#Film screenwriter francis marion movie

She worked as a commercial artist for Western Pacific Railroads and painted movie posters for nearby theaters. When the marriage eventually ended in divorce, Owens decided to strike out on her own.Ī seeming Jill of all trades, mistress of none, Marion Owens skipped from job to job. Discouraged, and with no immediate prospects, she married her art instructor. The art institute was gone her father’s business was no more and Owens’ dreams of attending the eastern college she had dreamed of went up in smoke. Family lost everything in the ’06 Frisco earthquake.īut Owens’ life was turned upside down two years later when her family lost everything in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. At age 16, perhaps drawing on the budding talent that got her bounced out of school four years earlier, Marion Owens enrolled in San Francisco’s Mark Hopkins Art Institute, one of America’s oldest schools for contemporary art education. It was on those pages, carefully hidden under her mattress, that she honed her writing skills. Her uncle, an old salt, took her to the bars up and down San Francisco’s fabled Barbary Coast where she heard - and kept a diary of - tales of ocean voyages and high-seas adventure. Her aunt held mock séances while young Marion voiced long-dead relatives. Stuck at home with private tutors, Owens grew close to an aunt and uncle who lived with the family, and to whom she credited her vivid imagination and storytelling talents. The high point of her early education was expulsion from school at age 12 for drawing snarky cartoons of her teachers - a badge she wore with pride because she felt it set her apart from fellow classmates she considered just plain ordinary. But from 1915 into the 1930s, a woman named Frances Marion was the most successful and highest-paid screenwriter in show biz.Ī California girl, Marion Benson Owens was born in 1888.

Google “top 25 greatest screenwriters of all time” and you’ll find every single one of them is a man. Marion, who wrote the scripts for more than 130 films during during Hollywood’s Golden Age, was one of the most highly-paid screen writers of her era. On set at a United Artists film shoot in 1920 are Frances Marion (right) and Mary Pickford (left).

Film screenwriter francis marion