« Screenwriters these days need heroines—figures to look back on with pride to continue the fight for freedom of expression and the right to a livelihood from their craft. »

What inspired you to write about Mary C. McCall Jr. ?

As you probably know, screenwriters never got the credit they deserved in histories of the film industry—in Hollywood or anywhere else. But a substantial number of writers in Hollywood during the “golden age”/1920-1960 were women. I wrote about many of them in Nobody’s Girl Friday (2018), but McCall stood out among her writing peers and among any key figure in Hollywood—for her achievements as a screenwriter, as a Hollywood labour leader, as a public figure respected in the national press, as a Hollywood insider impacted by the 1950s blacklist, as an unapologetic feminist decades before Second Wave feminism. And no one was paying any attention to her. The only serious attempt to include her at all in histories of the Screen Writers Guild and the blacklist was Nancy Lynn Schwartz’s 1982 book, The Hollywood Writers Wars. Sadly, Schwartz died before it was complete, and her mother edited the final version. But other male historians who actually got the chance to interview McCall—such as Larry Ceplair—downplayed her role and said she “didn’t look like the head of a union.” This was infuriating. So, I wrote McCall’s story in hopes that someone would remember her. Screenwriters these days need heroines—figures to look back on with pride to continue the fight for freedom of expression and the right to a livelihood from their craft. For me, McCall is such a heroine.

Can you tell us how long it took you to write the biography of Mary C. McCall Jr. ?

I wrote McCall’s biography over a two-year period after I finished launching a new edition of Silvia Schulman’s exposé novel of the Hollywood studio system (I Lost My Girlish Laughter). Schulman worked for producer David O. Selznick as a secretary and had to use a pen name (Jane Allen) to maintain her anonymity—which was blown by the press—and then she never worked in Hollywood again. Her portrait of Selznick is not exactly flattering but is very funny!

This backlash against women criticizing or gaining too much power in the industry was something McCall also encountered when she went toe-to-toe with producers to get a writers’ contract in the 1930s and 1940s. And then, during her 3^rd term as Screen Writers Guild president, when McCall sued RKO’s head, Howard Hughes, on behalf of communist writer Paul Jarrico, she really became a pariah in Hollywood. She wasn’t a communist, but she wasn’t going to see a writer lose screen credit because of his political affiliations. Producers stopped hiring her to write film scripts. However, she continued to work in television and her name stayed in the trade papers. Her real erasure happened later, when the so-called discipline of film studies began to look at Hollywood and create doorstop-sized histories of the business that focused only on male geniuses—and victimized starlets.

How did your research go ?

The research took a while to complete because there were a few archives and libraries to access which had scripts or letters of hers. Most of McCall’s papers are held privately, however, and I am grateful to her daughter for granting me access and for being so supportive of the project from start to finish. She is a television writer too—Mary-David Sheiner. And does she have some horrific stories to tell about being a screenwriter and a woman in the 1970s. But, as far as her mother’s career was concerned, major archives didn’t want to purchase or even be given McCall’s papers after her death. Libraries only wanted the papers of Hollywood men. Even male screenwriters have “bespoke” collections in film archives in Los Angeles. Very few women writers have collections in major archives, because of the entrenched misogyny behind the sourcing of collections. So then you have people only writing about men, and the endless, boring cycle of the patriarchy goes on and on.

Did you encounter any obstacles or resistance when looking for a publisher to publish Mary C. McCall Jr.’s biography?

There is so much misogyny in academia—but in American film studies it’s rank. French feminist scholars I’ve spoken with confirm it is as bad if not worse in France! So, you will know that books about male director auteurs and victimized female stars drive trade publishing interests and have an increasingly mind-numbing effect on academic publishing. It’s an algorithm that pushes fawning histories of male creativity and blocks studies of women who aren’t actresses. Readers get a false picture of what Hollywood was like for women in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. They begin to think that the only job women have ever had in film is to be a glamorous and exploited object of the camera.

The irony is that many women editors in publishing I approached about McCall’s biography weren’t interested in touching it because they were afraid it “wouldn’t sell” with an increasingly misogynist American public. Luckily Philip Leventhal and Columbia University Press did believe in McCall’s importance—and to their credit, so did the Academy Foundation attached to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who gave me a grant to finish the book. Ironically, McCall was one of the founders of the Academy Foundation back in 1944, so someone must have realized that they owed McCall’s legacy something…

Your book is subtitled “Rise & Fall”. How would you describe the key moments in the rise and fall of his career?

Your comment about the “rise and fall” subtitle is interesting because I didn’t want it to be like that. I don’t want to see the story of any woman’s career as conforming to a “rise and fall” pattern! But sadly, the real pattern of McCall’s career in Hollywood almost dictated that wording—because she was at the very top in the late 1930s and 1940s—and then with the blacklist and the postwar crumbling of the unions, the unions’ failure to protect women’s jobs, and her conflict with the producers—it was a precipitous fall. She went from being one of the top Hollywood earners listed in the newspapers to counting her pennies for the weekly food shop. 

