Script Girls: Women Screenwriters in Hollywood

The stereotypical Hollywood screenwriter is a smugly macho male pounding away at his typewriter. Yet women have been writing screenplays since the beginning of the silent era. Francke shows how, as the industry grew, screenwriting became virtually the only area in which a woman could play a significant role. In documenting Hollywood's early female scenarists, she touches on such prominent figures as Anita Loos and Dorothy Parker but concentrates on dozens of hitherto unsung heroines. Her account of female writers' current status is more compelling than that of the earlier days, thanks to interviews with Nora Ephron and other contemporaries. Francke's survey also points out how badly women have fared in other areas of the industry, on screen as well as off. But if "Writers are the women of the film industry," as a Hollywood figure once observed to indicate the lowly status of screenwriters, then women writers would seem to be the lowest of the low. Still, Francke describes her book as celebratory rather than as a catalog of discrimination, and it does detail the extensive contributions female screenwriters, facing daunting obstacles, have made. Gordon Flagg