Her Career Outlasted the Hays Code: Kathryn Scola

In a career that first challenged - and then outlasted the Hays Code - Kathryn Scola succeeded in writing the kind of defiant women that major stars like Barbara Stanwyck longed to play – and often did.  Born in New Jersey in 1891 to immigrant parents (her mother from Ireland/ father from Italy) Scola saw women struggle financially in her early life. Perhaps their strength encouraged her to both try her hand at making a living as a writer and use that platform to elevate such female-focused stories.

As with many of these women, we know very little of their lives outside of what appears in payroll records or the press of the day, which wrote about the lives of screenwriters alongside the lives of the stars.  We can say that Scola appears on Frank Lloyd’s employee rosters at First National Studio as a script clerk and earned a promotion to scenarist in 1930. By The Lady Who Dared, her second script, the press noted Scola as the writer. Interestingly, her 3^rd film La Dama Atrevida was the same script refilmed with a Spanish language cast.  The advent of the Talkies had made it tough to distribute films in English so there were experiments in remaking films for alternate language audiences. It proved too expensive and the world had to wait for the invention of subtitles before sharing films so freely again. (Also interesting, this practice has come back in use by international television shows as Medici: Masters of Florence which filmed once in Italian and once in English for a wider market.)

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Scola’s best year might have been her second as it came before the strength of the Hays Code had yet been tested. In that year she wrote Baby Face, about a woman using sex to advance socially, Female, about a businesswoman seducing a male employee, and Midnight Mary, about a woman in poverty who finds the solution to financial security in a life of crime. Also produced that year, in Shadows of Sing Sing she took a bit of a spin on Romeo and Juliet by having the sister of a crime lord fall for the son of a police officer.

These last two might have led to the 1935 assignment to adapt Dashiell Hammett’s crime novel The Glass Key after which Scola proved a prolific writer in many genres. Sing Sing brought her into the romance world so that her films in the later 1930s included Second Honeymoon (1937) and The Baroness and the Butler (1938). In 1941 she merged romance with westerns with her own political views by writing The Lady from Cheyenne, where Loretta Young starred as a liberated teacher supporting women's suffrage in Wyoming in 1869.

In the late 1940s, Scola wanted to move into film noir but her script was rejected by the censorship board for being far too “questionable". The studio fired her and she found it hard to find a new contract – or new buyers for freelance material – as she was nearing 60 years old.  She did not go gently into that good night, as they say, because in 1956 she co-wrote a television segment of The 20th Century Fox Hour.

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Scola wrote enough that there is a whole page on Wikipedia titled: “Category: Films with screenplays by Kathryn Scola” with 30 listed and we know she wrote during a time when credits were not always awarded well.  Yet there is no book covering her work. Instead, you can read bits about her in books about the men with whom she sometimes collaborated. In Joseph Blotner’s biography of William Faulkner we learn that in 1936 Scola co-wrote a draft of a script with Faulkner. Blotner interviewed her about Faulkner’s work, not her own.

Scola died on January 4, 1982, in San Diego, California at the age of 90. 

If you’d like to learn more about the history of women in screenwriting, and about the craft of screenwriting while earning your MFA, our low residency Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting is currently accepting applications.