Frederica Sagor Maas, a Hollywood screenwriter in the 1920s, died January 5 at the Country Villa nursing facility in La Mesa, in the San Diego metropolitan area. She was 111.
The daughter of Russian immigrants (one Jewish, one Christian), she was born Frederica Alexandrina Sagor on July 6, 1900, in New York City. According to her autobiography, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim: A Writer in Early Hollywood, she studied journalism at Columbia University, but quit before graduation to work as an assistant story editor at Universal Pictures' New York office.
While at Universal, she kept herself busy going to star-studded premieres and parties, and — as found in her book — having the studio buy the rights to Rex Beach's novel The Goose Woman, thus giving a solid boost to the careers of actresses Louise Dresser and Constance Bennett, and of future five-time Oscar-nominated director Clarence Brown.
Sagor left Universal when film executive Al Lichtman and future Paramount chief B.P. Schulberg founded the independent studio Preferred Pictures. Sagor's top assignment at Preferred was to write an adaptation of Percy Marks' novel The Plastic Age. Released in 1925, the movie (co-written by Eve Unsell) helped to solidify Clara Bow's reputation as the embodiment of Jazz Age youth.
Not content in having Sagor laboring away as a mere screenwriter, Schulberg told her (or so Sagor claimed): "I could turn you into another Theda Bara." Sagor's response was "I'm not an actress. I'm a writer." Curiously, Theda Bara would resurface in Sagor's life once again in the near future: in her book, she describes fending off the advances of triple-crossing director Charles Brabin, Bara's real-life husband and the lover of Sagor's then-roommate.
So, instead of starring in a remake of Cleopatra, in 1925 Sagor found herself working as an MGM screenwriter. In her book, she talks about signing a three-year contract for $350 (approximately $4,500 today) per week "and increasing to $500 the second year." MGM files, however, show her getting paid $100 (approx. $1,300 today) a week in summer 1925.
As per the AFI catalog, Sagor's sole screen credit during her MGM stint was Robert Z. Leonard's low-budget comedy Dance Madness (1926), featuring Claire Windsor as the girl and Conrad Nagel as her man. In her book, Sagor asserts that Dance Madness was "a big moneymaker," though in reality it earned MGM a very modest $74,000 in profits simply because at a cost of $125,000 it was the studio's cheapest 1926 release.
Additionally, Sagor states that she wrote screenplays for the Norma Shearer comedies His Secretary (1925) and The Waning Sex (1926), and began working on a treatment for what would eventually become the Clarence Brown-directed John Gilbert-Greta Garbo smash hit Flesh and the Devil (1926). Credit for her efforts, however, went elsewhere — partly because of her naiveté, partly because of studio politics, and partly because she was a determined woman: "a troublemaker."
Referring to His Secretary, Sagor wrote:
"Adaptation and Scenario by Carey Wilson?! There it was, in black and white. By Carey Wilson — he, who had not contributed a comma, a single idea. It was mine! All mine! I could not believe it, yet there it was. … My anguish showed.
"'If you don't see your name, Frederica,' he said, 'don't worry about it. You'll get screen credit in the end.' Oh yeah? I never did — Carey Wilson did. This was the way I was used for a series of Norma Shearer pictures. All moneymakers. I wrote every one of them, practically from scratch, and received credit for none. None. The worst part was that there wasn't a blasted thing I could do about it." [Carey Wilson was credited for His Secretary's story; the screenplay was credited to Hope Loring and future producer Louis D. Lighton; titles by Joseph Farnham.]
Sagor's various tales of misogyny and discrimination have been taken as the absolute truth by some. The way Hollywood men treated Sagor and/or other women — plagiarism, prostitution, abuse of power, etc. — have served as proof of how intelligent, driven females suffered in the hands of ruthless, sex-crazed male animals in the American motion picture industry.
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Wow, what a biased obituary. "Screen credits few"? "Angry, gossipy, anti-Hollywood"?
Frederica Sagor Maas was a screenwriter at a time when women were "assigned" fluff-piece roles, and not allowed to be taken seriously. Perhaps she had a bit of an edge to her, but there must be some truth for her to have written a book about it 40+ years later…clearly, the issue was not a financial reward but the stealing of ideas and credit. Certainly, anyone who's worked in Hollywood (or for anything of major importance, really) has dealt with the politics of reaping where one does not sow.
I am sure that this woman had a lot of information to share but as we know, auto-biographers only share what they want you to know.
She was pretty enough to have been in movies. Thanks (as ususal) for an interesting article Andre.