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Key words: American silent film; women in film; Dorothy Arzner; Herbert Blaché, Alice Guy Blaché.
The ease with which many scholars, and others, make pronouncements in regard to statistics is often highly questionable. Research seems irrelevant when emotional issues are involved. Forexample,howmany timeshasonereadthat ninety per cent of all American silent films are lost or that fifty per cent of allAmerican films evermade no longer exist? Not once has anyone ever produced back-up documentation for such claims.1
On 13 June 2011, Cari Beauchamp (twice named an Academy Film Scholar) introduced a screening of Humoresque (written by Frances Marion, with a little help from Fannie Hurst) at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and announced, to gasps from the audience, that fifty per cent of all silent films were written by women. In the 2011 documentary, These Amazing Shadows, Shelley Stamp (yet another Academy Film Scholar) makes an identical pronouncement. One person in the Academy audience who immediately questioned Beauchamp's claim was Patricia King Hanson, the long-serving editor of the American Film Institute Catalog, who recalled being asked many years ago if such a claim might bemade and having responded that it could not.
While it is impossible to determine just how many silent short subjects were written by women - in that contemporary documentation does not exist, with trade papers often failing to provide any credits for such films and house organs for various early studios existing only in incomplete runs - it is a relatively simple, if somewhat tedious, matter to come up with a figure for feature films of the 1910s and the 1920s. Thanks to the American Film Institute Catalog, a complete record of feature films from those decades does exist. With none of the financial aid available to members of the academic community, and with no staff (but with the enthusiastic encouragement of Patricia King Hanson), I set upon the task of actually counting just how many feature films could be credited to women screenwriters during this period. I accepted that there might be issues with the 1921-1930 volume of the Catalog in that there are some omissions and errors, but not enough greatly to change the percentages. I also accepted that that same volume includes some sound features,...