Ready Reference
	Anita Loos ?1893-1981 American actress, screenwriter and playwright noted for her satiric comedies. Loos, who wrote some 200 scripts for both silent and sound films, created the art of writing film captions, beginning with D.W. Griffith's silent films, such as Intolerance (1916). In 1926 she and her husband, John Emerson, dramatized her successful novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Noted for Lorelei Lee, the stereotypical 'dumb blonde', the play was made into a musical in 1949 by Loos and Joseph Fields. Throughout her career Loos wrote plays (Happy Birthday, 1946) and screenplays (San Francisco, 1936; The Women, 1939); adapted French plays into hit American shows (Gigi, 1951); and wrote witty, gossipy memoirs of her career in Hollywood (A Girl Like I, 1966; Kiss Hollywood Goodbye, 1974; Cast of Thousands, 1977). Reproduced with permission from The Cambridge Guide to Theatre, edited by Martin Banham. Copyright (c) Cambridge University Press 1988, 1992, 1995. All Rights Reserved.

Nicholas Benton: Miss Loos, please recall, as you can, as you remember, your extraordinary entrance to Hollywood. I believe it began at--

Q: You were 12 years old? Can you tell us about that?

Loos: You see, I was practically born for Hollywood, because my father was a writer and I was a stage child, and I had writing and theatrical experience when I was 12, but beginning when I was about 5. So I became a film fan very early, as a child, and realized that they must have to have a story before they'd start shooting. So I wrote one, and I climbed up in the loft of my father's theater and got the film can with the address of the Biograph Company on it, and I mailed my story to this address.

Immediately I got a check back for $15, which was about what I was earning as an actress by the week. So that started me, and I never stopped. I just kept turning them out.

I had written 200 produced films before sound came in--200 silents. They gave a festival at the Museum of Modern Art, you know, dug up things I couldn't even remember when I saw them!

Q: You did a great deal, and worked with [D.W.] Griffith.

Loos: Yes, I began with Griffith. It was Griffith who bought my very first play. And by the way, I wrote Griffith's very last movie, The Struggle, yes, which was a complete disaster, as you know.

Q: I want to talk a little bit about that in a moment. Were there any particular screenplays of those 200 that you recall that were pronounced favorites of yours?

Loos: Yes. There was one I called The Little Liar that got me a write-up by Vachel Lindsay in The New Republic. Vachel Lindsay was the first film fan of any mentality, and he became my pen pal from that time on. So that stands out, because I had great experiences with Vachel, and that was with Mae Marsh.

Q: Then, before we get to the sound era, could you give me--I think I probably know, but for the tape--what you feel, and when you were writing all these screenplays, the difference between writing a screenplay for the silents, a scenario I suppose, as opposed to writing for sound? It must have been different.

Loos: There was a great difference, because we didn't put dialogue into our silent films very much. Most of the dialogue was put in after the film was cut, with subtitles. Then, of course, when sound came in we had to put in dialogue scenes, and that was a great difference. But I had a big hiatus, because I left films in 1925, when they were silent, and I didn't come back till sound was in, well in. So when I came back to Hollywood, to Thalberg, sound was already established.

But I did have a picture, which was, I think, the first picture that used sound in one single scene. It was Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and it was a silent picture except that they put one scene in sound, and--

Q: Jim Walker, was it?

Loos: Yes, Jim Walker, and Alice White. No, Jim Walker was the stage star. This was a fellow named--oh, dear, I should remember the name, but I don't at the moment.

Culver Pictures

Jean Harlow (left) with famed scriptwriter and playwright Anita Loos, in a 1932 advertisement for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Loos' novel was first published in 1926, and over the next 50 years it was made into a play, two musicals and two films. Gentleman Prefer Blondes was one of the first silent pictures to incorporate sound into one of the scenes.

Q: Do you recall that scene at all, with the sound?

Loos: I remember that it was a scene with the two girls in a restaurant, and they were ordering fish, and the reason why we did it in sound was that there was a play on the French word for fish, which the girls took to mean "poison." So there was no way to do it silently with the subtitles, so they put that in sound.

Q: Let's ask you a few questions about Jean Harlow, whom you did quite a number of things with.

Loos: Yes. I did the first comedy that Jean ever appeared in, and I think it was due to [Irving] Thalberg alone that she became a great star, because she was playing the femme fatale in very second-rate films, and when he decided to put her into Red-Headed Woman, which was a comedy. She had never done anything like that before, and there was a big question of whether she could get away with it or not, and she certainly proved that she could. And it made her a star, but instantly, and she never faltered from that time on. But she had her whole career under the influence of Thalberg, and he protected those stars. He never let them do one thing that wasn't right for them. So her whole career was there as a Thalberg star.

Q: After Red-Headed Woman, where I guess she was put in by Thalberg, did Thalberg then in turn say, "She can play these things, get us more properties," or what happened there?

Loos: Yes, then Thalberg immediately set about having things tailored for her, and--

Q: You subsequently wrote for her Riff Raff, I see.

Loos: Yes.

Q: Saratoga, which of course was her last picture.

