Frances Marion was Hollywood's highest-paid screenwriter, male or female, from 1915 until the early 1930s. She was a friend and confidante of some of the screen's greatest stars; she had studio bosses in her pocket; she had power. But "networking" was something else in those days, and Marion famously worked the system to the advantage of friends in need. Marion had influence, not just because people like Louis B. Mayer didn't read books and trusted her, but because she could write. Girl, could she write.She herself wrote some 200 produced films, and her fellow women writers were equally prolific. Among Marion's circle was the irrepressible Anita Loos, who wrote scenarios for D. W. Griffith's Biograph Company from the age of sixteen and became one of the key satirists of her era. One of the first screenwriters to employ intertitles in silent films, she frequently used them to make wisecracks aimed at the picture itself. Indeed, young writers such as Loos, Beth Meredyth, Marion, and June Mathis established the importance of the screenplay/scenario written always with the camera in mind. Like Loos and Marion, Beth Meredyth had worked in short-story and newspaper writing, and like Jeanie Macpherson and others, she began as an actress. Macpherson's twenty-five year collaboration with Cecil B. DeMille (after she had been a director in charge of her own unit) was based on mutual admiration and shared values: his hard-driving perfectionism epitomized what she demanded of the characters she created. "Of course, calling them 'women writers' is their ruin. They begin to think of themselves that way," Dorothy Parker once quipped. But what do we have to show for the little-acknowledged fact that women writers outnumbered men until well into Hollywood's "Golden Age"? Our series suggests the collaborative power of these writers with the actresses they wrote for, such as Garbo and Pickford, Crawford and Harlow, who made a place on the screen for daringly independent women.Mightier than the Sword: Women Screenwriters in Hollywood continues in May with other writers and other films! Special thanks to Lee Amazonas for research. Our series is inspired by a larger series at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Powerful Women of Early Hollywood: Frances Marion and Her Circle, organized by Mary Lea Bandy, Chief Curator, Department of Film, on the occasion of the book by Cari Beauchamp, Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood (Scribner, 1997).Sunday April 5, 1998