stories featured by distinct film companies and wrote a script for Biograph suited to their house style. To figure out where to send it, she climbed up to where the film projector was located and found a can of film with the Biograph address on it. She signed her cover letter ‘A. Loos’ and Biograph addressed their letter accepting it ‘Dear Sir.’ After that, she made her way to Hollywood. Loos’s memoir is very interesting on the early interplay between Hollywood and Broadway. When D W Griffith decided he wanted to make serious films, he knew he had to go back to live theater to get real actors. Los Angeles was flooded with people who wanted to work in the movies, but they were all amateurs with zero experience. Many of them got work and learned on the job and became great film actors, but some of the biggest film stars came from Broadway. Mary Pickford, for example, had a long career as a child star in theater before she became America’s sweetheart in films. The same was true of D W Griffith’s favourite movie actress, Lillian Gish. She worked for years in live theater before becoming a film star. Both. She charts the rise of celebrity in film—how a medium that didn’t start out using stars came to define stardom. Films initially lacked stars and didn’t even name the actors featured in them because directors and producers wanted to save money. They knew that if actors became crucial to attracting audiences to films, they would demand higher salaries. But at a certain point, the film industry realized that audiences want to identify the people they’re seeing on the screen. If they like them, they might want to see another movie with that same actor. So producers made their peace with having stars who commanded higher pay and exercised some power. Loos writes, “They tried to keep them anonymous as long as they could and then they couldn’t.” To counteract the star’s power, producers often tried to impose very restrictive contracts on them. By the 1930s, movie stars had much less power or autonomy than theater stars had enjoyed in their nineteenth-century heyday. Another phenomenon that promoted film stardom was the rise of the film magazine. Loos talks at great length about the first major movie magazine, Photoplay , which turned her into a star by publishing photographs and articles about her calling her “the soubrette of satire.” As soon as one of those articles was published, she got hundreds of fan letters; she reprints some of the more hilarious ones in her memoir."