2013 Essays

Frederica Sagor Maas

Vatsal, Radha

Frederica Maas first contacted the Women Film Pioneers Project in the late 1990s. 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).