Can you tell us what working conditions were like for Hollywood screenwriters at the start of Mary C. McCall Jr.’s career, before her union battles?

This isn’t in any way to suggest things were easy for her in Hollywood when she started. She worked briefly for Darryl Zanuck at Warner Bros. at the start of the Great Depression, and later in the 1940s, she would go to work for him at Twentieth Century-Fox. Zanuck was anti-union, but he started out as a poor screenwriter and so he had respect for them. He still felt like he was one of them in a way and looked after his writers for the most part. He paid them well and was one of the only producers to ever hire one writer to see a project from its beginning to its final script.

But after Zanuck left Warner Bros. to form his own company, McCall met producers who hired and fired writers in batches and treated them like disposable commodities. Writers had no minimum wage—their work could be taken and they had no guarantee of getting screen credit. Producers even stole writing credit outright— claiming they’d written the scripts writers had created. Writers made less money than assistant secretaries in the early and mid 1930s. And without writers, there would have been no films at all.

Do you think Hollywood’s preference for adaptations over « on spec » scripts explains why screenwriters were often seen as interchangeable parts, with their rights being so poorly respected by producers?

Your question about original scripts over adaptations is interesting…I think Hollywood has always had a distinct preference for adaptations because they’re pre-sold in another cultural medium, not because they can screw writers over better that way. There weren’t that many original scripts in the 1930s and 1940s, but when McCall did an original script, her work would be passed on to other writers. The most control she ever had was adapting George Kelly’s Craig’s Wife for Dorothy Arzner and for using the Collison stories to create the Maisie series for women in 1939. In these cases (1936 and 1939), she was the sole writer, and these were nominally “adaptations.”

Incidentally, she also financially backed the New York theatre production of “Gaslight”—so she loved theatre and the way in which writers and actors were even more closely bonded. I know from other theatre actors—from Alec Guinness to Eileen Atkins and Paul Scofield and even Bette Davis—it is the writer and the script they paid attention to on stage, not the director. One of the reasons established theatre actors hate making films is because they feel disempowered by directors and producers. In theatre, the contract between the actor and writer is everything. So perhaps McCall should have gone back to Broadway and written a play. Perhaps this is the answer for screenwriters who are fed up with their treatment in the film industry now. Their creative salvation may well be in live theatre rather than in mechanical films. And as so many films in Hollywood are just sequels or comic book franchise knockoffs…

What were Mary C. McCall Jr.’s major accomplishments as president of the Screen Writers Guild?

Actors knew it then, and some actors still know it now: It’s only the script that counts—the director is incidental. A good film is born with a script and a great group of actors to interpret it. McCall knew this too and all her life forged close relationships with actors—and with film editors, who created the language of film with screenwriters.

She wanted non-managerial filmmakers to work together, to talk together outside of work to learn better ways of telling motion picture stories. Take the producers and directors out of the equation altogether. She knew the Hollywood system could function well enough economically to support artists in many branches of filmmaking and give them a sense of continuity and community, so she fought for the first screenwriters’ contract with the producers, which was fully implemented during her first term as Screen Writers Guild president in 1942. She got a minimum wage for all writers regardless of seniority, credit protection and arbitration, minimum hiring periods, pay rises during the war, an 80% guild shop, and the right to strike backed up by the US government. She also helped build the one Hollywood charity for impoverished film workers: the Motion Picture Relief Fund.

But she also knew that great writers take risks, and so as she got wealthier and more powerful, she worried she would lose her edge as a writer. Instead, she channelled her energy into helping emerging writers like Richard Maibaum (who wrote the James Bond films) and Harriet Frank Jr., who later co-wrote Norma Rae. It was she who demanded that all writers get the same minimum wage and no writer, however inexperienced, could be pressured into speculative writing. And there was a defined, detailed system for guaranteeing credit for writers with committees for arbitration. Most of her day-to-day work as guild president was to protect writers—men and women—from being exploited by the money men. David O. Selznick and Jack Warner had terrible reputations in this regard. But McCall got on well with Columbia’s Harry Cohn. He hired more women as writers and producers than his peers.

How did Mary C. McCall Jr. see the screenwriting career for women in Hollywood, and what were her relationships with other screenwriters of the time, such as Anita Loos and Frances Marion ?

McCall always insisted that writing was one of the few careers for women where they could achieve pay parity with men. Where they could work their own hours and feel satisfaction with their creative work. Loos and Marion had pioneered the career in the 1910s and 1920s, but women had always been writing for their living in the US—whether it’s journalists Ida Tarbell and Nelly Bly or historian Mercy Otis Warren or novelist Catherine Sedgwick. Film writing was just a new type of writing that women could master. And because so many women were readers in the US, editors and film producers knew that women’s writing sold well to the public. There were a lot of magazines, novels, histories, biographies, plays, and films aimed at women up to 1950.

