Early Screenwriter and Author’s Guild Founder Turned Film Editor Hettie Grey Baker

As the Writers Guild Strike of 2023 continues we are continuing to celebrate the many women who were instrumental in founding the guild. Recently we’ve profiled founder Mary Hamilton O’Connor and the first female president of the WGA, Mary C. McCall Jr. 

This month we look at the career of Hettie Grey Baker who was among the founders of The Photoplay Authors' League (PAL) in 1914. Members had to have had produced 10 screenplays (then known as photoplays) to join. That was no problem for Baker who the membership elected to serve as their vice president.

Born in 1880 in Connecticut, Baker attended Simmons College and became a librarian for the Hartford Public Library and the Hartford Bar Library. A well-read woman and a fan of the new art form of films she started to write scenarios during those daytime gigs. Baker sold her first stories to Vitagraph Studios in 1912. Soon actor-producer Hobart Bosworth hired her as a story editor for his nascent film company. The same year she co-founded The Photoplay Authors' League in 1914 she had 3 films premiere, all adaptations of short stories by Jack London. This included The Chechako, from London’s short story collection Smoke Bellew.

Soon adaptations became her specialty, along with a moral message or two. Baker based her 1913 The Poet and the Soldier on Herbert Trench's poem “Apollo and the Seaman” which concerned the waste of war, in this case, the Boer War. In 1914 she adapted an anti-liquor story from the Saturday Evening Post into the film John Barleycorn. At that time Bosworth, in his capacity as producer, refused bribes from alcohol manufacturers to quelch the film.

By 1916 Baker had gained so much respect and notice that D.W. Griffith hired her to work on Intolerance. His apology for Birth of a Nation, the new film interwove tales of intolerance throughout history with the story of a poor woman who is separated from her husband and baby due to prejudice. Griffith recruited many writers of the era – including Anita Loos – but Baker did the bulk of the overall writing and structure, so her name remains in the credits.

That same year Baker moved into film editing by joining the Twentieth Century Fox film department (then known only as Fox). She edited the first film with a million-dollar budget, A Daughter of the Gods. Though she is considered the first female editor to earn an onscreen credit, that means much of her work is uncredited. Perhaps her work in the union gave her the push to require credit and perhaps the credit gave her more respect.

While she edited by day she continued to write, including co-writing Tom Mix in Arabia with cowboy actor Tom Mix in 1922. Then director John Ford asked for her to edit The Iron Horse (1924) and by 1938, Baker had transitioned once again into a executive censor for what was now Twentieth Century Fox. In her later years, her love of Siamese cats resulted in several books including 195 Cat Tales published in 1953. Baker died in 1957, having seen The Photoplay Authors' League become the Writers Guild of America, West.

Research for this column comes from the book When Women Wrote Hollywood, edited by Rosanne Welch. 

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