Publisher's Weekly Review
Beauchamp seems betwixt and between. Is this a biography of Frances Marion (1888-1973), one of Hollywood's most prolific screenwriters, or a study of women in the early film industry? For the former, there is disappointingly little character analysis or, for that matter, information about Marion's non-film careers, such as journalism (she was one of the first female war correspondents). For the latter, there is little sociological or economic inquiry. Instead, Beauchamp's narrative of Marion's life is heavy on gossip, with as much about her famous friendsMary Pickford, Louis B. Mayer and William Randolph Hearst, among othersas about her. Although the writer of such well-known screenplays as Stella Dallas and Dinner at Eight, Marion remains relatively unknown, a state of affairs not helped by the fact that she was frustratingly private, as Beauchamp admits in her notes. Beauchamp demonstrates how Marion's career as a screenwriter known for her clever plots and astute literary adaptations (Anna Christie, Camille) evolved with a changing Hollywood. She shows Marion's adjustments to market demands: from the silents to the experiment of the talkies to the squeaky-clean films demanded by the Hays Commission and the growing business of film promotion and distribution. Beauchamp's focus is the considerable emotional and professional support that Marion and her celebrated female friends offered each other. Beauchamp's portrait of Marion seems to reflect someone perfect, hardly human: "Frances was a raving beauty and she was also very happily married and immensely successful and innovative in her work." As a result, by book's end readers will have absorbed a lot of PG-rated tidbits about the wealthy in Hollywood but won't know Marion in any real psychological depth. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
From 1916 to 1946, Frances Marion was the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood. She wrote hundreds of scripts, including Stella Dallas (1925), Min and Bill (1930), The Champ (1931), Dinner at Eight (1933), and Camille (1937). She won two Academy Awards; for her work on The Big House (1930), she became the first woman writer to take home an Oscar. When she moved to Los Angeles, the movie industry was still in its infancy and considered disreputable; so before her writing career took off, she played a few bit parts in "flickers." In 1915 she received $200 a week as a scenario writer. Only four years later William Randolph Hearst hired her at $2,000 a week to write and direct at his Cosmopolitan Studio; her duties included developing scripts for his mistress, Marion Davies. When she signed with MGM, her contract was even more lucrative. Beauchamp pored over unpublished manuscripts, diaries, appointment books, letters, and studio contracts for this extremely well documented biography, which will delight movie fans with its insider's view of early Hollywood. --Jennifer Henderson
Library Journal Review
Film journalist Beauchamp's book is aptly subtitled, for this is not only about the pioneering screenwriter Frances Marion, whose credits range from silent classics to Garbo's first "talkie" to sophisticated comedy. This is also the story of the women with whom Marion worked, who creatively and symbiotically sustained one another. Chronicled here are her intimate working relationships with Mary Pickford, Marie Dressler, and Irving Thalberg; her qualified disdain of Louis B. Mayer and Joseph P. Kennedy; and her marriages, especially to cowboy film star Fred Thomson. Occupying the marginsbut rarely marginalizedMarion cultivated power that often translated into casting decisions and salary negotiations on her own terms. She made the transition from silents to sound motion pictures and likewise survived the industry's swing from early respect for the director's vision to a later reverence for bottomline returns. To dub Beauchamp's work "revisionist" is inadequate: this is a welcomed rediscovery. For all film collections and larger public libraries.Jayne Kate Plymale-Jackson, Univ. of Georgia Lib., Athens (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
![Cover image for Without Lying Down [electronic resource] : Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood.](/client/assets/5.1326/ctx//client/images/no_image.png "Cover image for Without Lying Down [electronic resource] : Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood.")