WITHOUT LYING DOWN (2000)

Subtitle: Frances Marion and the Power of Women in Hollywood.  A TCM documentary from about twenty years ago on the top screenwriter (male or female) from the late-‘teens thru the mid-‘30s.  That subtitle no doubt aspirational to the then prominent Hollywood women interviewed about being female in the industry in the 1920s vs 2000; surprised at what they didn’t know.  Not Cari Beauchamp who wrote the book on Frances Marion this is based on*, but certainly Callie Khouri, Polly Platt, Martha Coolidge, Robin Swicord, et al.; all of whom (Coolidge the notable exception) going on to earn far less credits in the 20 years after this came out then any similar list of prominent Hollywood males would have.*  It was the next generation of women film professionals who’d seriously alter the playing field.  And the film itself?; no more than adequate.  So much goes missing!  Second marriage to George W. Hill (top M-G-M director and fine collaborator) unmentioned.  Maybe half of the Marie Dressler career save is in here.* There’s not a word on Marion’s ‘Talkies’ Achilles heel: bad dialogue.  Irving Thalberg’s M-G-M factory system coming into play here.  And Marion’s post-Mary Pickford decade in silents gets skimmed over; she was just as successful with soapy trash for Norma Talmadge and when writing superior Women’s Weepies like STELLA DALLAS/’25.

READ ALL ABOUT IT:  *This film plays much better when paired with Beauchamp’s bio of the same name.  In truth, that too could use a modern update.  But a good place to start (probably the only place to start), even when Beauchamp gets held back by so many ‘lost’ films.

LINK: Typing Frances Marion into the MAKSQUIBS Search Box will bring up a few peripheral titles, but mostly show how enormous her contribution was.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/search?q=frances+marion

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *There’s a book in the false spring these talented Hollywood women thought had dawned.  And another film focusing on how Marion twice saved Dressler’s career, taking her from a has-been living in a fancy hotel closet in Manhattan, to a near hit film that was banned from the screen and then on to become America’s Number One star just as cancer struck.