 Between 25%-33% of all Hollywood screenwriters in the 1930s and 1940s were women. Most of them were guild members and McCall’s friends (Marion was not an active member of the guild—nor was Loos. Many of the silent-era women writers were Republicans who believed in old-style, help-yourself free enterprise). McCall was a Roosevelt Democrat but tried to reach across the political spectrum to appeal to all women. For a while, she succeeded. Even Hedda Hopper was a friend.

At what point did the situation turn around for women screenwriters?

But after the war, a populist Republican base harnessed rabid anti-communism to go after unions, people of colour, women, Democrats—and McCall was one of their targets. The period in the late 1940s-1950s sounds a lot like now, with Trump know-nothings, anti-abortion trad wives, and psycho billionaires. The blacklist certainly destroyed the careers of many Hollywood women, including Marguerite Roberts, who only returned to write (ironically for John Wayne) in the late 1960s. McCall’s career was impacted, and she wasn’t even a communist—she was only a labour leader who sued a millionaire producer (Howard Hughes)!

But women’s presence behind the camera in the industry declined for other reasons too. When the Hollywood studio system fell apart, many women who’d worked for decades in film editing, production design, research, legal, producing, and writing, simply retired and weren’t rehired. There were cost savings, and television was eating into their profits after 1951. Then independent productions took over and the new men hired only men to work with them. In the past, the studio executives had hired the most qualified man or woman on their payrolls who was between projects, but in the new Hollywood, bros hired other bros. And the films they made were more exploitative of women on screen. So that’s the great irony—the Hollywood of the 1930s and 1940s was more welcoming to women workers and produced more female-oriented content than now.

To what extent do you think Mary C. McCall Jr.’s story resonates with the contemporary struggles of women in film and screenwriters in general, and what do you think Mary C. McCall Jr.’s battles would be if she were still alive today?

I think I’ve already answered this here and there, but Hollywood is a mess, especially for writers. The strike alliance between actors and writers in 2023 was heartening, and it reminded me so much of McCall’s faith in the basic artistic relationship between the writer and the actor. Stars and writers had worked together to achieve and develop their unions in the 1930s and 1940s, and this relationship came to their rescue again at a time of great peril for Hollywood. But in addition to greedy executives and competition from other media, the industry has to contend with poorer audiences with less disposable income to go to the movies each week/month, the streamers (who pay writers and actors a pittance compared to analogue television agreements), higher costs, and AI. It’s devastating to have to list all these problems facing today’s screenwriters.

In France, my sense has always been that there is a base of more active spectators invested in the cinematic and live theatrical experience. People simply care about French film, though it has been devastating that Adèle Haenel has quit the industry due to its systemic misogyny and racism. In America, spectators are lazy and stupid. They gorged themselves on the junk food of cinema for decades since Jaws. The old-style, risk-taking producers who would invest money in a film script that seemed provocative and exciting but had no pre-sold value are dead. We’ve had some well-written, commercially viable television series for the US market since 2000, but those that are most valued critically and commercially have focused on men’s experiences and have privileged men’s writing (I’m thinking of The Wire, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones).

So what would McCall do in these disastrous times? I’ve thought seriously about that throughout the process of writing her biography. McCall would probably 1) sue AI companies for using member writers’ work to train AI—and 2) sue publishers who’ve enabled it. 3) She would push a boycott on all studios who use AI voices and 4) boycott Hollywood altogether and start a new film studio—a collective funded by writers and actors—who have the option to work in theatre when the right project comes along.

McCall was a member of the Authors Guild and believed in the rights of all writers, so 5) I think she would also suggest funding alliances of writers across the board—not just in Hollywood. 6) All writers should invest in a lawyer who manages and defends the copyrights of their works. 7) And screenwriters and audiences should consider returning to live theatre where human magic really happens. Theatre was McCall’s first love as a student at Vassar (back in the days when it was a women’s college). And later, one of her happiest projects was adapting A Midsummer Night’s Dream for her friend James Cagney.

You wrote another book called Nobody’s Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood,  which is the first in-depth account of Hollywood’s influential career women during the studio era (1924-1956). Could you tell us if you are working on another project or book that explores similar figures in cinema history?

I’m done with Hollywood. When I had money and was less worried about the impending death of the planet, I used to fly to the US once a year for a week of archival research in Los Angeles or New York. But for five years, I have not done that and have tried to reduce my carbon footprint and live a better life. It wouldn’t do Hollywood any harm to think about the environmental costs of its existence either… And since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, I never want to set foot in the US again. If women’s rights to their own bodies are ever respected in US law and the Equal Rights Amendment is ever passed, I might reconsider. But I’m just done with that place. Lately my research has focused on British (and occasionally French) theatre and film. It’s hard to ignore the theatre when you are in Stratford-upon-Avon every day. And Shakespeare always gets top billing. Not bad for “just a writer”…

J. E. Smyth is professor of history at the University of Warwick. She is the author or editor of several books, including Nobody’s Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood (2018) and a new edition of Jane Allen’s novel I Lost My Girlish Laughter (2019). In 2021, she was named an Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.