Cari Beauchamp masterfully combines biography with social and cultural history to examine the lives of Frances Marion and her many female colleagues who shaped filmmaking from 1912 through the 1940s. Frances Marion was Hollywood's highest paid screenwriter―male or female―or almost three decades, wrote almost 200 produced films and won Academy Awards for writing "The Big House" and "The Champ." "[Marion's] story is an astonishing mini-history of the twentieth century. . . [She] knew everyone from Jack London to Irving Thalberg to William Randolph Hearst."--Jeanine Basinger, "Los Angeles Times Cari Beauchamp  is the author of  Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood  (UC Press, 1998), editor and annotator of  Anita Loos Rediscovered: Film Treatments and Fiction by Anita Loos, Creator of “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”  (UC Press, 2003) and  Adventures of a Hollywood Secretary: Her Private Letters from Inside the Studios of the 1920s (UC Press )  She also wrote     Joseph P. Kennedy Presents: His Hollywood Years ;  My First Time in Hollywood: Stories from the Pioneers, Dreamers and Misfits who made the Movies , and is coauthor of  Hollywood on the Riviera  (1992). Her documentary films have been nominated for an Emmy and a Writers Guild Award and she is the only person to twice be named an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Scholar.   She is also a contributor to Vanity Fair, serves as the resident scholar for the Mary Pickford Foundation and lives in Los Angeles. "An impressively innovative work. . . . Solidly researched, thoughtfully argued, imbued with affection and respect for the women it profiles, this is a fine addition to the small shelf of movie books that actually have something to say."