2013 Essays

Lenore Coffee

Blaetz, Robin

Lenore Coffee was a screenwriter in Hollywood from the late silent period through the end of the studio system. Although she wrote original stories, titles, and scenarios and was known for her adaptations of popular women’s fiction, she specialized in repairing the work of others. As a writer called upon to correct and reformulate the work of such well-known figures as Cecil B. DeMille and Irving Thalberg, her often unacknowledged and remarkably long-lived voice is worth examining more closely.