"Frederica Sagor Maas, a pioneering female screenwriter who scored her first big success with The Plastic Age, a smash hit for 'It Girl' Clara Bow in 1925, died Jan 5." She was 111. Mike Barnes in the Hollywood Reporter: "Because she was a woman, Maas was typically assigned work on flapper comedies and light dramas. Her efforts includes such other Bow films as Dance Madness (1926), Hula (1927) and Red Hair (1928); two films featuring Norma Shearer, His Secretary (1925) and The Waning Sex (1926); the Greta Garbo drama Flesh and the Devil (1926); and the Louise Brooks film Rolled Stockings (1927)…. In 1927, she married Ernest Maas, a producer at Fox, and they wrote as a team but struggled to sell scripts…. The pair, interrogated by the FBI for allegedly Communist activities, were out of the business by the early 1950s. Ernest Mass died in 1986 at age 94. In 1999, at the urging of film historian Kevin Brownlow, Maas published her autobiography,...
- 1/8/2012
- MUBI
Frederica Sagor Maas, who wrote screenplays for silent era stars including Clara Bow, has died. She was 111.
The pioneering screenwriter passed away of natural causes on Thursday. She was the third oldest person in California.
She began her Hollywood career aged 23 and racked up credits for silent films including Flesh and the Devil with Greta Garbo, Dance Madness, His Secretary and The Waning Sex.
Maas also penned the screenplay for 1925's The Plastic Age, acknowledged as the movie which launched Bow's career.
She married Ernest Maas, her writing partner, in the late 1920s but they struggled to sell their scripts in Hollywood after they were wrongly branded communists and blacklisted by industry executives. Ernest died in 1986.
The pioneering screenwriter passed away of natural causes on Thursday. She was the third oldest person in California.
She began her Hollywood career aged 23 and racked up credits for silent films including Flesh and the Devil with Greta Garbo, Dance Madness, His Secretary and The Waning Sex.
Maas also penned the screenplay for 1925's The Plastic Age, acknowledged as the movie which launched Bow's career.
She married Ernest Maas, her writing partner, in the late 1920s but they struggled to sell their scripts in Hollywood after they were wrongly branded communists and blacklisted by industry executives. Ernest died in 1986.
- 1/8/2012
- WENN
Screenwriter Frederica Sagor Dead at 111: Wrote Movies for Norma Shearer (photo), Clara Bow, Louise Brooks Now, whether Frederica Sagor's Hollywood Babylon-like tales bear any resemblance to what actually happened at studio parties and private soirees, I can't tell. But on the professional side, one problem with the information found in The Shocking Miss Pilgrim is that studios invariably used numerous writers, whether male or female, in their projects. Usually, in those pre-Writers Guild days, only two or three contributors received final credit, not because of the uncredited writer's gender but in large part because the final product oftentimes had little — if anything — in common with the original source. While doing research for my Ramon Novarro biography, I went through various drafts, written by various hands, of his movies. A Certain Young Man, for instance, went through so many changes (including director, cast, and title), that the final film...
- 1/7/2012
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Frederica Sagor Maas, a Hollywood screenwriter in the 1920s, died January 5 at the Country Villa nursing facility in La Mesa, in the San Diego metropolitan area. She was 111. The daughter of Jewish Russian immigrants, she was born Frederica Alexandrina Sagor on July 6, 1900, in New York City. According to her autobiography, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim: A Writer in Early Hollywood, she studied journalism at Columbia University, but quit before graduation to work as an assistant story editor at Universal Pictures' New York office. While at Universal, she kept herself busy going to star-studded premieres and parties, and — as found in her book — having the studio buy the rights to Rex Beach's novel The Goose Woman, thus giving a solid boost to the careers of actresses Louise Dresser and Constance Bennett, and of future five-time Oscar-nominated director Clarence Brown. Sagor left Universal when film executive Al Lichtman and future...
- 1/7/2012
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
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