Frederica sagor maas biography sample

  • Frederica Alexandrina Sagor Maas was an American dramatist, playwright, screenwriter, memoirist, and author, the youngest daughter of Jewish immigrants from.
  • She enrolled at Columbia University in to study journalism and worked as a copy girl at the Evening Globe for two summers.
  • Frederica Sagor Maas was born in America, the youngest daughter of Russian immigrants.

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    The Shocking Miss Pilgrim

    " Freddie Maas's revealing memoir offers a unique perspective on the film industry and Hollywood culture in their early days and illuminates the plight of Hollywood writers working within the studio system. An ambitious twenty-three-year-old, Maas moved to Hollywood and launched her own writing career by drafting a screenplay of the bestselling novel The Plastic Age for ""It"" girl Clara Bow. On the basis of that script, she landed a staff position at powerhouse MGM studios. In the years to come, she worked with and befriended numerous actors and directors, including Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, and Eric von Stroheim, as well as such writers and producers as Thomas Mann and Louis B. Mayer. As a professional screenwriter, Fredderica quickly learned that scripts and story ideas were frequently rewritten and that screen credit was regularly given to the wrong person. Studio executives wanted well-worn plots, but it was the writer's job to develop the innovat

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    Frederica Sagor Maas was born in amerika, the youngest daughter of Russian immigrants. Feeling no great desire to complete her course in journalism at Columbia University, New York, she found rulle an exciting new artistic medium, and was hired by Universal Studios as a story editor, and later MGM as a fully fledged screenwriter. Thus began a bumpy life in the film industry. Maas went from rubbing shoulders with stars such as Clara Bow, Norma Shearer, and Joan efternamn and being at the top of her game with hits like The Plastic Age () to watching several ideas and stories being robbed outright by unscrupulous insiders, to watching dear friends lose their careers in the McCarthy era, and eventually leaving the motion picture industry in the s after a series of crushing disappointments. She married fellow writer and producer Ernest Maas in , and honoured his commitments to the industry long after she realised it would take from them far more than they would take from it. She recount

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    Frederica Sagor Maas

    Frederica Maas first contacted the Women Film Pioneers Project in the late s. She had just completed her autobiography, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim: A Writer in Early Hollywood, which chronicles the vicissitudes of her career from the silent period into the sound era. In the course of a remarkably frank narrative, she offers various explanations for her professional disappointments. These include bad luck, bad decisions, and bad timing; however, it is finally the assignment of screen credits that had the most lasting impact. Maas tells us that “writers in those days had little redress. The Writers Guild was new and not powerful&#; [T]he last writer to be hired to do a re-write got the credit&#; [I]t wasn’t right and it wasn’t fair, but that was how Hollywood operated” (67).

    For writers, the assignment or non-assignment of screen credits can seriously affect one’s livelihood; for film scholars, it muddies the question of how we determine the accomplishments of

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