Loos: Yes.

Q: Now, you worked with Joan Crawford?

Loos: Yes.

Q: In Susan and God, I think?

Loos: Yes. Then, of course, I turned into a film doctor, through the years that I was there. Working with Mr. Thalberg, I got to know so well what his requirements were, and so there was a long stretch before I left when I was working on almost every script, because I would be handed the script to put laughs into it. And so there were hardly any of those scripts that I didn't have my fingers in the pie.

Q: Some of them without credit, I guess.

Loos: Oh, yes, many without credit.

Q: Crawford in Susan and God--I guess that was a fairly successful picture, wasn't it?

Loos: Oh, very, yes. It was a big success.

Q: It's interesting-- well, of course, you did it beautifully--but when you think of contrasting her to Gertie Lawrence on the stage--wasn't it?

Loos: Yes, it was.

Q: Susan and God was--

Loos: --was Rachel Crothers.

Q: Yes, that's right.

Loos: Then I did a very successful, the only soap opera I ever wrote, for Greer Garson, called Blossoms in the Dust. I got an award for that and there wasn't a laugh in it.

Q: That was a darned good picture. That was the first picture that Garson had with Pidgeon, wasn't it?

Loos: Yes. Yes.

Q: How did you happen to do that screenplay? Because that's really not your--what you're mostly well known for. Well, maybe you are.

Loos: No, no. I've never done anything but comedy, and how they happened to come to me, I don't know. I think they'd had several scripts that didn't turn out, and so they said, "Well…" At that time I was practically a film doctor, so they handed it to me. And it just happened to turn out all right.

Q: Yes, I remember it well.

Judith Greene: Talking about being a film doctor, you mentioned something to me on the phone about The Women?

Loos: Oh, that was a very funny situation, because when Claire Boothe's script went to the censor department they cut out all the laughs. You see, in those days, there could be no laughs about religion or anything of that type, and it came back just the day before we were going to start shooting, with all the laughs cut out of it, and so Thalberg sent for me in a panic, and he said, "We've got this big cast, we can't postpone, we can't delay a day," because they had about 10 female stars lined up, and he said, "I don't see anything to do but for you to sit beside George Cukor on the set and extemporize these things as they come up, one after the other, and put the laughs in, but so they can get by the censors."

So the whole picture was shot that way. I reported on the set every morning, sat through the rehearsals of the scenes, put in what laughs I could, and the script was shot in that way. It was practically extemporaneous.

Q: Let's return just a bit back to San Francisco, which is a fine movie classic now. Where did that story originate, and so forth? Of course, you had the earthquake. You had to work around it.

Loos: Yes. It originated in the love I have always had for San Francisco, where I was a child. The gag man on the lot came from San Francisco, and he had been a messenger boy on the Barbary Coast and we were great pals. We got to talking about the old days in San Francisco and thought it would make a good movie, and the two of us wrote it together. So--

Q: Who was that gag man?

Loos: His name was Bob Hopkins. Everybody called him Hoppie, and he was one of the great colorful characters of Hollywood. Everybody knew him, and I think Hoppie invented dozens of words that are in our vernacular now.

Q (Greene): Could I ask a question here? When you talk about the gag man, what does that mean? Does he write gags, or he is the funny man on the lot?

Loss: No. Hoppie was engaged to wander about where needed, and go on the set when a thing was getting soggy and gag it up, and that was Hoppie. And he saved many a picture, because the director could easily see where a scene was bogging down, and there would be a call go out for Hoppie, and he would go down to the set and he would say, "Well, have them say this."

Q: In San Francisco, in a screenplay like that, would you complete the screenplay before shooting began, I assume? And if so, what kinds of changes would go on during the making of that particular film?

Loos: When you wrote for Thalberg, as we did--although the picture was shot after he died, but we had written it for Thalberg--you wrote a complete script. Everything was there. An idiot could have taken one of Thalberg's scripts and gone out and shot it, because everything--motivation, characterization, dialogue, everything--was there, and the hardest thing Thalberg had to do was to get those different directors to keep the characterization. And stupid they were. There were no great directors in those days.

Q: Were other directors like Thalberg in their demands on a scriptwriter in that way?

Loos: I don't think anyone was as thorough as Thalberg was.

Q: Did you report essentially to him?

Loos: Yes. We worked under his supervision.

Q: As a writer, did he affect writing at all? Did he work like a good editor at Viking or something?

Loos: He worked like a good editor. He never intruded, but he would guide and direct you, and to my way of thinking he was one of the real geniuses of the whole industry.

Q (Greene): It's interesting that everybody who talks about Thalberg talks about him in the same way. He was really a giant, and there aren't many books out about him.

Loos: There is one book. But you see, he never allowed--he never put his name on a picture. He never allowed any publicity to go out about him at all. And it's terrible to say this--that a man could be that great, and because he didn't have a public relations man nobody knew him, and nobody knows him today.

Q: He wanted it that way, I suppose.

Loos: He wanted it that way. Yes.

Q (Greene): A rare bird.

Loos: He was indeed.

Q (Greene): Really.