2013 Essays

Julia Crawford Ivers

Miller, April

When discussing Julia Crawford Ivers, film historians primarily emphasize two things: her remarkably introverted personality, and her role as principle scenarist for William Desmond Taylor (Foster 1995, 199; Lowe 2005, 286). However, her 1930 obituaries assign Ivers a more independent and influential position, with the New York Times describing her as a “scenario writer, director and production supervisor” (19) and the Los Angeles Times making the inflated and incorrect claim that Ivers was “the second woman to become a film director in Hollywood” (A20). Given that a number of other women directed motion pictures before Ivers had her first opportunity in 1915, this last claim may say more about the way early Hollywood publicity machines operated than about the nature of her film industry work between 1913 and 1923.