Just as Hollywood is lining up to celebrate the movie romanticizing the silent film era, "The Artist", one of the era's very talented and outspoken screenwriters, Frederica Sagor Mass, passed away in early January at the age of 111.
Fortunately, she crafted a most memorable memoir of her days as a screenwriter published in 1999, "The Shocking Miss Pilgrim", where she revealed the greed, lechery and brutal nature of the early days of filmmaking. Her memoir reminded readers that Hollywood has always been first and foremost about one thing - business, not artists. Here she is from a 1999 interview:
"I know I’ve been hard on the motion picture industry [in the book],”
she remarks. “The facts and the stories I tell — about the plagiarism
and the way I was handled and the way other writers were handled — are
true. If anybody wants to take offense at the fact that I tell the truth
and I’m writing this book …” She pauses a moment, collects her
thoughts, then — Whammo! “I can get my payback now. I’m alive and
thriving and, well, you SOBs are all below, because I’ve lived to 99.
And I quit the business at 50.”
---
"Maas doesn’t think much of current films. “There’s no lack of material,
there’s just lack of incentive to make anything else but what they
consider box office. And, hell, who can dispute them? Pictures are
making money. And people are getting stupider and stupider. They’ll pay
seven and a half dollars to see a motion picture and it’s all in the
same vein: sex, sex, sex, sex, sex and violence, violence, violence,
violence. You know what they’ve done? They’ve taken the vulgar, low part
of old-fashioned vaudeville — all those terrible little acts — and
they’ve put it on TV.”
"Both she and her husband, Ernest Maas, saw their ideas stolen and
plagiarized, and they were blackballed by the industry after being
wrongly accused of being communists, she wrote.
"Her book is perhaps the best muckraking memoir about early Hollywood,"
film historian Alan K. Rode said Friday. "She was one of the last
living connections to silent film, and her autobiography is an
irreplaceable record written from the rare perspective of a woman who
lived through those times."
Her life and works deserve to be celebrated as much as or more than any box office hit of the moment. Here's to you, Frederica.
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