For Conservative Movie Lovers: King Vidor, Wallace Beery and 'The Champ' Part 1

Our newest film in this series, 1931’s The Champ, marks the first time we begin our study not with a director but with a writer. Not to say that the director didn’t have a great deal to do with the success of the film — he most certainly did, and (as the title of this post hints) we will review that contribution in good time. But in the case of The Champ, it was the writer who was primarily responsible for the rich familial tone and heart-rending melodrama for which this touching little film (only 86 minutes) is best known and remembered.

The Champ is that rare film that features a pair of strong male leads doing masculine things in a masculine universe, but with nuanced and delicate characterizations that delve far deeper than the usual sports movie, tearing at the raw edges of what it means to be a parent in an imperfect world, to live through the tragedy of a broken family, and to suffer the premature loss of childhood innocence. On the surface, these subjects would seem ill at home in one of the most famous boxing movies of all time. But The Champ is not based on a true story, or cribbed from a famous novel — it was wholly conceived in the mind of the screenwriter. And not just any screenwriter, but the most prolific (and arguably one of the greatest) in Hollywood history. Who was he, you ask?

Well, first of all, he was a she.

Born in 1888, Marion Benson Owens grew up in San Francisco as the middle child of a no-nonsense ad executive, but soon developed into a rebellious little Bohemian with a variety of artistic pretensions. She was above all precocious and full of imagination. Whenever her aunt would invite other ladies over for séances (a favorite pastime in those days), young Marion would play the part of a possessed girl channeling spirits, inventing all manner of accents, characters, and stories with which to delight her audience. Her uncle, an old seaman, often took her along to visit his buddies in seedy bars and taverns. Watching the gruff men smoking, drinking, and cursing in their salty element, she gained early first-hand experience in the sort of masculine banter and swagger that decades later would grant The Champ so much verisimilitude.

Looking for ways to express her imaginative longings, Marion began to draw and to write poetry, things that failed to impress her down-to-earth businessman father and socialite mother. Their divorce when she was a teen imbued her soul with another of the painful elements that would later figure so prominently in The Champ. Among her parents’ friends was the great Jack London, the first millionaire author in history. Although it is unknown whether she read any of his seminal tales about boxing (The Game, “A Piece of Steak”) it is known that he heartily encouraged her writing endeavors, spurring her to submit what would become her first fledgling short story and poetry sales.

Marion’s early marriage to a magazine illustrator failed, as did a second to a steel magnate. By 1915 a series of transient jobs (including time spent in Europe as a WWI combat correspondent!) had ended with her in Los Angeles, nibbling around the edges of the molten Hollywood film industry. Meeting the famous actress Mary Pickford was a turning point, as they quickly began a warm friendship that would last over fifty years. Soon she was acting in bit roles for silent movies under the stage name “Frances Marion” (one of her distant relatives was Francis Marion, the legendary “Swamp Fox” of the Revolutionary War). The name would stick, and the former Marion Owens would be Frances Marion for the rest of her life.

Ultimately, acting wasn’t her forte. Her first chance to write for a movie came about due to a funny circumstance. The movies of 1915 were silent, yes — but amazingly, studios were getting complaints from lip readers who claimed that the words mouthed on-screen by the actors didn’t at all match the displayed dialogue cards. (Because there was no sound, actors could say anything — including plenty of things no lip-reading Christian ought to “hear”!) Directors began requesting scene-appropriate mock dialogue for the actors to use. The newly christened Frances Marion obliged, and began what would become a lifelong career and passion.

Within a few years Marion the writer was a hot property, penning a continuous stream of “scenarios” and making an obscene amount of money doing it. She became the personal screenwriter for her friend Mary Pickford, as well as the ghost-writer for Pickford’s newspaper column. In 1917 alone Marion cleared $50,000 for her scriptwriting chores. She wrote lightning-fast, sometimes cranking out a feature-length script in as little as three weeks. No one knows exactly how many movies she wrote during the teens and twenties. The Internet Movie Database has records for 150, but copyright filings at the Library of Congress reveal that to be a low-ball figure. The estimated totals published in various sources are all over the map, ranging as high as 325.

What isn’t in dispute is that Frances Marion remains the most prolific screenwriter in Hollywood history. During her tenure she was also the best-paid writer, man or woman. “She had more muscle than most women in Hollywood,” observed actress Gloria Swanson, “because she was a gold mine of ideas — ideas that could become stories that could become scripts that could become films that could save careers, lives, and corporations.” In 1926, Variety reported that Marion was to be given a staggering $100,000 to write exclusively for Sam Goldwyn. Still later, as M-G-M’s prize scenarist, she would be paid upwards of $30,000 per week. “I’ve been so glad to get the money,” she said, “that I never worried much about the credit.”

In 1919 Marion married for the third time, to an ex-Army Chaplin named Fred Thomson, who had been a military adviser on one of Mary Pickford’s pictures. Unlike her previous marriages, this one worked out exceedingly well — after a decade of trying, she had finally found true love. A few years later, when Marion called on her husband to fill in for a missing actor on one of the pictures she was directing (yes, she even directed a few films), he promptly became an overnight sensation. Thomson ended up starring in dozens of films, most of them written by his wife, and soon her husband was one of the most popular Western stars in America. The happy couple adopted one son, had another naturally, and built a sprawling twenty-four acre estate in Beverly Hills. Life was wonderful.

Then, in late 1928, tragedy struck in the form of a rusty nail on the floor of a horse stable. Thomson stepped on it, developed tetanus, and quickly sickened while his doctors flailed around trying to diagnose his illness. His death on Christmas Day (so emotionally similar to the one she was soon to write for The Champ) sent her into a tailspin. Forty years old and with two babies to raise, she was hospitalized several times for exhaustion and grief. A fourth marriage to director George W. Hill ended in divorce (soon after, Hill committed suicide), and with that Marion swore off marriage forever, dedicating herself to the raising of her sons while alleviating her loneliness with occasional flings and affairs.

It was in the aftermath of her beloved husband’s death that she wrote the movies for which she is best remembered. Sound had arrived, and dialogue suddenly had grown substantially in importance. Whereas before a screenwriter need only write small bits for subtitle cards, now they were required to invent whole monologues and long debates bristling with dramatic energy. A new set of rules regarding pace, length, and nuance were required. Techniques that worked wonderfully in the silent era now fell flat. Unlike many, Marion’s well-rounded and emotion-laden characters transferred well to talkies. With the support and encouragement of the brilliant young producer Irving Thalberg, she penned hit after hit for M-G-M, and in 1930 became the first woman to win an Academy Award for a non-actress category when she took home the statue for The Big House, a gritty prison film.

But it was in Mexico, on a research trip for an upcoming western, that she had the “Eureka!” moment that would result in a film even more memorable and close to her heart. She watched in fascination as a man got tossed out of a saloon along with his young son. The boy was angrily defending his drunken dad, calling him “the Champ!” This scene of familial loyalty and moxie from a little boy touched her, and when she got back she asked Thalberg if she could write a different story than the western they had been planning. As Thalberg was vacationing in Europe, he assigned Marion to Harry Rapf, one of M-G-M’s top producers. It was an inspired choice, for Rapf gave Marion additional ideas that ultimately nudged the story far closer to the one we now know and love.

Rapf’s friend, director Chuck Reisner, had told him some tales about the misadventures of his son Dinky with a horse at a Tijuana racetrack. Marion incorporated these into her plot, and added heaping portions of emotional resonance drawn from her own life — divorce, untimely death, the hole left by the absence of a parent. Her flair for melodrama was exquisitely developed by this point, honed to a razor’s edge by fifteen years of writing hundreds of silent films. The resulting screenplay featured a mix of powerful elements appealing to both males and females. Alcoholism especially was given a harrowing treatment (and this during Prohibition, which had not yet been repealed).

Many critics find weepy melodrama loathsome, but Marion prized the ability of movies to elicit strong emotions. Years later, in a book on screenwriting, she would say:

A character exists only in his emotions and sensations. Without the expression of feeling, he no more represents a living person than does a fleshless skeleton. If he does not realistically express some credible emotion himself, he will not be likely to arouse feeling in those who watch him. His own characteristics and the plot arrangement should set him in situations that plausibly arouse his own fear, hope, passion, desire, anger, love, jealousy or other emotion, and his own feeling should be expressed so realistically as to arouse emotion in the beholder.

After she finished the story proper, screenwriters Leonard Praskins and Wanda Tuchock were brought in to add dialogue and flesh out the scenes. According to Marion, surgically adding layers of witty banter and comedy to an outwardly dramatic movie is a tough business:

If anyone [believes] that we sit around holding our sides with laughter as one hilarious gag after another is suggested, they are gravely mistaken. We sit in a room and build our comedy scenes with concentration. It was grim work, and even when we thought we had hit upon what comedians call a “belly laugh,” nobody so much as cracked a smile.

The resulting script was strange, the first of what would eventually be seen as a new genre, the “male weepie.” It’s a delicate balance: take the masculinity from such a script, and it’s just another Little Women type estrogen-fest. But take away Marion’s feminine melodrama, and it’s just another fight picture with shallow, cardboard heroes. As things turned out, audiences suffering through the Depression heartily embraced Marion’s heartfelt tale, and the script for the movie won the veteran screenwriter her second Academy Award.

Marion would continue writing for M-G-M until 1946. By then, in her late fifties, she was thoroughly disenchanted with the business. Most of her silent-era friends were dead or retired, and it was near impossible to get anything personal made anymore. Whereas The Champ had been pitched and developed at light-speed, now everything was homogenized by a legion of script doctors and production-code enforcers, assembly-line style. Writing in that environment was, in her words, “like writing on sand with the wind blowing.” The personal, heartfelt projects of yesteryear had given way to

the era of messages, of art; the intellectuals have taken over and the films aren’t simple and direct any longer. . . The poor people who write for the films! Film writers are like Penelope — knitting their stories all day just to have somebody else unravel their work by night.

Thus, with her children almost fully grown, she abandoned Hollywood and moved East to write novels and plays. Her last brush with Tinseltown was to adopt her Champ screenplay into a new vehicle for Red Skelton, changing the prizefighter of the original into a comedian and naming it The Clown (1953). Shorn of its hard-boiled masculinity, it bombed.

Frances Marion never worked in Hollywood again, and died in 1973 at the age of 84. In 1987, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was attempting to create a display featuring real Oscars from every year of the awards’ existence, they were having a problem finding one for 1930. Marion’s son Richard came through by donating the statue she had received for writing The Big House. When asked about how his mother had displayed her Oscars during her life, he replied that she generally used them as doorstops.

One of Richard Thomson’s earliest memories of his mom was walking into her bedroom early in the morning to find that she already had been up for several hours writing. “Her hair was down,” he recalls, “but she was sitting up with papers all over her bed.” The most prolific screenwriter in Hollywood history — lonely, tinged by tragedy, yet still possessing a little girl’s imagination and heart — gutting out the stories that made a generation of Americans laugh and weep.

Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers, a look at the underrated actors who brought Frances Marion’s ardent effusions to Oscar-worthy life.

For Conservative Movie Lovers: King Vidor, Wallace Beery and 'The Champ' Part 1

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