Essays

Agnes Christine Johnston

Miller, April

Agnes Christine Johnston repeatedly claimed that she wrote and sold her first scenario, Wanted for Murder, at the age of sixteen. In 1925 she described that effort to the Los Angeles Times as a “bloodthirsty” story about a man who was tried for his own murder (D13). Perhaps she was sixteen, but she says she is “just eighteen” in the thank you letter she wrote in 1914 to Vitagraph Company of America president Albert Smith. Here she describes her ambition to go to the Columbia School of Journalism, says how happy the check he sent made her, and raves that “even dances and parties pale beside ‘movey’ writing.” We do not know if that first scenario was actually produced, but her brief description mirrors the title of a later Vitagraph film, Tried for His Own Murder (1916).

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Academic Units
Film
Libraries
Series
Women Film Pioneers Project
Published Here
October 15, 2019