From High School Teaching to Writing the First Screenwriting Bible: Marguerite Bertsch

As with many early female screenwriters, the details on the life of Marguerite Bertsch change from one online biography to another. The best we can say is that in her early twenties, Bertsch joined Vitagraph as what was then called a scenario writer. Of her previous life we only know she went to Columbia University and first became a public school teacher, then possibly a playwright. We say ‘possibly’ because being a playwright is mentioned in some biographies, yet her name is not found on IBDB (International Broadway Data Base).

We do know that three years after joining Vitagraph, Bertsch was promoted to editor-in-chief of the scenario department, a position that involved reading all the scripts submitted to the studio every week and choosing those that required the least rewriting. Then she would undertake the rewrite while also brainstorming ideas for her own, original scripts. Many of those focused on the theme of letting women lead the lives they chose.

For instance, her first credit, for the 1912 short The Troublesome Step-Daughters, involved four fully-grown daughters who dislike their widowed father’s new wife – and make sure he knows it. The Fruits of Vengeance (1913) involves a circus performer who marries a rich man but misses her exciting, former life and earlier lover, so she returns, causing her husband to plan his revenge. In 1914 Bertsch wrote A Florida Enchantment where “A young woman discovers a seed that can make women act like men and men act like women. She decides to take one, then slips one to her maid and another to her fiancé. The fun begins.”

As a sign of her importance to Vitagraph, she also directed four critically successful films, including The Law Decides (1916), The Devil's Prize (1916), The Glory of Yolanda (1917), and The Soul Master (1917). Perhaps due to having read so many unsolicited scripts in her career, Bertsch wrote one of the earliest manuals for screenwriters, How to Write for Moving Pictures: A Manual of Instruction and Information (1917). Now in the public domain, it is interesting to see how much has changed in the industry – and how little. She defined good writing as writing that touches the mind and the emotion of the of the audience, still true to this day.

There is no information about why Bertsch left the film industry in 1918, a scant few years after entering. While she is not mentioned in IBDB, her name does appear in the U.S. Patent Office for three separate inventions, according to her obituary in the Jersey Journal. In 1920 she patented a mechanism for changing facial expressions on dolls; in 1953, a kind of reel grafted onto a figure; and in 1955, perhaps from her work as a director, Bertsch invented a new way of building lenses.

Over her career as a screenwriter, Bertsch collected 49 writing credits (according to IMDb) and four as a director. She died 50 years later in 1967 at the age of 77 or 78. As with many of these early, nearly forgotten auteurs, a few years ago the Nederlands Filmmuseum discovered copies of two of her early films - The Diver (1913) and The Troublesome Step-Daughters (1912) with intertitles, naturally, in Dutch. 

Perhaps someday there will be enough to write a full biography of this impressive woman. For now, it’s enough to add her name to the pantheon of early female screenwriters who founded the film industry alongside all those men whose names we know so well.

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.

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