Hollywood, when silents were golden

by Evelyn F. Scott

Memoir by the daughter of screenwriter Beulah Marie Dix.

Genres: Media Tie In

221 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

Not to be confused with the noted Southern writer Evelyn Scott (who died in 1963 and whose real name was Elsie Dunn), Evelyn G. Flebbe was the daughter of screenwriter/author Beulah Marie Dix and book importer Georg Heinrich Flebbe. She married film editor David Scott in 1935. Evelyn F. Scott worked for decades in Hollywood as a story editor at MGM.

Reviews

[Carrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this book at a charity sale a few years ago, and when I opened it up to finally read I saw the previous owner had signed his name on the flyleaf -- and it was someone I knew. ha! That aside, this was a really fun read. I am a longtime fan of silent film, and although due to real-life time constraints I haven't been able to indulge in watching the great many films that have been release on DVD, YouTube, etc. since I became enamored of them 30+ years ago, I still love reading about the era. This was a fun (and funny) memoir of a childhood spent in the very earliest days of Hollywood -- from about 1915 through the late 1920s. The author's mother, a well-established playwright and novelist for young people, came to Hollywood to visit an old friend (who just happened to be Cecil B. DeMille's mother) and stayed to write storyboards, intertitles, and scripts for the burgeoning film industry. The book is as much a profile of a professional woman making her way in a new industry as it is a young girl growing up in an exciting and somewhat wacky other-world. Scott's writing is witty and self-deprecating, and her stories contain all the details to make you understand that early film pioneers were just as normal as everyone else -- they just were doing wildly unusual things at a pivotal moment in history.

[Meredith · Rating 3 out of 5]

hollywood school for girls insight
really gives you the feeling of early hollywood