Cari Beauchamp

“When live entertainment was not available, women delivered the film and ran the projectors for the hundreds of movies that were shown to the soldiers. Frances witnessed the popularity of movies time after time; they were shown in warehouses, airplane hangars, on battered portable screens, or projected against the wall of a building in the village square where townsfolk crammed in around the soldiers. “Charlie and Doug” were the two favorites, but anything showing familiar sights from home—the Statue of Liberty, a Chicago department store, or San Francisco’s Golden Gate—created a sensation and bolstered morale. Toward the end of the war German propaganda films left behind by the retreating army became a prime attraction.30 Frances traveled to and from Paris for a few days at a time, usually arriving on or near the front after a battle to witness doctors and nurses doing what they could for the injured in the shattered villages and burying the dead. She was struck by how thoroughly exhausted the Europeans were after four devastating years of war.”
― Cari Beauchamp, Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood

“The vastness, the immensity, the awfulness of what I saw as I kept moving along with the front line engagements was utterly beyond my powers of comprehension, let alone my ability to describe or scenarioize [sic]. . . . I could not write of the war, of the agonies, of the bravery of our boys or the things they endured—I simply couldn’t do it.” Still, she continually worked on ways to shape their film into a cohesive story and whenever the truck wasn’t too bumpy or the candle still had a flame, she took her notes and occasionally turned to writing comedy vignettes “for relief from the strain.”
― Cari Beauchamp, Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood